Seal of the Prophets, Seal of the Saints

seraphimsigrist has written of a talk our friend Mark gave over the weekend, in which he read a dream narrative by their friend Lex Hixon, in which the nature of earth, hell, and paradise were revealed by a guide whom Mark allowed us to think of as Jesus. And of course a Christian may think of the wisdom guide as the cosmic Christ and picture him as Jesus; in the dream text published in The Heart of the Koran, the guide was named Muhammad. This is as it should be, or as it must be, as each of us must picture our guide as we can, or, perhaps, each of us will picture him -- or indeed her -- as we must.

What little I know of wisdom dialogue in the dream or near dream state I learned from Ira Progoff, a Jewish Buddha, as I heard him described early on. In the little library across the hall from the meeting room where Mark spoke I found an old crumbling paperback copy of Ira's edition of The Cloud of Unknowing, and read his introduction for the first time. (I have the somewhat less modernized Underhill edition at home.) Indeed it is the first time I have looked at the Cloud since practicing a form of meditation in its tradition, which traces its Christian pedigree to St. John Cassian and is taught by Benedictine Oblates, but which the future Father John Main learned at the feet of Swami Satyananda of Kuala Lumpur.

The Hindu lineage of Christian Meditation might be as disturbing to the more exclusively Christian as Lex Hixon's invocation of the Prophet of Islam, though Hixon, a prominent Sufi teacher, was perhaps pretty much an Orthodox Christian when he came to write The Heart of the Koran, which might be Islamic, but certainly not Islamicist. Satyananda, too, was more than a little Christianized, though he could not accept baptism because his Jesuit teachers demanded he make too sweeping a repudiation of his own heritage.

When Douglas Main, formerly of the Colonial Office, became Brother and then Father John Main, he was instructed to give up his practice of meditation, and only took it up again when he found it described, not only in the Cloud, but in Cassian's dialogues with Abba Isaac in the Egyptian desert. And I gave it up myself when I left the Roman Catholic Church for the Russian, in order to acquire a more integrally Orthodox phronema. Now I am facing the decision of whether to take it up again.

I, too, gave a little talk on Saturday, and will try to post a little about it in a while.