Last night for the first time in ages I watched two consecutive TV programmes and greatly enjoyed them both. The first was a Natural World feature on my favourite animal, the snow leopard.(photo courtesy of here). The second was Extreme Pilgrim, the first of three programmes presented by a Church of England vicar looking for a sense of meaning, identity and inner peace, and doing so at the extreme edges of religious devotion in three of the world's great faith traditions. (See here)
My interest in the snow leopard goes back twenty or more years when I first read Peter Matthiessen's masterpiece, The Snow Leopard. The book isn't so much about the animal, as the quest to see the snow leopard in its native habitat, the Himalayas. The expedition to Nepal and into the mountains was a quest not only for a sight of the rarest of the big cats, but for a new sense of purpose and worth in living, following the death of Matthiessen's wife. It is that human quest for meaning in the midst of grieving, alongside the naturalist's search for the ultimate prize of seeing the wild, elusive beauty and the sovereign freedom of a creature perfectly at home in wilderness, that makes the book a moving account of human longing.
Last night's programme was about this magnificent animal - it's sovereign freedom now being eroded by encroaching human activity. The scientist who trapped a mother leopard and fitted it with a large non camouflaged radio collar, explained that the data uploaded to satellites would be invaluable in helping understand more about the snow leopard. I can see why that's important; information about movement, habitat, breeding, human intervention will enable more strategic and effective conservation measures in the future. But I was upset by the sight of this magnificently adapted cat, whose camouflage makes it all but invisible against mountain rocks and screes, having the handicap of a high profile collar while hunting for food.
Extreme Pilgrim was another kind of search altogether, and yet just like Matthiessen who is himself attracted to Buddhism, Peter Owen-Jones was drawn first to the famous but now tourist-driven Shaolin Temple, and then to a less commercialised monastery, in search of enlightenment, or at least the first stages of freedom from self absorbing attachment. The rigours of martial arts training took a heavy toll on a man who was unfit, and whose lifestyle by his own cofession was more about self-dissipation than self-discovery. I started off being impatient, not liking him much - but as the programme continued I began to sense that behind the camera-conscious presented self, was a man genuinely searching for a sense of self, and not sure if he would like what he might find. Several of those with whom he spoke exuded the kind of peaceful purposefulness that is perhaps only possible to those for whom peace is their purpose.
Sure there are arguments, discussions, dialogues - choose your noun - to be had between any two of the world's great faith traditions. But alongside the theology and philosophy, the practices and the devotions, the traditions and the cultures, there is sanctity, the person in process, the human life, personality, character, soul, - and their awareness of that which is sacred and transcendent. Sanctity is not an argument, it is testimony. Sanctity has a transparency that much other religious baggage lacks, and last night, more than once, the discipline and wisdom of Buddhist monks contrasted with the fragmented anxieties of a Christianity torn between, on the one hand western consumerism and its addictive habits of thought, and on the other, the deep realisation that you cannot serve both God and mammon. The question for the church in the West and North, may well be one of where we think our treasure is; and the story of the rich young ruler has an oblique but searingly true light to shine upon a Church anxiously possessive of status and its own survival, and unwilling to sell all it has, give it away to the poor, and follow after Jesus. The question where our treasure is, what we are most attached to, should not need to be asked of us by a Buddhist monk. That it was, and with such courteous deference, should suggest our need for humility and repentance as urgent prerequisites to mission.
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