When I was in high school back in Dallas our PBS station began to air episodes of the British comedy group Monty Python, and a local radio station began featuring lectures by Allan Watts.
Both the strange humor of Monty Python and the eclectic thought of Alan Watts were liberating for me. My brothers and I would religiously watch Monty Python at night and I make a point to listen to Watt’s lectures on eastern thought whenever I could.
Since those days I’ve realized Alan Watts could sometimes present a simplistic westernized understanding of some eastern religions, but his gift to me was in demonstrating there were vastly larger spiritual options than what I had learned about in Sunday School.
The religion I had learned as a child was kindly but it focused on words. We would listen to sermons, read the Bible, or pray to God; but there was never a time where we just sat and absorbed the silence. There was never a time when our minds got silent. The prayers I was taught as a child were focused on my personal wants and fears. I had learned a religion of belief, but not wisdom; of ritual, but not art; of service, but not love.
Reading Eastern texts taught me there was a space between my thoughts that contained the key out of my little self-centered prison of desires and fears. When I stopped dividing life into nouns and verbs I began to sense an oceanic unity that was deeper, broader and more immediate than I could have possibly imagined when all I knew were words.
I began to suspect that Jesus was concerned much more with that deep sense of unity than he was about creeds, rules and rituals. Before long, I would discover the writings of Trappist monk Thomas Merton who taught of a version of Christianity that allowed for contemplation and inner silence.
Thomas Merton said:
“The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness. But it does not matter much because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there.”