I come to Spiritual Direction from both a Unitarian Universalist and a Theravadin vipassana (insight/mindfulness) meditation perspective. As a lifelong Unitarian Universalist who became deeply committed to Buddhist meditation practice in my 20’s before I entered seminary, I’ve always had a tension between my Western religious and philosophical traditions and thought and Eastern Buddhist orientation, as interpreted by Western teachers from the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts.
As I approached spiritual direction, that tension intensified. As spiritual direction comes from the Jesuit tradition’s leader St. Ignatius and has been practiced in the Catholic tradition for over a thousand years, I have felt some tension with my Buddhist outlook and practice. Given how Christian spiritual direction is often presented in the foundational literature and gradually brought into more secular settings, might I be trying to remake it in my image? Was I doing cultural misappropriation?
How happy I was to find “Not Passing God Over: Introduction to Christian Vipassana Meditation” by Toshihiro Yanagida, SJ (© 2024 Jesuit Communications). Yanagida is a Jesuit! He fuses them together as mutually reinforcing.
Yanagida was encouraged to try Vipassana meditation as taught by S.N. Goenka on a trip to India. At a ten day meditation retreat, he had a powerful awakening experience. It opened him up to a particular meditative experience he recognized from the Ignatian retreats he led.
Yanagida, though Japanese, grew up Catholic and decided to become a Jesuit during his early thirties. He found the Ignatian spiritual exercises very helpful and especially enjoyed leading eight-day retreats. One big problem he struggled with was dealing with his ego. No matter how pure his practice was while on retreat, the ego would haunt him a few days after the retreat was over, especially the temptation to pride.
At the vipassana retreat, he experienced a kind of consciousness that was separate and detached from his egoic concern. He experienced strong knee pain, but was able to observe and detach from it in a way that was beyond his Ignatian training.
The book does an in-depth analysis of Trinitarian theology and how it functions in the present moment—the focus of vipassana practice. In the book, he explores how the Holy Spirit works and the nature of “root consciousness”. He also has a Universalist view of God’s grace as a constantly available in the present moment. Thus when one is doing vipassana meditation, one is immersed in that holy presence that is accessible through moment-to-moment mindfulness. The witness consciousness of the present moment and what is arising and passing away is the “being itself” of the Holy Spirit in his understanding.
Another key idea is the nature of God as agape. The Holy Spirit in a sense is the activity of agape in the present moment. The Buddha praised the four heavenly abodes, the Brahma Viharas, loving-kindness or metta, compassion or karuna, sympathetic joy or mudita, and universal responsiveness/equanimity or upekkha. These are four faces of agape from the Christian perspective.
Yanagida investigates religious pluralism as he too is concerned about crossing from Christianity to Buddhism. He talks about the life and work of Thich Nhat Hanh who did work with Catholics and Jesuits. He also talks about Jacques Dupuis, a Jesuit theologian who has worked on the issue of the Christian claim to exclusivity for salvation. He has a clever way of getting around it and extending salvation to other religions. If Jesus, as the Word, the Logos, existed at the time of creation as claimed in the beginning of the Gospel of John, then Logos could have been working in other religions before and after Jesus, just in a different form. Krishna or Moses or Mohammed or Buddha might be different manifestations of Logos.
Yet there is a need to sort religions between delusional cults and religions that have some connection or source in this Logos. Yanagida follows Dupuis who says the mark is whether they have the analog to agape in their tradition. Buddhism clearly does with the Brahma Viharas that center metta/loving-kindness for all beings.
This book has been very helpful to give directions in how to integrate the two together. There is even an appendix on how to do it! As I already integrate my love of Sufi practices that also inform my spiritual life along with my vipassana practice into my UU ministry, keeping centered on love/agape/metta seems to be the universal binding agent with different expressions.
I’m so glad Unitarian Universalism has centered Love in Article II.
There is a lot of deep theological work in this book that unpacks Christian Theology, especially from Thomas Aquinas, to get at the nature of reality. He also works on the problem of no-self from a Christian perspective. I don’t know if it holds together with Buddhist understanding of no-self but it works for me as a bridge to explore experientially in meditation practice.
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