The Temptation of Belief: A Buddhist Enters the Christian Realm

by Bethany Saltman

Last month I went to southern California to visit my cousin K., the born-again Christian who promised to show me around the church scene there and take good care of me in the seventh month of my first pregnancy. Pretty much everyone I talked to found it a bit odd that I would leave behind my cozy world of husband, house, mountains, and fellow Zen practitioners in the monastery down the street, to fly 3,000 miles across the country to interview Christians about their faith and conversion, to waddle around in that palm-treed land of strip-malls for ten days, driving my rental car to megachurches, study groups, and Starbucks after Starbucks, and they wanted to know why. Why would a Buddhist spend all this time researching and writing about Christianity, and that type of Christianity, specifically? It’s a good question, one that I am trying to answer as I do the work, which I have become nearly obsessed by.  I keep putting off things like turning our guest room into a nursery to read C.S. Lewis or transcribe an interview with a fundamentalist. People are beginning to wonder. I wonder. But there’s one thing I know: jealousy is a powerful force and I am terribly jealous of the born-agains.

I have been practicing Buddhism for ten years now. In the first couple years, I truly felt like I had been delivered from madness. I discovered the dharma through a total fluke, knew I had found the answer to my torment, and threw myself in with an abandon I had known only for self-annihilation. Instantly, I was rewarded for my efforts – my mind settled down and I could see the world in front of me and it was much simpler than I had imagined. Someone once told me that when she first met me, I seemed like someone who had been saved, yes, even born again. And it’s true. But even then, in the beginning, when the payoff was greatest and most obvious, the goods didn’t come easy.  I was devoted – fanatical – practicing -- doing something -- as Master Dogen says, as though extinguishing a fire upon my head. It was natural, in that sense, but not effortless; in fact, it was pretty frantic.

One of my cousin’s favorite terms is “season,” i.e. “in this season of my life God’s plan for my life is x.” For me, those first years of my Zen practice were a blessed season.  Since then, things have gotten harder but I have not given up. Until getting pregnant, I still did a silent retreat nearly every month, desperately searching for comfort, and finding it in only in shards, and even then only in the realization that I must give up all hope, which I, apparently, have refused to do. I have lived in a training monastery for two of those years – a season unto itself -- waking well before dawn, living in a small community, working hard, maybe too hard. In other words, my religious life and practice have not been incidental. I may have stumbled onto riches in the beginning, but that season has been over for some time. It’s not that I don’t find joy in my practice; I do. But the joy comes from being pretty consistently thwarted, rejected, denied, and learning how to surrender to that. It is a slow joy, a long season of patient but rewarding diligence.

Therefore, I find it shocking, confusing, and fascinating that for approximately 88 million people in this country alone, or 40% of the U.S. population -- those who are considered born-again Christians --  forgiveness, relief, and eternal life are apparently handed over in the blink of an eye. From sinner to redeemed sinner, just like that? “Yes,” I am told, “A free gift,” they say, “available to all.” A “free gift” that is of course actually more of a bargain at one low price of taking Jesus Christ into your heart. But even with such a price to pay, it just doesn’t seem fair. I have been ready to strike a deal with my teacher for years now, but he, and even the Buddha himself, promises me nothing beyond my own capacity, which can feel pretty depressing. So while I have all kinds of intellectual curiosity and more rational reasons for doing this research, my dismay at the fact that relief seems to be happening for other people and not me is at least one driving force behind it. And this trip, which would focus on the more extreme “quick fix” end of the Born-again spectrum was, at least in part, an attempt to find out what that kind of relief is made of.

K. is a very cheerful woman, 39 years old, beautiful with her long blond hair, bright grey eyes, and white teeth. Impossible to not like. I was impressed by K.’s willingness to field all my obnoxious questions, to allow her life to be picked over. But I could tell when she was getting uncomfortable as I asked her things like “so why do you believe that what the bible says is true?” by her refrain of, “gosh, that is such a good question.” She knew I was trying to understand her faith from my own perspective, to present her world to outside observers, to “unbelievers.” While she was fully aware of my commitment to Buddhism, how could she not have had some hope that my curiosity would lead to my salvation? As she said later in our formal interview with uncharacteristic gravity, “The Bible talks about hell as a place that’s really pretty horrible, and so that drives me to prayer.” K. is not the only person I met on this trip who may still be praying for me, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. Part of me can receive the love that I know is intended, while another part of me is angry at the arrogance of it. If anything, that tight little part of me thinks, I should be praying for you!

That first night in Corona del Mar, I was exhausted, but K. was determined in her sweet way (are you sure you’re ok? I know you’re on a different time zone still, and you’re pregnant and all and we totally don’t have to go, but I think you’d really like to meet them) to take me to her friends’ house so I could meet them, and her boyfriend was going to be there as well, which was a bonus. On the way there we stopped at In and Out Burger, which was the first thing that blew my mind. As much as I was trying to do the Rome thing,  I was surprised to find myself eating a cheeseburger in a car in a parking lot. As we ate, K. told me about her friends Deb and Jack and how they are such neat people, and how their three year old son Stevie had recently died in his sleep.

Deb and Jack were in fact really nice people (and those burgers were in fact so good I have longed for another since) and as we sat in their living room, Jack and K.’s boyfriend playing guitars, Deb shared with me the story of their son. Apparently, he had been born with heart trouble after a dramatic pregnancy. At one point not long ago, when Stevie was 3, he told Deb that he was going to “fly to Jesus.” She said, “No you’re not. You’re only 3!” But he was sure. “Yes I am,” he told his mother. “I believe everything happens for a reason,” Deb told me, fighting the tears that must come often, “there are no accidents.”

It was strange to sit and listen to someone like that – I was in her home, this was not an interview, but a social situation, and she was sharing a wound that I, being pregnant, found particularly brutal. But as soon as the Jesus stuff came up (and it didn’t take long), I felt myself hardening. Deb told me about the work she does with homeless people and how she met this one woman who was “high on crack” and neglecting her three kids. She told me that the only reason this woman was worried about someone taking her kids is for the welfare check the kids allow her, and how angry this makes her. She would happily take one or all of those kids and love them, she said, and I am sure that’s true. But instead of seeing where Deb was coming from, I distanced myself even more. For me, at that moment, she was not a woman who lost a child; she was a self-righteous born-again Christian fundamentalist who didn’t have the time of day for a crackhead and I was seeing through her charade of compassion. It was like what Buddhists get all the time: if you’re so spiritual, why are you such an asshole?

The next day was Sunday and we were planning on attending Saddleback Church, home of Rick Warren and his runaway bestseller The Purpose Driven Life. We were in a small and very hip café in Newport Beach when K.’s boyfriend called. In California, there is no shame in talking at full volume on cell phones in public, so K. told the whole place that we were on our way to Saddleback for Sunday service. She must have said the word “church” five times. I was mortified. But later, when I got there, I had a totally different feeling – it felt good to be part of something so huge, and even oddly pleasant for people to assume that I was no different from them.

Coming from a religious community that feels cramped by a hundred people on a Sunday, the Saddleback experience – the parking lot alone with its attendants and signs and thousands of yellow lines – was a fascinating cross-cultural experience in magnitude. Leaving aside the Christian part altogether, just the fact that 30,000 people (the number involved in Saddleback’s small groups, which function just like cells of other more ominous organizations) are engaged in any spiritual pursuit is incredible to me. And this is not just any group of folks. This is Orange County. This is the group that raised 50 million dollars in one weekend of fundraising for its own campus. This is the group that offered to pay, for three months, the salaries of 400 pastors whose churches had been destroyed in Hurricane Katrina. And this is the group that says, in its introductory brochure, “please do not feel obligated to give in the offering.”

Saddleback is, to coin a phrase, what it is: gigantic, terrifying, inspiring and surreal. Not creepy like many people assume all fundamentalists to be, but a little creepy for other reasons. Rick Warren is certainly a fundamentalist in the sense of professing to take the bible literally and looking at it as moral and ethical code of divine inspiration. But he is not, on the surface anyway, filled with the hate many associate with intolerant fundies, though he is clearly intolerant – intolerant of pluralism, intolerant of moral relativism and intolerant of religious universalism. He believes that when Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” he meant that, “If you don’t believe that I am the only son of God and all the rest, you will go to hell.” Of course this is not Rick Warren’s personal theological stance; this is the favorite scriptural apologia of all born-again Christians I have met. As if in this one line the whole thing is buttoned up – I win, you lose. But the next part is that nobody claims to really know what will happen to us unbelievers; only God knows. Rick Warren is clearly an intelligent guy whose heart is in the right place, who wants to help as many people as he can possibly reach. And for someone with that much power, he seems surprisingly humble. But how does he believe what he believes? That’s the part that makes my head spin.

My other Orange County church experiences were equally dizzying. First, there was the Calvary Chapel study group which started with 30 minutes of worship music played on an electric keyboard, a rain tube, and a little set of chimes. This place felt like an AA meeting in its random cross-section of people – the Indian man on his knees wiping away his tears, a bird-like lady in a belted suit and hat who might have been crazy, a beautiful Arab woman, a mean-looking Korean lady (I could tell by the writing on her bible), and the requisite California tall and lovely young Asian men. Plenty of folks who looked beaten up, plenty of middle-class ordinaries.

The study group ended with folks being called to the front, anyone who wanted to be baptized, to take Jesus into their hearts, or simply to have someone pray with them. A good fifteen people went to the front and another handful rose to help, to place a soft hand on the back or shoulder of someone who needed a witness. All the words were too quiet for me to hear – the music was playing again and I was of course way in the back, but the image alone was mesmerizing. Even the grumpy Korean lady got up to help a stranger. I was tempted to walk up and ask for someone to help me pray for safe travels or something simple like that, so I could feel what they were feeling, but I knew once I got up there I would chicken out or feel overwhelmed by the closeness of another person, the smell of their breath or whatever. So I sat in the back and just watched and it looked like people were really getting healed, at least for the moment, or maybe it was just me being healed. Even there in that dingy room, human hands penetrating human hearts moved me.

And then there was the Vineyard service, which is the home of the original Jesus Freaks, known for their worship music. This time, the music was more like an amateur indie rock concert, or a wealthy suburb’s junior high talent show. The crowd was much bigger, younger, cleaner, whiter – a high energy crowd. A girl who looked like she had trained for years as a deadhead danced near the stage, couples sat together, holding hands, others stood, arms outstretched totally grooving on the jammin version of Amazing Grace. When the music was over, the pastor, a very casual dude, gave a “message” (sermon) about how Jesus wants everyone to pay better attention to the poor. Fair enough, I thought. But the way he talked about the connection between wealth and God made me very uncomfortable, implying that God rewards believers with wealth. He actually said that when Pagan cultures are introduced to the gospel they are “improved” within a generation, in other words, as these “undeveloped” nations accepted Jesus, lo and behold, they “developed.” And, along those lines, he said that God has poured out the blessings on the U.S., the assumption being because we are so wealthy, but a.) of course not everyone in the U.S. is wealthy, so he is talking about a certain segment of the U.S. population being blessed, and b.) the whole point of his sermon was about how much Jesus loved the poor, not the rich, so how is it that we are so “blessed?” Maybe we’re cursed!

On my last Sunday in California, I visited Rock Harbor, a church with a congregation which is 70% single and mostly under 25. This pastor was not only chill, but he was a comedian as well, throwing things out there like, “raise your hand if you’re wearing a tie today.” Of course nobody moved. “I’m very proud of you,” he delivered to a good, hearty laugh from the congregation/audience. There were probably 1,000 people there, the girls all gussied up in their Coach bags, tight low-riders, clingy t-shirts, pointy heels and lacquered hair. The guys were appropriately clean yet rumpled. It felt more like a mall than a place of worship, but I guess that is so east-coast-mainline-denomination of me. The theme of the sermon was, of course, sexuality, and learning how to be single, not as a default position but as an offering to God. I couldn’t quite figure how these folks think they are going to stay celibate, save themselves for marriage, in an environment like that. It looks like these youngsters have their work cut out for them.

I don’t know if this Sunday service ended with an altar call, though it probably did since that’s the general format, because after the short sermon, K., always sensitive even to the heathen’s needs, could tell I was getting hungry, so we left and ate at a café nearby. I was totally wiped out by all my looking, drained by trying to understand. As I had sat in the church, trying to notice everything – the simple wooden cross, the industrial loft details, the complex lighting system, I also scanned the crowd, really trying to study these Christians. Some looked familiar, like people I have known all my life, people trying to fit in, look good, feel better. And more than that, too – people wanting to know how to live, who they are, who God is. People just like me. And yet there was something totally mysterious there, too – a faith in a doctrine that I do not understand:  a firm belief in God as the benevolent father, a belief in Jesus Christ as his only son, a belief in heaven as a place that exists beyond death and beyond this earth, a belief in the Bible as the inerrant word of God, and a belief in salvation realized only through these beliefs. But do they really believe it? My teacher tells us all the time, “don’t believe me, experience this great dharma for yourself.” He is also fond of saying that if he discovered the whole Buddhist story was a myth, that Shakyamuni Buddha never existed, it wouldn’t make one bit of difference to him. I guess, for me, it would make a difference. As much as I know that only I can make my life real, only I can realize myself, only I can feed the poor, I can’t help but feel the temptation of belief.

That night as I lay in bed, hands on my hard, round belly, my mind filled with the faces of all the believers I had met and seen. And I tried, really tried, to pray. I tried to feel what it would be like to believe in someone watching over me, some big Father – my true, one, original dad-- the who never got distracted, never looked at porn, never died a pathetic death. Someone who loved me no matter what I did, was always ready with forgiveness, and a forgiveness that actually mattered and would relieve me from all this lingering guilt and shame. I tried to talk to Him and ask that He make Himself known, and if He couldn’t or wouldn’t do that, would He please watch over me and my baby and make her healthy. But I knew I was praying all wrong. I knew that what I should pray for is that thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, and pray for the strength to live through whatever comes my way, to pray for the fortitude to face my life as it is, to trust myself as God’s unique daughter who is filled with heavenly grace, if only I could realize it. I should pray that I could forgive all who have hurt me. I should pray that I take good care of my baby girl, regardless of her health or disposition. I should pray to see God in all beings, for the wisdom to not disregard a single speck of dust. I should pray to see through my desire to feel superior, to point out other’s errors and faults, to separate myself from anything or anyone. I should pray for the dissolution of my big fat ego. I should pray to stop looking outside of myself.

But the other prayer was so much more of a relief.

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