Jesus, Jazz, and Buddhism

About age forty some people feel that they run out of any more faces to wear.  They begin to try to save their old faces or, if they are rich, to buy new ones with surgery.  They forget that there is something very beautiful about an aged and worn face, even if its seams are split.  I borrow these ideas from the poet Rilke, who writes: 

"I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.  There are people who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears out, gets dirty, splits at the seams, stretches like gloves worn during a long journey,

Other people change faces incredibly fast, put on one after another, and wear them out.  At first, they think they have an unlimited supply; but when they are barely forty years old they come to their last one.  There is, to be sure, something tragic about this. They are not accustomed to taking care of faces; their last one is worn through in a week, has holes in it, is in many places as thin as paper,k and then, little by little, the lining shows through, the non-face, and they walk around with that on." (1)

What is a face?  I offer a Whiteheadian perspective: A face is how one living being with experiences of his or her own -- a human being, for example --becomes objectified for others, voluntarily or involuntarily, consciously or unconsciously.  A face is an objectification of subjectivity.  Animals have faces, too; and from Whitehead's perspective rivers and mountains have faces.  There is subjectivity everywhere.   But here I focus on human faces. 

A human face is more than eyes and nose and cheeks.  It is is also clothing, decoration, posture, gesture, and tone of voice.  Moreover, we fantasize about the faces we might present to the world, even if we never actualize them.  We imagine ourselves saying certain things, wearing certain clothes, acting in certain ways.  We are dreaming our faces. 

The woman on the left is dreaming a face for us.  Behind her are masks.  Perhaps they are masks she wears in her actual life, or only in her dream life.   The faces of our fantasies are real for us, but not for others. 

Of course we have secret faces, too. These are the faces we present to ourselves in the mirror early in the morning or late at night.  As we look into our eyes in the mirror, when no one else is present, we have a face to face encounter.  We ask: "Who are you?  What has become of you?  I have missed you.  Are you all right?" 

The image in the mirror is not really the same person who is looking in the mirror, but it is very hard for us to distinguish the two.  But sometimes we sense the difference when, as we look into the mirror we find ourselves asking: "Is that really me?"

The Bible tells us that we are made in God's image and are called to grow into God's likeness.  If you look very carefully into the eyes of another person, with tenderness and without judgment, you can sometimes see this image.  There is a universe inside each person.

Just as the actual universe is the body of God, so the universe inside each person is the body of that person.  It is a spiritual body, filled with hopes and dreams and feelings and yearnings.  It is a person's soul.

God is the soul of the universe.  This means, among other things, that God does not have a face among faces.  We cannot imagine a universe in which there are ten thousand faces and then imagine God as one additional face."  It is better to imagine God as a kind of uncreated Light that is everywhere at once.  "God is Light and in God There is No Darkness." (1 John 1:5)

Some faces reveal this Light in special ways.  They are god-like even as their lining wears out, even as they lose their lustre, even as they are torn.  We see in them a wisdom and a kindness, a capacity to reach out and include others.  There's a shining in them.  They are like windows through whom God shines.   They have halos.

Most of us have halos in certain moments of our lives, when we are wise and loving and creative, when she are obedient to the call of the moment and shine in our own ways.  Some people shine dramatically and some quietly, some ebulliently and some subtly.   A good friend is someone who sees the shining in you, even when you can't see it yourself.  The key to life is to help people shine in their own ways.  Good teachers and parents know this intuitively.  Our calling in life is to encourage shining.  In helping others we shine, too.

Some of us are born with faces that are hard to live with.   We feel ugly.  Other people see us as different or odd or deformed. 

We did not choose our face; the choice was made by our genes, or by an accident, or by a wound someone inflicted upon us.  And yet, as Nietzsche says, what does not kill us will make us strong.  Some of the strongest people in the world are those who have been trapped inside faces they wish they didn't have.   Sometimes very gifted surgeons can give them new faces, and this is to be celebrated.  But if they do not have new faces, if they have to live with their old ones, they are God's special children.

They are special because they add to God's beauty, God's glory.  God is enriched by differences, by what others might call "odd."  For God nothing is odd, but much is surprising, and delightfully so.  The western poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put the point beautifully in his famous poem Pied Beauty.  He saw God in "all things counter, original, spare, strange,' in whatever is "fickle, freckled."  The world needs more original and freckled people.  People whose differences make the whole so much richer.  In their differences in God's salvation.  God is saved by differences, because they give God so much pleasure.  It may seem strange to say that uncreated Light enjoys pleasure.

This is another idea we find in process theology.  It is that the Light at the heart of the universe, devoid of a particularized face, is also a reality who feels the particularities of the universe in their particularity.  Imagine that the whole universe has a soul or a consciousness.  This consciousness is not one among the many entities in the universe.  It is the subjectivity of the universe itself, understood as a living whole.  These particularities are the very "glory" of God.  When we pray to God, someone is listening. 

"Dear God," someone might say, "I hate my face."  God then responds: "Well I think you are gorgeous.  I wish I had a face like that!"

Even as we wear our faces, we also have our secret thoughts.  Our thoughts may be revolutionary or counter-revolutionary, anti-revolutionary or a-revolutionary.  We may be protesting a system we find unjust; or just pretending to protest because, if we don't pretend, we will be in trouble.  In the language of Whitehead, we have lots and lots of ideas inside our minds, lots of lures for feeling, which only we know.  When people look into our eyes they sometimes wonder what we are thinking.  They cannot know.  We are hidden to them.

Everybody needs to have a hidden side.  Extroverts sometimes forget this.  They think everything must be expressed, unveiled.  But it is good if we recognize that everyone has a celibate core that is known only to themselves and to God.  This is the side of a person which is not connected to others, not revealed, not seen.

God respects our secrets, too.  God is loving enough to know that there are some things that we cannot and need not share with others, or even with ourselves.  Whitehead says that God is a fellow sufferer who understands our inner being.  God doesn't judge our secret side.  God loves it.  God can keep secrets, too. 

Sometimes there are things we can share only with God, not with anyone else.  Sometimes there are things we cannot even admit to ourselves; we can only hope that God knows them and somehow forgives us.  As Whitehead put it: "God is the great companion, the fellow sufferer who understands."

The faces above, and the one to the left, are all gendered.  As you look at them you know that are presenting themselves in female kinds of ways.  This does not mean that all the faces belong to people who are anatomically or sexually female.  We best distinguish between the anatomy of a person's body and the gender roles that he or she assumes in life.  Sometimes the assumption of a gender role can be empowering, but sometimes it can be tragic.  Hear the words of a college student, Kendall Lewellen, as she describes the tragedy some people face when their gendered faces are their only source of empowerment:

Whether these faces are literal like the makeup people put on their faces or figurative like the way our voices rise or fall when we talk to someone we love, we are always wearing gendered masks.  There is nothing inherently wrong in this, and we can never really take these masks off.  But if we are women, the tragedy of being a woman is that our masks are oftentimes our only sources of power, and our masks will inevitably wear thin with age. If women only know themselves as their feminine masks, there's a very real sadness that comes when those mask's lining shows through.

Do you think this woman in the art by Jin Shi is sad?  Is she reducible to her costume?  Is there anything more to her?  Does she have some secret faces, too?  And for that matter, is she a woman?  Or a man dressed in women's clothing?  Does it matter?  Not really.  All that really matters, at least to the soul of the universe, is that this person find her halo.  It is possible that, in order to do so, she must remove some masks.

To remove the masks that harm us is to embrace what some western academics call our queerness.  When I was growing up, this was a very bad word.  You would speak of people as "queer" and you meant that they were odd and perverted, and not to be accepted by others.  But western academics have taken the word and made it much more positive.  Our queerness, they say, is our uniqueness.  We claim our queerness when we recognize that no single set of categories quite fits who we are, because we are different at ever moment and always more than any of our masks.  

This always-more-than-our-masks is part of the image of God within each of us. It is our transcendence of all categories.  God is queer, too.  God is always more than our concepts of God.

Often people speak of God's transcendence, but we Whiteheadians speak of each person's transcendence, too.  When we forget our transcendence, we fall into what Whitehead calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.  We confuse our masks -- our faces -- with our Buddha-Nature, with the image of God within us.  When we claim our queerness, we undergo a process of peeling away, of mask removal.

The act of claiming queerness can last a lifetime.  Maybe even more, if the journey continues after death.  It begins with a desire to take off unwanted masks: those which have been forced upon us, but which are not true to who we are or who we want to become. 

When we take off unwanted masks, we have the opportunity to put on new ones of our own choosing.  Or at least experiment with them.  And we have the opportunity to recognize that the person wearing the masks is, at some deep level, none of them.  She is the one who is looking into the mirror and who knows that she cannot be reduced to the image that appears in front of her.

Un-masking and re-masking is a process of becoming.  East-Asian traditions -- Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism -- see life as a process of becoming.  In one of the Analects (2:4) Confucius describes his own life as a process of development.  He says when he was fifteen he set his mind on learning, when he was thirty he could take a stand, when he was forty he was free of doubts, and when he was fifty he could listen.

It goes without saying that Confucianism has been a very patriarchal system.  In many of its historical expressions it has been rigid, elitist, emotionally stifling, and bureaucratized.  Other religions and cultures have been patriarchal, too.  Part of the world's best hope is that religions can evolve into post-patriarchal forms of consciousness.  If an individual's life is a process of development, so perhaps a culture's life is a developing process, too.

Confucianism has some good ideas to build upon, as it evolves into a post-patriarchal cultural atmosphere.  One is that we humans are social beings, and that in our sociality we can find a certain kind of wholeness -- a harmony -- in our lives.  We live through relations, even as we have our private selves.  The harmony can be creative and, in the future, it can include a deep, postmodern respect for the absolute uniqueness of each individual.  Call it Queer Confucianism.  A Queer Confucianism will bring with it the general idea that relationships need not be patriarchal or heterosexist in order to be meaningful and healthy for the world.  It will align itself with the broader moments of hope in our world: movements which help others and not just ourselves.  One of these is feminism.

Feminism as a process of seeking justice for women and men and for all who are in-between.  

What is justice?  In a certain sense it is just the opposite of what so many societies have today, when their people suffer from excessive stratification between the rich and the rest, from a fear of power.  When compared with the unjust societies of our time,  a just society is the world turned upside down.  It is opposite of domination.  The point can be put positively.  It is a society that is creative, compassionate, participatory, ecologically wise, and spiritually satisfying, with no one left behind.  It is a society in which individuals are respected: enjoying rights to dissent, to be themselves, to say what they think, and to define who they are.  Understood in this way, justice is an ideal to be approximated, not a utopia to be realized. 

Does justice have a face?  It looks like any face and every face.  But justice always wears a face of kindness.  It is not about power over others, or about elitism, or about patriarchy, or hatred.  It is about love.  At least that's how Jesus understood things. And what does Jesus look like?  He, too, looks like any face and every face.  After his resurrection he becomes one with the soul of the universe; he has no face except love.  Whenever you look into any eyes, even your own, and see a trace of love, you are seeing the face of Jesus.  And whenever you look into the eyes of someone who suffers from injustice, you are also seeing his face.  But sometimes, in order to understand this, you must look at things from a fresh and novel perspective.  This is the way of love.  It always turns things upside down.

Note: The faces above and below are shared with JJB by permission of Outstanding Art gallery in Shanghai.  It is difficult to say whether the words interpret the images, or the images interpret the words.  We hope readers will focus on the images.  We have identified the particular artists whose work is shown at the gallery, and we encourage you to go to their website to learn more about the work of each: http://www.outstandingartshanghai.com/.

1. Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Random House, 1983.  Pages 6-7.