Triangulating

JUST AS COMPARING BIBLE TRANSLATIONS HELPS US UNDERSTAND both specific passages and the Bible as a whole, so comparing religious traditions helps us understand both specific traditions and religious phenomena more broadly. Comparative study brings witnesses with differing points of view into play, in the hope they’ll clarify one another.

Last week, while re-reading The Cloud of Unknowing, I realized that for decades I’ve been using Christian spirituality (mysticism), Eastern wisdom (Buddhist and Daoist, mostly), and C. G. Jung’s Analytical Psychology comparatively to understand not only each of those three traditions, but also religious experience as a whole.

Because I’m a lifelong Episcopalian, mainline Protestant Christianity is and always has been my spiritual core. When my Sunday school classmates and I reached adolescence, however, our parish chose to prepare us for confirmation with a boring, semi-formal course on Reformation history. When it came time for the course’s final exam, I walked out without taking it, and felt God’s presence more deeply than at any time during the course or during Sunday worship. (There’s a bit of irony for you.) Reading the Gospel of Matthew, a few years later, left me with an indelible impression that the disciples seemed to understand very little of what Jesus might be up to. My disillusionment with “religion” was complete, and off I went to college.

During my junior year in college, Huston Smith opened my mind to the spiritual wonders of the East, not personally but through his classic book on the world’s religions. As I read the book for a religious studies course, I filled the margins of the pages on Hinduism and Buddhism and Daoism with a flood of enthusiastic notes, “Far out!” chief among them. (It was 1973, after all.) These Eastern religions, according to Smith, focused on direct experience and expanding consciousness, not on devotion to institutional traditions. Amazing!

Meanwhile, in another religious studies course that same semester, I encountered C. G. Jung for the first time, and intuitively knew his theory was “true.” Here was a psychology that took religion and religious experience seriously, a theory that didn’t dismiss religion but accepted it as a source of meaning in life. Although reading Jung was a challenge, the payout seemed worth the struggle.

By the time I graduated from college with majors in both religious studies and social studies, all three components of my comparative triad were in place and a lifelong process of triangulation was underway.

At first, I concentrated on deepening my understanding of Jungian theory and Eastern spirituality, reading and re-reading volume after volume of Jung’s Collected Works and one Buddhist or Daoist text after another. The modern translations of classic Eastern texts seemed reasonably straightforward, and Jungian theory helped me make sense of their spiritual concepts by “translating” them into psychological terms.

From time to time, the mystical tradition of Christianity popped up in these readings, prompting me to begin exploring an aspect of Christianity my Protestant upbringing had ignored almost entirely. Reading John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, Brother Lawrence, Catherine of Siena, and others turned out to be doubly challenging. The devotional language in which these spiritual virtuosos spoke was full of maddeningly archaic metaphors describing ineffably transcendent experiences.

As I read and re-read these mystics, I began to feel deep resonances between their Christian metaphors and Eastern wisdom and Jungian theory. Despite their differences in language, Christians, Buddhists and Daoists seemed to be talking about essentially similar experiences. Even though Jung surely was influenced in part by these same spiritual traditions during a lifetime of developing and refining his psychological model, the empirical data and phenomenological method he used kept his insights scientific — in spite of the symbolic language he often used to “explain” the mysteries of the human soul and spirit.

So, these traditions, with their distinct languages and points of view, became the core comparative elements that ever since have helped me understand religious experience. Now, each time I triangulate depth psychology, devotional mysticism and spiritual wisdom, I get both an intuitive reading of a common source — a no-thing that is no-where — and a meaningful glimpse into the dark night, the cloud of unknowing, the dao that is not “dao,” the all-encompassing fullness that is empty.