RE: "The Way of the Pilgrim"
Baader, Cecilia (cbaader@casecorp.com)
Thu, 21 Oct 1999 01:25:17 -0500
D.,
You address something that I've been thinking about extensively recently,
and that is the "breadth of mysticism in Christianity," something a little
more accessible to young Franny perhaps than the Buddha-truths.
This surprising mysticism as you say, along with other parallels in nearly
every religion in the world, is something that I'm interested in exploring.
The more that I see these universal "truths" appear in not only my own
faith, but also through the Vedas or completely isolated African tribal
religions, the more I believe in them.
Let's take the ideas behind the Jesus prayer, for instance. First we have
this Christian mysticism where the prayer of the heart brings Jesus into
every thought, every breath, every heartbeat, because the prayer becomes
internalized and everything is God. Only then do we meet God. Then we have
Buddhist meditation, where enlightenment comes only through the complete
knowing of self. Then the Hindu Vedas teach that God reveals himself to the
pure soul, and the pure soul is attained through the Advaita (unity)of the
soul with the body, through the practice of meditation, or Raja Yoga. (I'm
by no means an expert in any of these faiths, so if I'm at all wrong, I urge
someone to correct me.)
Joseph Campbell talks about this quite a bit in the Power of Myth, this
universality in faith, the same stories arising again and again in the
collective subconscious of the separate societies in the world. So by
having Franny concentrate on a Christian practice instead of any Eastern
method of meditation, wouldn't Salinger be "tricking" his audience a bit,
forcing his point home by using this universal thought that just happens to
be rooted in the Christian faith?
Hmmm...
Regards,
Cecilia.
(Oh, and by the way, I left my little typo in the original message because
it's been bugging be ever since I sent it out and I caught it...
bibliographic information, not biographic. Here I am, a stickler for
everyone else's language, and I mess up my own. My only excuse is that I
was working on the biography of Woolf for a presentation that I needed to
make, and I'm an idiot. That's all.)
> -----Original Message-----
> Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 11:14:59 -0700
> From: "MacLaughlan, D" <DMAC@mail.law.ucla.edu>
> To: "'bananafish@lists.nyu.edu'" <bananafish@lists.nyu.edu>
> Subject: RE: "The Way of the Pilgrim"
> Cecilia Baader wrote:
<snip> Here's the biographical
> >information:
> >Savin, Olga, Trans. _The Way of a Pilgrim_.
D. MacLaughlan wrote:
[Again, edited for brevity, though I appreciated every word...]
> Perhaps this has been mentioned before, but searching for
> "Philocalia" (or "Philokalia") instead of "The Way of the
> Pilgrim" will result in two different books. One is the Greek work later
> translated into Slavonic and Russian, written by Athonite monks in the
eighteenth
> century; it promotes the practices of the Hesychasts, who believed that
> mystical, repetitive prayer, renunciation and devotion
> would result in union with God, usually wordless, accompanied by an
> inexplicable light (one thinks of the speed and brilliance of Jean de
Daumier-Smith's
> experience as well). This is Franny's treasured tome. ...
> What amazed me about all this was the breadth of mysticism in
> Christianity---a mysticism that seems reasonably akin to the
> eastern varieties that constituted Buddy's and Seymour's extensive
> reading (if Seymour knew that actors should travel lightly, it makes
> me wonder why he didn't just assign hesichastic writings to Franny
> and Zooey and dispense with the weighty Buddha-truths)...
> Regards,
> D. MacLaughlan