 Who Can Stop the Wind?Notto R. Thelle |
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"Who can stop the wind?" When Kobo Daishi (774-835), one of the great masters of Japanese intellectual history, renounced the power and luxury of the court and its bureaucracy and set out on his wanderings as a homeless monk, his family and friends thought he had gone mad, and they protested loudly. His reply was simple: "Who can shatter my resolve? Who can stop the wind?" These words were more than just an appropriate metaphor for an irrevocable choice--they described a whole way of life. Kobo Daishi was whirled up out of the secure framework of his life, and he let himself be carried along by the wind. He had seen all too clearly the emptiness of the "good life" and he knew that he could find a more authentic life only if he encountered reality without any protective clothing. He could perhaps have drowned out this call and shut out the wind, but he knew that it would just keep on blowing. As a man of the spirit, he had no other choice. When Jesus talked with Nicodemus late one night about being born anew, he too pointed to the wind: "The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit" (John 3:8). Here, "wind" and "Spirit" are translations of the same Greek word, pneuma. The wind blows where it chooses. The Spirit blows where He chooses. When I was a child, I ran around on a mountain outside Hong Kong, Tao Fong Shan, "The mountain of the Tao-wind." The Tao-wind is the Logos-wind of John's Gospel, the "wind of the Word" or "Spirit of Truth." Buddhist pilgrims came to this mountain, as did others in search of the truth. Buddhist tradition called these people yun-shui (unsui in Japanese), "cloud-water." They were wanderers who let themselves be driven by wind and water until they met a master who could lead them to the truth, one who spoke to their hearts and opened their eyes. When Elijah waited on Horeb, the mountain of God, the first thing he encountered was a storm that split the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces, but He was not in the storm. Nor was He in the earthquake or the fire. He came in the sound of a gentle breeze (1 Kings 19:11-13). It is impossible to halt the Spirit of Truth, the Logos-wind. We can indeed attempt to shut it out, building walls and defense-works. We can drown it out with words--our own excuses and the warnings of our friends. But when our words and the admonitions of our friends fall silent, we still hear it blowing. It breathes life into words of scripture that we had not yet discovered; it flickers through our dreams and takes us by surprise at unguarded moments. Sometimes, it puffs away the mist of our words, and in a moment's frightened clarity we know that we must follow it, even though we do not know where it is going. We have of course good reasons to shut out the wind. There are so many winds and so many voices that entice us with their promises about the spiritual life and about fair spring weather, but most winds are deceitful--they die down as soon as one tries to follow them. Other winds turn into storms, and we are "tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine" (Eph. 4:14), until we are left windswept, exhausted, and empty. But some of this fear is unjustified. We are afraid of what we do not know. Some people are afraid that they may be led into faith--they are modern and secularized, and have become accustomed to looking on the church and Christianity with contempt. Others are afraid that they may lose their faith--they do not want to risk being blown away from a childhood faith in which they no longer really believe, and being led into a more adult faith and insight that they do not yet know. We know it is the Spirit of Truth who is blowing into our lives, but we resist him. Yet in our heart of hearts we know that no one can stop the wind. It does not let go of us as easily as the false winds--it keeps on blowing. Surely we are not going to let fear of the unknown prevent us from following it on its path? Who can stop the wind? Faith as Fate and as Choice Many years ago, in the late 1950s, one of the pioneers of the Norwegian Humanist Association held lectures on the nature of religion in the cathedral high school in Oslo. The sham of Christianity's claims had been unmasked, and the debate was in full swing. He concluded one of his talks with these strong words: "If you had been born in China, you would not have been a Christian. You would have been a Buddhist or a Taoist or a Confucian!" These words really struck home! Those of us who were members of the school's Christian union exchanged alarmed glances, as we sat sweating on our chairs. I was the next to address the public, and I held the shortest--and most successful--speech of my life: "Well, as a matter of fact, I was born in China." Everyone knew that I was the chairman of the Christian union, and the whole assembly hall burst out laughing. Every subsequent contribution to the debate was completely irrelevant; the evening was a defeat for the humanists. All their arguments faded in view of the irony of fate that had made me the living proof of the error in their thinking. But although the humanist's words were drowned out by laughter that evening, this naturally did not mean that his questions had been answered. I do in fact suspect that his question was primarily rhetorical; he wanted to weaken our confidence in all religions, rather than to challenge us to be open to the knowledge offered by religions other than our own. Nevertheless, let us put the best construction on his words. He was challenging us not to take our inherited religion for granted. He wanted to sow doubt about faith as a product of "fate." The historical accident that one was born in a "Christian" country is no guarantee of the truth of Christianity. My thoughts have often returned to that debate. In the first place, it taught me that "victory" and "defeat" in debates are not always decided by a neutral evaluation of the arguments put forward and of the respective weight of the positions held by the debaters; the outcome is just as much dependent on the speakers' elegant language and ability to formulate their thoughts, on their wit and irony, on the impact made by their personalities, or on coincidences such as the one I have just described. And secondly, of course, I subsequently had to admit that the speaker was right: if you are born in the East, it is highly improbable, statistically speaking, that you will be a Christian. Religious adherence is largely determined by geography. This is a very simple fact that need not unsettle our faith. On the contrary, it can force us to think through our faith, and it can whittle away ingrained but superficial ideas that take the superiority of Christianity for granted. When I returned to the Far East, where I had spent my childhood, I felt the magnetic attraction of the local religions. In such a situation, faith could never be just a matter of course. Here in Europe, however, the situation has changed, since it is no longer exclusively the humanists or atheists who issue challenges to our faith. Buddhists and Muslims and adherents of other religions are active in all Western societies, and they are beginning to change the face of Europe. An English friend told me recently that of the 200,000 citizens in his hometown, 50,000 are now Muslims or Hindus. There are not so many in a country like Norway, but they are certainly a visible presence. We ought perhaps to get accustomed to the idea that a monopoly on Weltanschauung (worldview) no longer exists: there is no longer one majority religion. Rather, societal development means that a plurality of worldviews and religions is now normal. The sociologist Peter Berger has analyzed this transformation in modern Western societies. In the past, religion was determined by one's "fate" in the sense of one's historical and geographical circumstances. Today, the world into which we are born obliges us to choose the sphere of faith, and Berger speaks in this context of the "heretical imperative" (from the Greek hairein, "to choose"). The plurality of religions and worldviews forces us to set out on our own journey and choose afresh. In modern Western societies, it is just as likely that one will abandon Christianity, as that one will discover a living faith. Indeed, it is possible that an acuter sensitivity is required, if one is to choose faith rather than to drift away from it. We can therefore take the argument put forward by the humanist in my high school in the 1950s and reformulate it as a challenge to new generations not to take inherited attitudes for granted. For example, we could say: "If you had been born in Africa, you might have been a Christian! The fact you were born in a country that is in the process of forgetting its inherited faith does not permit you to presume that Christianity does not lead to a truer and more integrated life." Notto R. Thelle, D.Th., is a professor in the Faculty of Theology, the University of Oslo, Norway. Having studied Buddhism at Otani University in Kyoto, he acted as associate director of the NCC (National Christian Council) Center for the Study of Japanese Religions in Kyoto 1974-85, where he was a visiting scholar 1999-2000. He is the author of numerous books and articles. This essay is a translation of part of his book, which was published in Norwegian.
This article was originally published in the April-June 2006 issue of Dharma World. |
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