Walk from the garden into the side aisle of St Ethelburga's and your eye is drawn to "Frolicking Horses", Ahmed Moustapha's striking artwork hanging straight ahead over the sofa. It explodes with colour and energy. I've seen wild horses on the Camargue like this, dancing with the joys of life and freedom. In fact, it's not a "picture", it's calligraphy - an ancient Persian poem with many layers of Arabic text superimposed to create a superb illusion of form. It subverts the proscription of depicting living creatures by hardline religious powers in Moustapha's native Egypt. This is nothing new - religions have always struggled to co-opt or control the making of images. One woman's icon is another man's idol, and most religious traditions can point to historical episodes of iconoclastic blood-letting.
St Ethelburga's is about to offer hospitality to eight Tibetan Buddhist monks from the Tashi Lhunpo monastery for a week (8 - 12 June). The focal point will be the construction of a sand mandala in the chancel. If you can't call in to see it, you will be able to watch its painstaking creation, grain by grain, on the web through the magic of "mandalacam" (a £9.99 webcam from Maplins). You'll see a richly-coloured, abstract image of extraordinary intricacy emerge. St Ethelburga, glowing in the stained glass window above, will have a little visual competition for a few days.
For Buddhists it is, I'm told, a map of both the universe and the mind. Deities are said to reside in the mandala. These are not easy ideas for Christians and people of other faiths who use St Ethelburga's. The presence of such an alien image in a consecrated space raises interesting questions. And that's the point. Let me reassure you first - this is no new-age attempt to short-circuit the integrity of different traditions, no esoteric art show. Nobody is going to be "worshipping an idol". We want to use this spectacular juxtaposition of traditions to learn more about how authentic relationships can be built across boundaries of culture and religion.
So how might a non-Buddhist approach a mandala? Here are five thoughts
1. A world in a grain of sand: From a Keatsian stance - "Beauty is truth, truth beauty…" - the colour and elegance of the mandala are God-given qualities that please and uplift us. Kandinsky and Rothko show that we can find a spiritual meaning in abstraction, and we can approach these patterned lines of sand in the same spirit. Simone Weil, ever the mystic provocateur, puts the spiritual case for beauty even more strongly:
"the beauty of the world is almost the only way in which we can allow God to penetrate us", she says.
Approach the mandala with a sense of wonder and we may see a new aspect of the divine creation.
2. Symbols of the unconscious: For Jung, a mandala is a powerful spiritual metaphor of universal relevance. Our "spiritual journey" is, he suggests, not linear but a "circumambulation around the Self". The maze-like mandala, with its complex symmetry of squared circles, symbolises this. These patterns intrigue us and are strangely satisfying to observe. Jung suggests that this is because they produce an echo in our unconscious which reveals that deep down we have an intuitive awareness of the essential order and inter-connectedness of things. Doodle for a few minutes and I bet you'll soon see geometric patterns emerge.
3. Companions in Compassion: The central theme of the Chenrezig mandala which the monks will build for us is compassion. As Karen Armstrong is busy pointing out, this is a concept also at the heart of most other religious traditions including (particularly?) Christianity. I am curious to see whether the mandala can transcend its specific Tibetan cultural pedigree and speak to us about something in which we share a deep-seated common interest. The patient craftsmanship of the monks is an astonishing thing to witness, as is their seriousness of purpose and their contemplative discipline. We can share neither their task nor their prayers, but this need not be a barrier to spiritual companionship. With such a powerful shared ethos between us I feel sure the rhythm of their daily meditation practices will have an effect on us. I hope it will strengthen our commitment to own prayer and enable us to renew it in shared silence with them.
4. God of Surprises: I have always been struck by the honesty with which that great reviver of the Christian monastic tradition, Thomas Merton acknowledged that his deepest spiritual experience happened not in his Kentucky cloister but on the other side of the world, in front of the great Buddhas of Polonnaruwa (Sri Lanka).
“I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious”.
We never know when God will speak to us, but it’s clear from the bible that it is usually from an unexpected place. Christian scripture doesn’t say much about sand mandalas or even Buddhism. (Q: is it conceivable that Jesus could have heard about Siddhartha Gautama sitting under the bodhi tree half a millennium earlier?). It does say a lot about the value of welcoming strangers, and accepts the possibility that we may change and grow in the process.
5. Holy Envy: I owe my introduction to the concept of holy envy to my good friend Rabbi Mark Winer. It was coined by the Swedish theologian Krister Stendhal as one of his three rules of religious understanding. "Leave room for holy envy", he says - i.e. be willing to recognise in other religions practices and ideas that you can admire or which you wish could be reflected in your own tradition, even though this may not be possible. Rabbi Mark loves watching Christian Eucharist - "seeing Christians being who they are" - whilst he recognises, not without a slight sense of regret I suspect, that it can never have the same meaning for him. I find this a helpful idea. It enables us to enter into other people's religious worlds as guests rather than intruders or voyeurs. For me, it's made it possible, for instance, to be wholehearted about admiring the reverence and sense of community I sometimes witness in mosques without feeling that my own faith is prejudiced in any way.
A thoughtful new book by Catherine Cornille - "The Im-possibility of Interreligious Dialogue" - puts all this into a helpful framework. An enthusiast for East-West religious dialogue herself, she seeks a strong theological basis for authentic Christian engagement with other faiths. She finds this in a set of five balanced conditions:
· doctrinal humility,
· commitment to a specific tradition,
· recognising the inter-connections between religions,
· empathy,
· hospitality towards difference.
She takes us onto much more expansive terrain than the modest overlapping ground of "common values". She shows us a place where personal conviction is a pre-requisite, not an obstacle to dialogue.
This rings true in my own experience. My Christian understanding has been continuously deepened by exposure to the beliefs of others, not weakened or confused. Time and again questions, insights and friendships from outside my own tradition have been the cue to finding new things in my own scriptures and prayer-life.
As a Christian I look forward to seeing what this alien, holy object has to show me. Come and join me.
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