In her excellent book, The Shamanic Bones of Zen, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel talks about the roots of Zen Buddhism in ancient Shamanic practices. As an African-American woman who is an ordained Zen priest, Manuel has a unique, remarkable, and refreshing perspective. Her experience is considerably wider than Buddhism, and much of what she says resonates with well with Christianity.
Part of what she means by "the bones" is the importance of recognizing and respecting our ancestors in faith. Just as the bones are the invisible framework of the body, attention to ancestors and tradition serves to ground, form, and empower a living tradition. Our bones hold us together. Manuel finds the bones of Buddhism in the rituals of offering commemorating the ancestors that are a part of Zen practice, ceremonies that go back to pre-Buddhist times.
We Presbyterians, of course, do not explicitly venerate ancestors. Neither do we have recognized historical "saints" like some branches of Christianity. For Protestants, more than anything else, I suspect, this function is filled by the Bible and the Sacraments. Our Christian ancestors also heard and cherished these stories and practices, and were guided by these insights. When we pray the Psalms, we are praying not only with our Christian forbears, but with Jesus himself and the Jewish tradition. The basic rituals of Christianity in which Presbyterians share also constitute the bones of our lived faith. Mainly, of course, these are the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper or the Eucharist, which are obviously rooted in Scripture and authorized by Jesus.
Our Book of Order recognizes this by allowing and encouraging innovation and adaptation in many areas. But we recognize basic limits to this flexibility. Presbyterian worship without the Bible is unthinkable. And the Sacraments retain certain minimum required elements, including that they be authorized and authenticated by the recitation of specific Scriptural words.
This is why I get deeply concerned about attempts to undermine, compromise, or unrecognizably alter Scripture or the Sacraments. All kinds of things about our worship, theology, and mission may change, shift, and evolve. But the deep, structural bones which make us who we are remain. These at some level finally do not change. They are what hold us together with each other, with our ancestors, and even with the Earth.
Speaking of her own Zen tradition, Manuel says, "When we ignore the bones, we appropriate. With appropriation, we don't see the practice as one of enhancing interrelationship but one of personal improvement.... And we don't see that there is an opportunity in ritual and ceremony to activate justice through collective awakening with the help of ancestors...." (p. 54)
In other words, when we ignore, discard, or otherwise mess with the bones of a tradition we place our personal agenda ahead of spiritual continuity and integrity. This is a kind of colonialism in which a dominant power takes the liberty of separating a tradition from its ancestors, ripping off its skin to be used for its own purposes. Appropriation is the violent and extractive skinning of a tradition. For us this is usually done for the sake of some form of commercial Capitalism. We have seen this happen repeatedly with Native American and Asian traditions which are taken by white people and adapted to fit a self-help model and commodified for sale.
And it even happens to Christianity when the faith is disconnected from its bones, roots, and history, and refitted for profit. This whole idea that everything is on the table for me to appropriate and customize to my personal preferences is a Western, Imperialist, colonialist approach that violates the integrity of indigenous, ancestral, organic traditions. This can be done for the sake of marketing; or it can be done for reasons of ideological purity and correctness, sometimes even labeled "inclusion" and "justice."
Where the limits of this may be set is a matter of conversation within those traditions. But Manuel points out that harmful appropriation begins when we stop honoring the bones of the ancestors, that is, the basic and fundamental framework of the tradition. When we do this, no matter the rationale, whether it is from within the tradition itself or from outside, we break with the essence of that body and invent something new.
I wonder if Manuel's observation, that we find the deepest roots of what became Zen in an ancient and nearly forgotten Shamanism, which nevertheless remains in its bones, applies to all religion. For instance, Christianity emerges from an Israelite religion embedded with Shamanistic elements. There is research that brings out the relationship of Jesus to Shamanism as well. (See, for instance, The Life of a Galilean Shaman: Jesus of Nazareth in Anthropological-Historical Perspective, by Pieter F. Craffert.) And Shamanism is deeply grounded in the Earth, creation, and different forms of life.
If we dig deep enough into the bones of our lived faith, we will find ourselves digging in the dirt. For all authentic religion is grounded in and emerges from the Earth of which humans are made. The essence of the Earth, which resonates with the voiceprint of the One who spoke it all into being, is giving. Authentic religion is therefore the sinews, tissues, and organs built on the bones constituted by the ultimate and original self-offering of the Creator in love.
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