Buddhist Bucket in Christian Well

Paul Knitter, in his book Without Buddha I Could Not Be A Christian teaches many ways to adapt Buddhist practices of prayer and meditation to our Christian walk. He calls it "Using a Buddhist bucket in a Christian well."

"I'm talking about practices that will help us Christians draw on the mystical content of our faith. Buddhism can help Christians to be mystical Christians. It can help us respond to the need that ...Karl Rahner summarized when he declared that for Christianity to survive in our contemporary age it will have to reappropriate its mystical depths.

"Buddhism offers Christians a bucket that can draw up the mystical depths of the Christian well. It provides a help, for some a decisive help, to realize and enter into the non-dualistic, or unitive, heart of Christian experience - a way to be one with the Father, to live Christ's life, to be not just a container of the Spirit but an embodiment and expression of the Spirit, to live by and with and in the Spirit, to live and move and have our being in God."

When I recently saw my Psychologist who helps me cope with pain. She asked how I was able to use Radical Acceptance with my Christian walk. I had some difficulty putting that in words. The next day as I was reading Paul Knitter he put it in words for me beautifully:

     “Acceptance is only the first response ( to “when bad things happen”, etc.). Buddhists, if I understand people like Thich Nhat Hanh and Pema Chodron correctly, would first accept what is with as much mindfulness and compassion as possible, and then, let whatever actions they take flow from this mindfulness and compassion.  As a Christian I would try to do the same thing – accept the suffering contained in what happened as “what happened,” but I would also be aware of the ever-present interactive Spirit of Wisdom and Compassion. {The Holy Spirit} And this Spirit, interacting with my spirit, can provide both the strength to accept what might feel utterly unacceptable, and the creativity to do something about it, or at least to take another step forward. This “creativity” is based on the trust I have (and the trust that I think Buddhists have but don’t need to identify) that in accepting what has happened I will find the ability to carry on and to make something out of the pain and loss that I have experienced.

     “Process theologians speak about the Spirit as the source of infinite possibilities for new life and new relationships that can be drawn out of anything that happens. …I have the inner resources, which are the Spirit’s resources, to deal with such painful realities and to draw new possibilities from them. “

May you turn to the Living Lord and let His Holy Spirit live large through you today and always.