"The glory of God is a human being fully alive, and human life consists in beholding God." — Irenaeus of Lyons
When I say we draw on both Christianity and Zen, I usually get a look. Aren't those opposites? Isn't that just picking whatever feels good?
Fair question.
They are not the same. I don't blend them into one smooth thing where every path is secretly the same path. They point in different directions. They tell different stories about what a human being even is — Christianity says you are a soul, made and loved by God, meant for more than this life. Zen won't hand you a self to hold onto at all. Those are real differences, and the further you go, the more they matter.
But here is what I found the hard way, in years of Zen practice and in the Church both: at the beginning, they are doing a very similar job.
Before any of the high talk, there is plain, unglamorous work. Clearing the ground. Getting honest. Turning from the things that are deforming you. Learning to actually pay attention. Learning to be with people instead of using them or hiding from them. Both roads ask for a kind of death to self — a slow loosening of the grip of I, me, and mine — so that love has room to grow.
Some Christians call it the early stages of sanctification — putting off the old self, putting on the new. The old Catholic writers called it the purgative way, the first of three stages in the spiritual life: purgative, illuminative, unitive. In Zen, it's keeping the precepts — the daily practice of not lying, not taking what isn't yours, not numbing your life away.
Different words. Same ground. And you can't grow anything real until that ground is cleared. You can't go deep while you're stuck in patterns of harm, distraction, and self-involvement.
That's where we start together — Christian, Zen, or neither. Down at the foundation, where a Zen monk and a desert monk would recognize each other's work, even if they might argue about everything else.
Further up, the paths do separate, and discussing the differences between them will help us understand our own way, whatever that might be. Both struggle with fundamental questions around effort, grace, and the nature of the blessed life. So, if you're serious about one road, this is meant to help you walk it — not pull you onto another. But hardly anyone is stuck because their theology is wrong. We're stuck because we never did the ground-clearing. That part, we can do side by side.
So, to return to the Irenaeus quote up top. Irenaeus was a Greek bishop in the second century, noted for his role in expanding Christian communities and developing Christian theology. He lived during the reign of Marcus Aurelius — a Roman emperor still loved for his popular Stoic writings.
Irenaeus said the glory of God is a human being fully alive — and that human life consists in beholding God. Many people like to quote the first half but drop the second. It's the easier and seemingly inclusive move. But it distorts what Irenaeus was saying, so we won't do that.
For a Christian, becoming fully alive does indeed require a kind of seeing of God. Only through faith can one participate in God's life and realize the purpose of one's own life.
And perhaps that's something we can take up in depth over time. Even a devoted atheist Zen practitioner would learn something in that conversation. But the early work needn't wait on that. You can begin it settled, or begin it full of doubt. The ground-clearing is the same either way.
Come and see.