Meditation on a Buddhist chapel

I walk past a Buddhist chapel every morning. It used to be a church. (Reminds me of the many Unitarian structures in New England with the small print on their front lawn signs: "Formerly a Congregationalist church." Heartbreaking stories surely lay behind those real estate transactions.)

By the time I get to the Won Buddhist Temple on Parkdale Avenue I have already spoken volumes to the Lord, and gotten volumes back. But the folks in this repossessed building don't pray; they meditate. I briefly did meditation in college --- was given a mantra to repeat to myself over and over, to usher me into blissful union with the Oblivion. I have a sneaking suspicion that whatever insights I gained in that void were just me talking to myself.

It beats me why middle-class, Caucasian, former nominal Christians in my town would go to this place --- why they would prefer an impersonal reality over a Personal one. It is the perverseness of our rebellion against God, I suppose, that we would exchange something warm and full for something cold and lesser.

And make no mistake that it is lesser. The impersonal is not higher and more transcendent than the Personal; it is a big step down. An impersonal force behind all creation (if it existed) would be like the Creator we know --- but with something subtracted from Him. It would be "It," not "Him." We humans would find ourselves in the curious position of being superior to the force that spit us out! More highly evolved. Here we are, equipped with awesome capacities --- to love, to grieve, to desire, to aspire, to trust, to have relationship, to know courage. And our "creator" is meanwhile mute and uni-dimensional.

Moreover, concepts we are hard-wired with, such as "guilt," "fellowship," "rebellion," and "thankfulness" would have no meaning or intelligible origin in an impersonal universe. What a bizarre rebel is man to concoct such a faith as Buddhism.