A Reflection on Vipassana
by Father Peter Loudes
The Importance of Silence
People who know I am a priest sometimes wonder what a Catholic priest is doing in a Buddhist centre....Thomas Merton remarked he felt more in tune with D.T. Suzuki (a Zen Buddhist) than with the average Catholic mass-goer. I am no Merton, but ...I often feel so in my ministry. Spirituality is a lifelong quest for me. I have dared to search for it in waters outside of the Bark of Peter.
How does that square with my Catholic affiliations? I think Vipassana is one way of reaching the goals of the mystical spirituality of my Catholic tradition.
The theory (or theology if you will) of the Vipassana technique does not generally fit with my Catholic theological world view. But I do not think that is important.
The reason why I do not think it is important is this: I consider my Christian theology just one way of interpreting and talking about transcendent experience. I think the experience is more important than talking about it. In the experience, I feel closer to the mystics of Christian tradition and to those of our Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist traditions, that to our theologians and mass-goers.
In my Christian tradition, I think, “theological spirituality” is more dominant that the mystical one. I seem to find that in (Vipassana) the mystical is all. It reaches out so heart-warmingly to the really Real and will not settle for anything less.
Does not the Christian tradition have the same thrust? I believe it does, but it does not seem to have a simple and clear-cut method like Vipassana. Whatever methods it had may have died with the monasteries.
Where I am at present in my spiritual journey, I feel hungry for the ineffable God of our humanity rather than the talked-about God of our theology and Sunday school.
Although I do not wish to be messianic, I often feel sad that I cannot interest all my fellow Christian in the mystical dimension of our common human thirst for the Beyond.
Father Loudes is a priest with a degree in psychology from Rome and a PHD from Loyola University of Chicago. A Catholic Priest on Vipassana, Sayagyi U Ba Khin Journal, 1991
