“We Christians are often practicing Buddhists. We kill desire in an effort to to escape pain , then wonder why we don’t enjoy God.”
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I am a practicing buddhist.
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Let me explain before you start forming judgemental thoughts. Before you start dismissing my words.
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One of the blessings of the race is that during any downtime (be it long bus rides, long wait for bus moments, long airport layovers, waiting for ministries to start, or our ride home after ministry, etc.) without other distractions of duties or wifi, the obvious solution is reading.
Since wifi is a good 45 minutes away here in Rwanda and it costs to travel there, during another several hour break session i finally buckled to boredom and dug into books i hadnt yet gotten to. Not that i hadnt wanted to read, but i like to read with large patches of uninterupted time.
Thank God for the kindle app. Its the easiest and lightest way to bring books with you on the race.
One of the books i started digging into was a book my dear friend sent me in a time of despair. A book i regretfully hadnt gotten into until now. And a book i think God ordained for me to read at this time. Its called “Shattered Dreams” by Larry Crabb. I’m going to be quoting it a lot in this blog – (***without permission of the author/publisher).
In order to set the zone for this blog i have to make this seemingly random statement:
In general in life i have been deadening all my expectations, dreams, and pain to the point that i no longer know or can identify what could possibly be a future hope of mine. Pushing my uncomfort into a realm i call peace. Begging God to give me peace that passes understanding in order that i can not feel. Not suffer….not dream and dissapoint myself or anyone else. Avoiding the possibility to fail. Slip once again from the grasp of depression into painless actions that result in solid tangible results life.
I hadnt thought about what i was practicing.
In many ways, in many moments of my life i realize in reading this mans words that i was only surviving my survival in ways that i hadnt thought i was.
“We Christians are often practicing Buddhists. We kill desire in an effort to to escape pain , then wonder why we don’t enjoy God.”
“To help us realize how easy it is for us to follow Buddha but to think we’re following Christ , it might be helpful to quickly summarize Buddha’s ideas.
Gautama Siddhartha was the son of a wealthy king, a prince whose father prepared him for the throne by shielding him from everything ugly. Against the wishes of his father, the young prince decided to venture outside the castle walls to see what he would find. He came upon “four distressing sights” that unnerved him: a sick man, an old man, a dead man, and a seeking man, one who wanted to unravel the mystery of suffering.
The sights troubled him deeply. He decided to make it his life’s mission to understand suffering and to discover its solution.
One day, after much time and thought, he arose from under the sacred tree and announced “I am Buddha.” His awakening consisted of the “four noble truths” that make up the core of Buddhist teaching.
Truth 1: Life is suffering. There is always, in everyone’s life, a gap between desire and reality. The gap is suffering.
Truth 2: The cause of all suffering is desire. People suffer because they desire what they do not experience. It is not possible to have everything you desire. Therefore, if you desire, you will suffer.
Truth 3: The way to end suffering is to end desire. Want nothing, then nothing can disturb you. A person without dreams will never suffer the pain of seeing them shattered.
Truth 4: Spend your life learning to eliminate desire. The “eightfold path,” the way of Buddha, shows you how.”
Sounds pretty legit.
I’ve known this urge, this inclination, and ive even made it a habbit to end desire and avoid acknowledging my pain.
I often will enjoy the moment as the moment. Refusing myself the luxury of hoping or presuming that the future might hold the same experience again. For me, enjoyment is at cost. I am pleasantly surprised by happy moments. And i let them go just as easily… Yet deep down i feel justified in recieving them.
I am, after all, a relatively – if not somewhat one of the rare truly good people. Right?
Deep down, i believe we all feel that way.
Am i alone?
Perhaps i am truly one of the rare arrogant people – and you are exempt.
What does Jesus offer?
Why is being a Christian the complete opposite of being a practicing buddhist? And why is it so easy to slide into Buddhist ways?
“Jesus directs us to a different path. When He tells His followers to not let their hearts be troubled, He does not intend for us to deaden desire.
Quite the opposite.
His teaching might be summarized this way:
Truth 1: Life includes suffering, but life is good. In this world, His followers and everyone else will suffer tribulation. But Jesus has made a way for us to satisfy our deepest desire in the midst of unrelieved pain.
Truth 2: The cause of all suffering is separation. We are separated from God— and from our own deepest desire, our longing for God— and we’re therefore deceived into looking elsewhere for joy. That sets us off on the ultimate wild goose chase. Nothing but God satisfies our most profound desire.
Truth 3: The way to handle suffering is to discover your desire for God. Then everything, both good and bad, becomes redemptive. It moves us toward the God we desire.
Enter your thirst.
Feel your ache, the very worst ache that throbs in your soul.
Face how you harm others, your spouse, your children, your friends. And face your disappointment with them.
Eventually, you will seek God for …… forgiveness of your failure to love. … the love you desire. … empowerment to love others. … hope that one day you will revel in love freely given and freely received in a perfect community of lovers.
Truth 4: The new life provided through Jesus must be accepted as a gift of love. We then spend the rest of our days discovering our desire to know God better, and we come to realize it’s a desire whose satisfaction no shattered dream can thwart.
Don’t let your hearts be troubled, even if your husband and both sons die (referencing Naomis predicament in the book of Ruth, from which the author draws his examples for the book), even when you realize that God could have done something to prevent their deaths but did nothing.
The command, however, does not tell us to hurt less. When you hurt, hurt. Hurt openly in the presence of God. Hurt openly in the presence of the few who provide you with safe community. Feel your pain. Regard brokenness as an opportunity, as the chance to discover a desire that no brokenness can eliminate but that only brokenness reveals.
Remember what brokenness is. It’s the awareness that you long to be someone you’re not and cannot be without divine help. Never pretend to God, to yourself, or to your safe community that you feel what you don’t or that you are what you’re not. “
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I dont often hide what im feeling anymore. Thats not really the problem.
Ive gotten to that place in life where i mostly have learned good boundaries with others, yet i can be real about my current condition.
According to my friend Amy, probably too real about my feelings. She despairs that i lack hope, dreams, or desires and actively prays that i would dream for the future.
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She like others seek “stories of hope in sorrow and victory in trial.” Its the reason Hollywood keeps pumping out cinderella remakes.
Crabb asks, “Isn’t that what Jesus makes available? “Don’t let your hearts be troubled,”He told His disciples.
What did Jesus mean? Is He telling us to pretend we feel what we should feel when our most deeply experienced emotions are quite the opposite?
Are we to admit our troubled feelings only to ourselves and God, while telling others that God’s presence and promises are real to us when they’re not? Is Jesus agreeing with Buddha in prescribing a form of contentment that requires us to cut off the nerve endings of our souls and to report peace when what we feel is a void? Is He teaching that if we trust Him, we’ll feel no pain?”
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I have subscribed to that. The feeling inside myself that if i was walking with the Lord properly, if i was trusting Him, then i wouldnt be suffering so much. Despair washes over the pain…that i have yet to figure out how to properly trust or obey the Lord enough in order to live in the freedom He promises. Freedom – i have thought at times, was from the abnormal sufferings of life.
I have sought the nirvana of life – as if living in Christs freedom is alloof from the mental anguish of the nonbeliever….
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“Trust God, we insist, and trust Him so fully that all other desires become as nothing. When we hurt, especially when we scream and wail, it’s evidence that we’re not trusting. Don’t feel pain, trust God! It’s a foreign idea to imagine that we might desire God so strongly and passionately that every other desire could still be fully felt and yet not control us.
It’s a more familiar idea to try hard to fix our eyes on heaven in a way that lets us feel no other desire with passion.
” Yet…”could we actually love God so much that we could feel all the pain of [say] a teenage daughter’s pregnancy and still worship? Could we still love our daughter?
Or do we believe that loving God would somehow reduce the pain that a child’s rebellion creates?
“Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Find some way to feel less pain, to reduce your desire for what you do not have. If you succeed, call it contentment. Call it deep trust.”— We think that’s what Jesus taught. But it’s really advice from Buddha.
A Buddhist community would hear the command to not let their hearts be troubled as instruction to feel less, to find some way to deaden the desires that bring pain. When we follow that advice, we experience nirvana and call it victory. And we never discover our desire for God that remains beneath the suffering brought on by unmet desires.
Deaden pain. That’s Buddha’s way . It eliminates all hope of joy.”
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I want joy, but honestly not at the cost of enduring pain that seems unnecessary.
You know what i mean.
I know you do.
Which is strange, because i find the complete opposite within Jesus himself.
“For the joy set before Him, He endured the pain,” the writer of Hebrews says. So “consider Him,” he writes. “and do not become weary.” –
How do we not get weary in the face of lifes at times overwhelming cruelness, and unfair pains?
As stated above, pains that God could easily change for us or eliminate in life altogether. Pains that we feel we dont deserve – especially those of us who have claimed Christ as Lord…doesnt that mean we are exempt from somethings in life? Some kinds of misery God would kindly keep us from?
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“There are two kinds of misery, the kind that people without God feel but live to deny and the kind that people with God assume they should never feel. I am speaking now only of the second kind.
In our day of feel-good Christianity , we have come up with a wrong view of our spiritual journey. We think of suffering as something abnormal, as evidence that we lack faith. We work so hard to escape suffering that we fail to realize what good things might be happening in us as we suffer. But that’s wrong. That’s more Buddhist than Christian.
Life can be tough. It can be tough for sincere Christians who have walked faithfully with Christ for many years. It can be so tough that the best you can do is just hold on.
Nights can be darker than you feared.
Your soul can feel so alone, so filled with agony, so untouched by love, that the most honest thing you can do is cry.
The only alternative is rage, a powerful, destructive rage that in a moment of expression can give you the comforting sense that someone is finally administering justice. That’s what fuels our spirit of revenge. It’s a testimony to how desperately we’re committed to finding ourselves apart from God that the choice to abandon ourselves to Him is often most powerfully made when life has dragged us to the brink of blasphemy.
Until we know how close we come to giving up on God (“ Look what He allowed to happen in my life!”), we’ll know little of what it means to give ourselves fully to God. That deplorable condition of our hearts gives shattered dreams their unique power.
Let me explain.
The pain created by trouble carries us into the depths of our being where everything revolves around us, where there’s no love for anyone else, where we feel only pity for ourselves and sullen disappointment in others. It’s a place where we actually believe God has failed us, that He has given us a raw deal.
We think we have an airtight case against Him that requires true justice to be our advocate. The pain of shattered dreams helps us admit what we really think, that our demand for a better friend than Jesus (or for Him to be a better friend) is legitimate.
It’s here that we must not become Buddhists. We must not confess all these ugly thoughts too soon in an effort to find peace. We must rather trace them to their deepest roots.” –
when we do and we find our dissapointment with and judgment of God then we must stop for a moment. Feel all you feel, feel that anger and disappointment. And state your judgement.
What is it?
As you tell me allow yourself to see where you are, and where God is.
You are the judge in this picture.
How have you become the judge of the creator of the entire universe?
Can a being that powerful truly be at your mercy?
What percent of all the universes knowledge do you possess?
And in the face of that question, how much of all the worlds knowledge would someone who created the whole world with all of its potential(s) possess?
Could it be possible that armed with that knowledge, that creator knows with full confidence how allowing or dissallowing situations would affect all others?
…then, simply discarding the last paragraph of questions, lay all your judgements against the backdrop of Jesus willingly allowing himself to be judged by man.
How does that picture look to you?
Fair? A man who did no wrong, yet he was silent in the face of his accusers, silent as they pummled him and stripped him – and as a barracks of soldiers beat and flogged him. Then after all that him kneeling to lift a cross [that if you read the story was] made for another man named Barrabbas. Who he allowed the governor to offer him up in Barabbases place… or the desparaging image of him writhing, suffocating, nailed to the unpolished wood… where he promised the robber beside him eternal life.
The image of Jesus to the last breath continuing to offer life to those around him.
In this vein, your judgements against a proclaimed God willingly dying in our place, thus making a way for our “wages of sin [which is] death” (Romans 6) to be paid.
[This has been my own painful process of questioning thru my judgements of the Lord]
How can we resolve/reconcile the difference between a God who gives himself like this to our experience of unanswered prayers in the most desperate of times?
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When we get to places where our dreams or hopes or expectations or efforts are shattered – where He seems totally distant and indifferent “our deepest need, our deepest desire, is not for relief from current troubles.”
If we look deep enough past it all we find that we are really longing for an intimacy with the Lord that is unshaken by circumstances. Thats why we are so deeply shaken and dissapointed by his seeming indifference. But if we look at who we are, and who He is, then we should also be able to see and acknowledge honestly that “we don’t even deserve relief. [And in the face of those realities] our deepest desire is for a kind of life only mercy makes possible, a life only grace provides. It is for life from God, life with God, life for God. And we [who claim Christ as Lord] have it.
We’ve had it since the day we trusted Christ to forgive our sins. But it took shattered dreams to put us more deeply in touch with what we already have. The pain carried us into depths of our heart that are still ugly, but the Spirit took us deeper, into the very core of our being, where Christ lives, where we are alive.”
Where we realize shockingly how much God desires us – far, far beyond what we could ever hope for.
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— Crabb asks us to take a moment and write down our most trusted friends who we know will come thru for us at any given moment.
Doing it himself he realized Jesus was abscent from the list…. And when i read that i realized He wouldnt have been on my list either.
Why? Because Jesus does not bow to our every cry of pain, want, and need. WHY? If he cares so much does it seem that he feels or at least acts in a way numb to our feelings???
When i sit in silence and contemplate some of the sharpest pains i have known – pains so deep i cannot verbalize them – and think about why God has allowed them, it hurts.
There have been times when ive sat in tears and grief so deep i could not see my way out and the silence of God only punctuated the pain with hopeless despair. I did not feel him despite my pleading prayers.
— Crabb urges us to stop reading and open the bible to the book of Ruth to see what he’d found in his own experiences that coorelated with what hed found in this specific story in the bible.
If you want more background you can stop and checkout Ruth too. Its pretty short.
Then he continues, “Naomi [despite the situations the Lord clearly didnt prevent] was not a practicing Buddhist. She did not deaden her desires. She felt her pain in ways that made her truly ugly and exposed her to the contempt of her community. By refusing to deaden her pain, she kept alive, even in the midst of her depression, her capacity to desire something more. And that’s important. People who insist on happiness never find joy. They allow themselves to feel only those desires that are met.
Denied desires – they deaden. The effect is to feel happy for a season, perhaps a long season, but it’s a selfish happiness. They live for the ongoing satisfaction of desires other than the desire to know God. They become self-absorbed.”
Crabb continues: “Deepen desire.
That’s the way of Jesus.
His way awakens passion within our souls that transcends all other passions, that puts them in their place without weakening them.
We still yearn for a friend to be faithful, and we hurt when he isn’t. But we long so deeply to know Christ that our hurt has no power to drive us toward revenge.
I wonder if any of Naomi’s friends told her to just get over it. I wonder if she ever tried to relieve her suffering by distracting herself with busyness, perhaps hoping to forget what her husband looked like so his face would no longer haunt her in the night.”
I have been that person – to myself. The person telling myself to get over it in leiu of my parents. The person distracting myself with business, with books, with daydreaming, or sleeping if all else fails. So much so that without realizing it i moved myself into a buddhist mindset. Avoid pain at all costs. Keep myself busy and out of trouble. Avoid the possibility of failure. Avoid misunderstanding in relationships. Avoid challenges i may not overcome. Caution. Caution oh my soul.
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I a practicing buddhist.
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When i wrote the blog a bit back asking God to make the walls fall, i didnt realize that that meant id have to be exposed again to my own depravity. Imagine, when the walls of jericho fell – walls that contained houses – all peoples junk falling out onto the ground. All the secrets they were trying to hide, out, exposed.
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I thought i had things together mostly.
I complained to my team many times that i came on the race better than i was finding myself on it – and that i was afraid id leave more broken than id come. I was pouring myself out for people and losing myself as i did it…who would i return to the states as? A less confident, more confused, less answers and devestated person?
It was making me question my being on the race. At times i despaired that id come. The race was wrecking me. Ruining me. Not in a good way. I came on the race such a whole person. I had found out how to let my pain be reasoned away. I didnt sit in pain. Whod do that? – ok, id done that before and been depressed into suicidal tendencies as a kid growing up. But id moved out of that.
I had had healing there.
No more reflections on pain like that if i could.
Id burned all my journals full of pain filled poetry.
And then, sitting in Rwanda, laying in my tent in the heat of the afternoon, i read these words: “We Christians are often practicing Buddhists. We kill desire in an effort to to escape pain,” – “The cause of all suffering is desire. People suffer because they desire what they do not experience. It is not possible to have everything you desire. Therefore, if you desire, you will suffer.”
And i realized, i did think like that and i was one of those christians.
But thats not what i wanted.
I wanted more.
I wanted more than a dull blunted experience with Christ. I want the real deal. I want to fail and be forgiven, i want to attempt and overcome. I want to avoid a leprosy kind of living where you are alive, limbs there, but unable to feel.
Erasing pain deprives us of the need for God to bring life to us…for the only ones who dont feel pain are the dead!
We must see that pain is a gift of God, it allows us to know when something is wrong, it allows us to see when and where something is entering our life that shouldnt, it allows us to fix a problem that the unexistence of pain would leave us ignorant about.
When we think of leprosy – and how it keeps the person from realizing they are hurt or are being hurt, and thats how they get sick or lose pieces of their own bodies, then we know that the presence and ability to feel is important. And we realize that to feel is the ability to live while not feeling, having a leprosy or buddhist lifestyle – is the horrible absence of life.
Reading I realized that i wanted to desire. I wanted my desire to burn and the hunger to draw me closer to the Lord. I wanted to meet Him in that pain whether satisfied here or not. And to experience – to feel – His desire burn back far brighter and stronger than my own, and for my heart to burst with joy despite the pain.
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How about you?
Are you a practicing buddhist?
Do you want to be?
