Shauna says she feels bitter toward me every time she checks my blog and I haven't updated it, so this is an attempt to prevent her from having any negative feelings toward me. Also, it's about time I wrote a new blog, so she just serves as the motivating factor. Anyway . . . we'll start with Saturday . . .
I got up early (early meaning 9:00 a.m.), and met several people from our church at Naropa University, a Buddhist university in Boulder. Really, ever since I had arrived here in Boulder, I had felt God telling me that I needed to do prayer walks on the campus, but only recently had I felt him saying, "Seriously, you need to do prayer walks on the campus." And when God uses the word "seriously," you should take him, well . . . seriously. I found that some other people wanted to join me, so I organized a prayer walk for Saturday morning.
The day before I went to the campus and took a guided tour. While listening to our tour guide speak about the education he had received at Naropa, I realized that they have not only allowed Buddhist practices to influence their educational methods, but it is integrated into every aspect of student life. Just as I remember my tour guide at Indiana Wesleyan talking about the professors integrating prayer into the classroom, my tour guide at Naropa talked about how each professor integrates meditation into the classroom and the homework.
I saw several Buddhist monks wandering the campus and a few students meditating on the lawn. During my time on campus and when I visited the Shambhala Meditation Center about a month ago, I kept thinking about how serious they really were about their faith. A disciplined life is a requirement, which at first made it strange to me that Buddhism is so appealing to people--but then I realized that it's because they are so serious about it that people are attracted to it. So as I considered this today on the campus, God brought Acts 17 to mind.
In this passage (Acts 17:16-34), Paul visits Athens. After seeing that the city was full of idols, he began to preach the good news about Jesus. When questioned about what he had been saying, Paul responded by complimenting the Athenians on their religiosity. (As he walked around their city, he had even seen an idol to an unknown god.) Paul then proclaims to them that the "unknown god" they had been worshiping is the true God, living God. To further communicate truth, Paul even quotes one of their own poets, and then explains how it relates to the living God. Paul used what they already knew, or what they did not fully understand, to explain the truth of the gospel. He saw that their hearts were bent toward God; they simply did not know who the true God was.
I feel that with many of the students who attend Naropa, the situation is very similar. They are attracted to spirituality, to a life of discipline, to serving others, to living in community. But they are on a path that will lead them only to emptiness and a loss of themselves. Even as I read over some of the literature I picked up on the campus, I was struck by a quote from the Dalai Lama. He said, "It's time to move away from our habitual preoccupation with self. It's time to turn our concern to the wider community with whom we are connected." How true this is for all of us. But the way to turning from ourselves is not by meditation or emptying ourselves, it's by allowing Christ to transform us.
So on Saturday about 12 of us gathered to pray on the campus--that God would provide opportunities to come into contact with these students, that they would seek truth and find it, and that God would give us wisdom to show them how what they already believe and practice can be shifted to be seen through the lens of the gospel. I've also been asking God that he would continue to break my heart for this community. They are such a beautiful and devoted people, and I believe we have a lot to learn from them--their desire to lose sight of themselves and to show others compassion. I would just love to communicate the joy of allowing God to give us a new self--one that is Christlike and then allowing compassion to flow from his heart, now our own.
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