Day 111c: Buddying up to Buddhists … (August 18, 2019)
It didn’t take long for me to get my newly cleansed body back into motion, and it didn’t take long thereafter for me to see an astounding sight off to the roadway’s right – a huge, smooth, glowingly snow-white statue of a Buddha overlooking a home’s back courtyard. The home turned out to be the New Jersey Buddhist Vihar Meditation Center, and the statue turned out to be the largest Samadhi Buddha statue in the entire Western Hemisphere. I spent quite a few moments alone in the great peace of that place, and it really was all quite impressive – almost as impressive as the great kindness that resident monk Vijita showed me upon hearing about my Walk …
“When spiritual friends share their stories, the others listen without working. They rest. There’s nothing to fix, nothing to improve. A spiritual community feels undisturbed quiet as they listen, certainly burdened . . . but still resting in the knowledge that the life within, the passion for holiness, is indestructible. It needs only to be nourished and released … A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.” ~ inspired by Larry Crabb & Alan Watts
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