Shopping in the Marketplace of Spirit

It’s a fluid time to be shopping in the supermarket of spirit, no matter which tradition you were born into. If I had any doubt that this was the case, that doubt has dissipated over the last few days. Everywhere I look, people are searching and asking the great questions.

On Sunday, I set out with my grandson, one foot in front of the other, on the long and winding road of faith. We celebrated Mother’s Day together by going to the church he has recently joined on his own, a year out of high school. In his interfaith family, Jewish religious culture had predominated. He and his brother learned all the prayers and recited them at shabbos and seders and Rosh Hashanah dinners. My grandson loved to read in synagogue on Yom Kippur afternoon from the Book of Jonah, his namesake, and because he is physically strong like Samson, was often asked to lift the Torah. Everyone in the intimate synagogue community cared about him and admired the strength he showed in facing various challenges. 

When he decided to explore Christianity, my grandson was starting from scratch, wandering around in the crowded religious marketplace with no real idea which aisle he would end up in. He chose a local UCC church and landed in a spiritual environment that I found quiet and unassuming, not in the least bombastic. There was no Bible thumping, no accusations of wrongdoing, no polarizing us and them. He felt welcomed by this gentle community and began to attend worship services and help out in the church garden where his gift for nurturing living things was noticed with appreciation. There weren’t any people his age in the sanctuary, but then my grandson has always been something of an outlier. 

He came in peace and it was peace he was looking for. 

Photo by Yuriy Kovalev on Unsplash

I began to understand his mindset when we talked about it afterwards over a Juicy Lucy and a grilled chicken sandwich at Matt’s Bar. Barack Obama also ate a Juicy Lucy when he stopped at Matt’s in 2014 so the place has the feel of a sacred pilgrimage site. 

I was filled with questions about my grandson’s religious beliefs and there are no simple answers to those questions. He really wanted to help me understand and open my heart so I could see that he had found a divine presence, a Creator God, existing outside of Creation, a Being that he could turn to for support. He seemed to be thinking about the afterlife, last things, which I thought was remarkable in a person his age. So we sat in the booth at Matt’s Bar and he told me about Jesus and I told him that in my spiritual experience, I did not meet God as a singular divine entity. I told him about the Buddhist idea of Interbeing, how everything is connected to everything else in a sacred river of spirit and about the Jewish name of God that cannot be pronounced because hey Eyn Od Milvado, there is nothing else. If you give God a name that can be said out loud, you’re suggesting that God is limited to that name the way we think a cow is a cow and not a horse. And we left it at that. I think he was somewhat disappointed that I didn’t feel what he felt, but we all want our loved ones to be on the same page with us, to hear the same music and eat the same cake. To have this conversation with my grandson, not yet nineteen, was a much greater feast. It was a royal banquet and it filled me with delight. 

I thought of Jonah many times the next morning during the first meeting of a new online Jewish Affinity Sangha in the Plum Village Buddhist tradition. There were sixty-six people on the screen and though we didn’t all speak, there was an almost audible sigh of relief as people who practice double belonging in Judaism and Buddhism gathered at a very difficult and painful time, joining the zoom call from all over the world. Our shared practice in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh glued us together across the miles and across our differences of Jewish background and affiliation. I think it’s safe to say that we were all grieving the violence in the Middle East, the deaths in Israel, the tragedy of the hostages, the continuing slaughter in Gaza. But ours was a particular suffering as we grappled with the double whammy of somehow being held responsible for the behavior of the murderous Israeli government while at the same time confronting the very real rise in antisemitism all over the world. We shared our feelings of horror, guilt, and fear, and began to consider how our Buddhist mindfulness practice might become a place of refuge. Because that’s what we all want and deserve, isn’t it? Refuge.

We come in peace and it is peace we hope for.

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. All subscribers are now welcome to read Many Voices posts. In May, Many Voices will feature Peggy Reeves, a glorious artist in the Berkshires working in the area of alternative photography.

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