What I have come to listen to in this way is, quite simply, "the Christian
story." More and more I have come to think of Christian faith not primarily
as a creed or as a mystical journey but as responsibility for a story: the
story of "God," with all its ins and outs, even as Jack Miles has most
recently retold it in God: A Biography (Knopf), and the story of Jesus, in
all its New Testament versions, even as deconstructed by John Dominic
Crossan and Marcus Borg. It is a very old story. It has been told again and
again--at Nicaea and Chalcedon; by Athanasius and Augustine and Aquinas; by
Eckhart and Ignatius and Newman. I like some versions better than others,
but I respect all the versions, even as I realize I must take
responsibility for my own deconstruction and retelling of the story. In all
the reflective writing Thomas Merton has done on Buddhism (especially Zen)
and Christianity, the recurring line is, "I live, now not I, but Christ
lives in me." The "story," God help us, is now incarnate in me. Or so Saint
Paul claims, and I'm willing to test it out with him.

Even as I describe a faith still in progress, I also find myself in
agreement with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's scolding
1989 letter on "Some Aspects of Christian Meditation." I don't see the
dangers of Eastern mysticism that worry the congregation, but I do see that
the words of Scripture are the bearers of the Christian story and the
sacraments are the dramatic reenactment of the continuing story. If you let
Scripture, liturgy, and sacraments go and try to "disappear into the sea of
the Absolute," as the congregation worries, you may still be part of some
story but not any longer the Christian one. So I find that even as I get
deeper into Buddhist practice, Scripture study, the liturgy, and especially
the Eucharist become not less but more important to me. That's exactly what
I listen to and somehow "hear" in a new way across the silence.

In trying to hold Scripture, sacraments, and Buddhist silence together, I
have found the writings of John P. Keenan, a Buddhist scholar and an
Episcopal priest, very helpful. He has shown how, in at least one Buddhist
framework, the Mahayana (the mystical "Great Vehicle" tradition of Indian
Buddhism, of which Zen is in a special way "the meditation school"), it
might be possible to read Christology ("the Word") in a way that respects
"the silence" about which Ignatius of Antioch speaks. Keenan has proposed
that reading the Christian tradition through a Buddhist lens will enable
theologians to locate the doctrine of the Incarnation in the context of
God's ultimate "unknowability"--the divine darkness--which is also part of
the authentic Christian mystical tradition (The Meaning of Christ: A
Mahayana Theology, Orbis; and The Gospel of Mark: A Mahayana Reading,
Orbis).

Keenan makes use of two themes: the identity between "emptiness" and
"dependent co-arising" and the "differentiation between the two truths of
ultimate meaning and worldly convention." The first of these themes applies
"horizontally" to our being in the world and says that nothing we
experience in our ordinary lives has a reality independent of the fragile
network of "causes and conditions" that bring our experienced realities
about. The second theme is "vertical" and "attempts to clarify our
experience of transcendence and its enunciation in symbols and languages"
(see, The Anglican Theological Review, 1989).

Given the longstanding Christian effort to ground all things in God ("the
ground of being," Tillich has taught us to say) and our commitment to "the
analogy of being," it is difficult to see how Buddhist "emptiness" does not
lead to nihilism and despair, since for the Mahayana Buddhist there is none
of the metaphysical security that has become so much a part of the
Christian theological tradition.

In fact, however, the notion that all things are "empty" leads the Buddhist
not to nihilism and despair but to nonattachment, and from there to freedom
and compassionate reengagement in the world. Nor does the Buddhist sense of
the lack of essential reality in the things of our experience mean that
there is nothing to be understood about the world. On the contrary, these
two themes affirm both the ultimate truth of "emptiness" and the
"conventional" validity of the knowledge we acquire in the world of
"dependent co-arising." The knowledge we have, Buddhists believe, is
partial and minimal but still vitally important as the "skillful means" by
which we reach toward the ultimate, ever unspoken truth of emptiness and
the freedom of compassionate re-engagement in the world.

These notions crucially modify the prevailing Christian understanding of
doctrine and even of revelation, understood as "information." As Keenan
says, "The role of doctrine in Mahayana theology is not to communicate a