In chapter one T.N.H. continues his introductory remarks by describing his long journey to gaining an appreciation of the Christian faith. As a young monk in Vietnam he witnessed the horrors of that war first hand. But he came to understand the American soldiers fighting in his country were as much victims of the war as were his fellow Vietnamese. Any of you who know a veteran of that war can attest to this truth.
During the war he traveled to the United States to bear witness to the travesty of that war. He met many professed Christians during his stay. But it wasn’t until he met what he termed “true Christians”, men like Martin Luther King and Daniel Berrigan, that he came to understand the power behind Christ’s message of peace. And isn’t that true of us as well? Isn’t the most genuine and powerful form of evangelism found in a life lived in accordance with Christ’s teachings rather than through words? His personal revelation led him to a deep appreciation of the Christian faith, to the point where he keeps a statue of Christ next to his statue of the Buddha, and reveres both.
But what is truly interesting in the first chapter is his introduction of the term and notion of “interbeing” into the vernacular. Interbeing is the understanding that all of creation is interconnected, that nothing exists completely independent. As an example, he uses a simple flower. When most people observe a flower they see just that, a flower. We may note its gross physical characteristics, size, color, scent, etc., but that’s about as far as we go. T.N.H. looks much deeper. When he observes a flower intensely, he sees all of what it’s made of - molecules, atoms, etc. – as well as that which made the flower’s physical being possible, rain, sunshine, and soil. When viewed from this perspective it becomes clear that the boundaries we place between physical entities are artificial. Nothing in creation is truly distinct. Our physical being blends with our surrounding environment and the rest of creation.
Western Christians see the world in binary terms, God/man, us/them, mind/body, man/woman, human/non-human, etc. We can trace this pattern of thinking to our Greek forebears who codified this artificial dichotomy. But the more we learn of ecology, and human nature, the less viable the Greek proposition becomes. Even in our basest form, our physical being, we are not a discrete organism. Rather, we are a symbiotic amalgamation of organisms – bacteria, viruses, fungi, and micro insects - that together, we call “human”. We are composed of water that has been reused countless times over billions of years. We are sunshine in the form of plants and animals we ingest. We are part of the amorphous creation, where everything exists in relation. Taken to the extreme, many believe in Gaia, the idea that the Earth itself is one massive symbiotic organism.
This is the essence of interbeing.
How does Christ’s message relate to interbeing? Have we twisted Christ’s vision of the Kingdom to reflect our Greek philosophical heritage? Is Gaia a secular analogue of the Kingdom?
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