I think I know a lot about Jesus, but a couple of months ago, I found myself wondering how Jesus prayed. I don’t know. And I want to.
My question has no rational answer. It’s like the question about “the sound of one hand (clapping).” It has no rational answer.
I began to wonder if my question was like a koan.
Longtime koan practitioner and teacher, Joan Sutherland writes, “[A] koan is a small moment, a vignette, that contains the universe.”
Jesus prayed. How?
Yes. A vignette which, for me, contains the universe.
Sutherland continues:
“Koans are both full of promise and unsettling… [they are] messengers from the territory of what we don’t yet know. They need to remain untamed, so that we can discover each one’s particular wildness and let it undomesticate us.”1
She says that the practice is basically, “keeping company” with a koan. We meditate with it, but then we also live our daily lives with it. Because “[k]oans are robust, capable of being hauled around, leaned on, and argued with . . . “[They] are meant to subvert the habitual processes of the rational mind, [as] a first step towards something else.”2
Keeping company with my koan has made me aware of how much of my world consists of what I know. Or think I know. I (we?) work so hard to know things. It is good to know things, but what we know can also become a box — a confinement — which keeps us from seeing other things, elsewhere, outside the box of what we know.
Keeping company with my koan, I finally feel as though I am allowed, invited even, to look around outside the box of what I know. It feels promising.
I will share some of the things I find while keeping company with my koan. I don’t expect to find an answer. But I have already heard questions I haven’t asked before and I have seen things I had “seen” without really noticing them.
Promising.
Image by jan mesaros from Pixabay
Sutherland, Joan. Through Forests of Every Color: Awakening with Koans, (Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boulder, Co. 2022) Kindle edition at 50.
Sutherland, Through Forests of Every Color, Kindle edition at 51.
Hmmmm...... you have set me to pondering - without expection, yet with a tiny bit of eager anticipation!
What a fascinating concept…. Can’t wait to hear about your adventures.