Rediscovering the Divine: My Spiritual Journey __ Teresa Yu
[Note: We are happy to share this article from Teresa Yu with our readers. She is sister of John余蔚廷 ('65), Marcus余蔚文 and Louis余蔚琪 (both '67). She had taught both at Smith College and Simon Fraser University.]
When I was five years old, my mother had me baptized as a Catholic. Mother had become a Catholic earlier mostly for sentimental reasons. During WWII, China was under the grip of the Japanese. My mother was away from home. Along with other College and Senior high school students, she was serving as a youth volunteer as part of the war effort against the Japanese. She learned after the war that her family and many of the people in her hometown were saved from Japanese looting, raping, and plundering because of the courage of an Italian Catholic priest. The local Catholic parish was used as a sanctuary for many people in the town during that period. After the communist occupation of China the same priest fled to Hong Kong. My parents had gone to Hong Kong as well. Mother went to visit the priest and eventually became baptized herself. As a child, I remember going to some cathedral with my mother and my brother John to visit this kind elderly man. He would pat my head, give me a big apple, and ask me questions in his broken Cantonese. Another time we went to see him, he gave us children a bunch of Italian stamps and a few dried Edelweiss flowers from the Alps which he said his family had sent him from home. He eventually left Hong Kong and returned to Italy, so that he could die in his native home with family by his side, mother said. But his kind face and his gentle smile had left a deep impression on me. For a while as a child, whenever I prayed to God, the smiling face of this kind priest would appear, looking down at me.
Church-going was also a fascination for me as a young child. The magnificent setting, the solemn and sacred atmosphere, the elaborate rituals, the beautiful choir music and heavenly Gregorian chants---all these I marvelled at and soaked in every time I was in church. My young heart and soul felt a deep sense of awe and reverence, a powerful humbling feeling for all things sacred, a feeling that I so long to recover and to relive these days. I learned to say the standard prayers. I had no idea what they meant as they were couched in a high-flown Classical Chinese that sounded totally foreign to a little girl. Partly because of this, the prayers had a mysterious, hypnotic power to them, and I was drawn to them nonetheless. At eight, I started going to a school run by an order of nuns. That was when my religious education formally began.
That was also when my idea of God began to change. In our weekly bible lessons, we were told stories of original sin, of hell, and what it was like in graphic detail. Satan, we were told, was constantly hovering on the left side of our shoulder. A guardian angel would stay close on our right side, protecting us from falling into Satan’s traps. We were the constant battleground between Good and Evil, between God and Satan. When we did not behave perfectly, God would be there keeping count. Not going to church on a Sunday, or eating meat on a Friday constituted a major sin, so was taking Holy Communion without skipping breakfast, or without confessing your sins beforehand. Having unkind or selfish thoughts constituted a minor sin. When you lied to somebody, your words would come out like ugly toads and tongues of fire, those who were discerning could see them. Of course, if you were not a Christian in the first place, you would be considered a pagan, and forever excluded from salvation or the grace of God Himself. We never read the Bible in school, but we were taught the catechism, Catholic doctrines and rules. We picked up biblical stories here and there second hand, retold by the nuns and sometimes by priests in church sermons. Most of them were from the Old Testament. Until I was much older and started to read and examine the Bible on my ownafter being a disillusioned and lapsed Catholic for years, I had missed the true essence of Christianity and the teaching of Christ. Still. I could not reconcile my image of God with the all-compassionate and redeeming Christ. My childhood image of a personal god who was vengeful, judging and unforgiving continued to haunt me. My religious experience in school did not help to change this impression. Church-going became a duty, a habit and a way to lighten the already heavy burden of guilt and sin. When my experience with the Church and with God became mainly one of doctrines, rules, and rhetoric, when the inner orientation of that relationship started to wear thin, even the sacrament lost its magic on me. This, together with stories of abuse and unsavory practices within the Church, and a knowledge of church history through the centuries, further alienated me from Catholicism and the idea of institutionalized religion itself.
But my religious experience was more complicated than that. As a Chinese growing up in Hong Kong, I was not brought up too traditionally. Still, ideas about ancestral spirits, ghosts, karma, retribution, the transmigration of souls and other spectres from folk religion all found a place in my rich and complex psyche. Chinese folk religion is an amalgamation of vulgarized and popularized Buddhism, Daoist religion and Chinese ancestral worship. Even though my family never practised Chinese folk religion when I was growing up, its ideas and images permeated our oral and folk literature, our folk art as well as popular culture. To my young mind, most creatures from the numinous realm were vengeful and capricious. They were a source of fear, not solace for me. For a long time as a child and even in my teenage years, I was afraid of the dark, and had to sleep with my feet fully covered, even in the summer.
I went to a public school for my high school education. All through my mid to late teens, twenties, and beyond, I rarely went back to church again. Very occasionally, I would go with my mother to an Easter Sunday or a Mid-night Mass. Each time I was in church, I would feel uneasy and guilty for having stayed away. I could not feel the presence of God. Nevertheless, I told myself it was probably because I had fallen out of grace, that it was a matter of time before God would punish me for my truancy. I met friends later who were devout Christians from various Protestant denominations. Most of them tried, one way or another, to bring me to their fellowships and church services. I would usually go with them but would feel rather empty afterwards. Worse still, I felt that there was pressure for me to declare in front of everyone that I was a sinner, that if I did not repent and submit myself before God it was because I was beyond redemption, that there was something wrong with me. I also felt that most evangelical church goers tended to form very tight-knit and exclusive groups. Few of them had much tolerance for other religions or other forms of spiritual worship. The God they conceived of was both wrathful and unforgiving.
And so for years I hovered in a realm vaguely inhabited by capricious ghosts, ancestral spirits and a judging, vengeful God. I was also torn between belief and disbelief. The secularism of a rational scientific culture played its part in undermining my already shaken faith. Nevertheless, I wanted to believe, to surrender myself to a transcendent being, to be part of something larger than myself. As I grew older, I began to suspect that scientific reasoning might not be the answer to everything, that it was only one approach to Truth. I also wanted to believe deep in my being that there was something beyond our material and mortal self, that it was not the be-all-and-end-all of cosmic existence. The universe remained totally mysterious and enigmatic to me. How could we, as sentient beings, be born with our heightened sense of consciousness and sensitivity, our profound longing for love, connection and meaning, make sense of a cosmos that is mechanistic, unfeeling, and totally unresponsive? Still, all these years, my experience with the Church had not satisfied my persistent yearning for that ultimate connection with the Divine. In my mid-thirties, I started reading on and off on various world religions, dabbling in Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism and Daoism, even a little Judaism and Islam, but my understanding of these faiths and spiritual traditions remained largely intellectual. It enlarged the vista of my religious knowledge and paved a way for my future spiritual development. At the time, however, it did little to transform my inner world.
Then came the illness. The initial years when I battled with chronic fatigue syndrome and depression were the most difficult and painful period of my life. At times, my conditions were so severe that I was bed-bound for weeks and months on end. Suddenly, not only did my body seem to be totally alien to me, but all those things that made up my world began to collapse around me. I was stripped of all the usual frameworks that people build their identities on. I could no longer go to work every day. I gradually lost touch with many friends as I had no energy to socialize or to simply chat with them over the phone. I was not even able to function on my own, depending largely on my husband and my helper for my daily meals and needs and my occasional transportation to the doctors. In other words, I was simply existing, but hardly living. All of a sudden, I did not have just a medical problem, but existential ones as well. And I had all the time in the world to dwell upon them.
I asked myself many questions: What is the meaning of my existence, given my suffering? First of all, why do I have to suffer so much? Why me? Did I do anything wrong? Was it a lack of awareness, self-knowledge, intuition and foresight that had contributed to my plight? Or was I partly the victim of a series of bad luck and sheer randomness? I knew I got sick because of a number of factors and events, but many of those factors seemed totally beyond my control. When I started to look around me, to see human life in a larger context, I realized that suffering is actually an essential part of our human condition. People die every day from sheer bad luck, from car accidents, earthquakes and tsunamis. They happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Daode Jing （道德經）says, “Heaven and Earth are unfeeling, they treat the myriad beings as straw dogs.” How do we make sense of the disconnection between us and a random, mechanical and seemingly unfeeling universe? Then there are those atrocities and afflictions, wars, genocides, murders, tortures, discriminations and billions other acts of unkindness we inflict on one another that haunt us every day. They are the result of human cruelty, ignorance and violence. Why is it that we, as a species, could not live in harmony with one another, with Nature at large? Why are most of us at odds with ourselves, uncomfortable in our own skin, and rarely satisfied with what we have?
Besides, even when things are largely going right for certain individuals and they seem to be peaceful, satisfied and constantly riding high on their luck, it is all just a matter of time. We could not, as humans, escape or reconcile with the ultimate realities of life: that of aging, sickness, and death. In that sense, I think that the Buddhists are right. Even birth itself is a form of suffering. We suffer simply because we are. To be born is to be given consciousness, to have to deal with the needs and cravings of our senses. Increasingly, I have come to the conclusion that the will to live, our instinct to survive and to perpetuate this physical body of ours is the source of all our suffering. It is why we developed an ego, so that each of us could distinguish clearly what is one’s own self and what is “other”, all for the purpose of survival and self-preservation. It is also what generates all our fears, insecurities and other internal demons. It is the reason behind all forms of power-play, violence and wars.
But why are we wired that way? I was curious about where we came from as a species and how we came to be the way we are. According to scientists and archaeologists, there was apparently no life on earth over 3.7 billion years ago. Our planet was then an extremely hot and uninhabitable place. There were many foreign objects---comets, meteorites, asteroids---and large pieces of debris bombarding the surface of Earth from outer space. Sometime between 3.7 to 3.9 billion years ago, the basic building blocks of organic matter and life---carbon and nitrogen---began to appear on Earth. They had probably come to our planet earlier along with those fallen foreign objects from outer space. Also around this time, microbes, bacteria, and other one-cell organisms began to appear on the globe. At first, they could only survive underground or in the ocean. Gradually, as bombardment from outer space ceased and our planet cooled off after a long period of inactivity, these organisms began to come to the surface of the earth to live. They formed cultures on the surface of rocks and started to draw energy from the sun through photosynthesis, giving oxygen as a by-product. Over time, a biosphere was created. An ozone layer developed which protected the earth from over exposure to ultra-violet light from the sun. In time plants started to appear and single-cell life-forms began to proliferate and evolve to form other life forms. The first corals appeared, the first fish, then insects, amphibians, reptiles, the first dinosaurs, birds, and mammals. Apparently, for the most part of the earth’s history, there was no visible life on earth. We humans, along with other animals, have only been around for the last 10% of the entire history of the earth.
What was significant in the course of evolution, however, was the emergence of consciousness which became increasingly heightened in the development of the human species. We generally believe that humans alone have consciousness, while other living organisms on the planet have only instincts and sense perceptions. Increasingly, I have come to believe that we are all made not only of matter, but also of spirit, including all living as well as non-living things on earth. Quantum physics tells us now that sub-atomic particles, the stuff that we and everything in the world are made of, are both matter and energy, that the two are in fact one. Since the dawn of their civilization, the Chinese have also believed that qi (氣)---understood as a primeval energy, the stuff that makes up mountains, trees, animals, humans and all other living and non-living things on earth---is both matter and spirit. They also believe that all things are simply unique manifestations of qi in various yin (陰) and yang (陽）compositions. Because qi is in everything, so along with matter, spirit is in everything. Indeed, I am inclined to believe that spirit, or some form of consciousness, is in everything, but in vastly different degrees. The Chinese believe, for example, that a piece of jade is a stone made up of qi in its most rarefied form. For that matter, humans are also born with various compositions of qi; hence the difference in individual temperament, endowment, and sensitivity. The Chinese call this unique individual quality qizhi (氣質). What is significant in all of this, however, is the fact that we are all made of the same stuff which is, and has always been in a continued state of becoming and transforming (in its various compositions). The whole world is, therefore, in a constant flux. We know from experience that this is true, that we are changing every day, that things are changing around us as well, every moment and every day. But we are not aware of the fact that, at the same time, a changelessness underlies everything, that nothing ever dies. As the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn describes it, our individual lives are like the ripples and waves in the ocean. We are so used to identifying ourselves as the waves, forgetting that we are ultimately water, indestructible and connected, a part of the larger whole that is the vast ocean. If we could just touch our true nature, the nature of water, we would then be able to free ourselves from the fixation on our physical body. After all, our individual bodies are just like the waves, constantly changing. The Gospel of Matthew says something similar. “He (God) gave the spirit to the world, and the spirit itself lives in men, and men who live by the spirit make up the kingdom of God. For the spirit there is neither death nor evil. Death and evil are for the flesh, but not for the spirit.” The spirit is everlasting, only the physical body changes, and dies.
Through tens of thousands of years of human evolution, however, we have been hard-wired for the sake of survival, to identify ourselves with our body, and not our spirit. Because of this, we will always be trapped in the dimensions of space and time, and what the Daoists recognize as the pairs of opposites---of being and non-being, life and death, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, and all the other polarities that bind our faculties to hope and fear, driving us to constant deeds of defence and acquisition. Yet deep down inside, we seem to feel that something is amiss. Somehow, we long to transcend ourselves, to connect to something larger than we are. The older we grow, the more aware we are of the finitude of life, and the futility and suffering brought on by a life lived in polarities. We would like to stop the perpetual striving, to dwell more in harmony and peace. Is there any way, however, that we could get out of this, individually and collectively? The more I examine our major world religions---Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, Confucianism and Daoism---the more I see a common core in their teachings. Whether it refers to a personal god, or an impersonal primeval principle such as brahman, dao （道）or what Plato calls anima mundi (the world soul), we are all conscious of ourselves being derived from a source which is both transcendent, divine, and infinite. This is not only because we all yearn for this instinctively as a spiritual home but also, in very rare moments of our lives, we do have glimpses of it. Reports of near-death experiences often describe moments of illumination and bliss. When we are caught in a moment of rapture when we gaze at a beautiful sunset, or feel a communion with Nature itself, we come close to having a mystical experience, or epiphany, of being at one with this source. For a brief moment, our ego is crushed, and there is no boundary between us and the rest of the world, This is a state that the Daoists would describe as wuwo liangwang (物我兩忘). The subject-object dichotomy is broken down in a moment of fusion and we feel a deep sense of wellness, harmony and joy.
Much like the blind men who call the elephant by the different parts of the body they have touched, people from different cultures and wisdom traditions call this infinite and transcendent source they have experienced by different names. There is no need for us to fight one another over just a name. Instead, we should honor one another’s religious tradition and consider each a unique expression coming from an inner aspiration to the same transcendent source. And how could we align ourselves with this ultimate reality without having to die to it? How could we tap this timeless bliss in the here and now, in our very physicality?
We do so by nurturing “the kingdom of heaven” that is within us. One of the main problems of many institutionalized religions is the mistaken notion that if you believe certain doctrines to be true then you are saved. This tendency to emphasize doctrinal belief over practice is the major cause of many religious wars and violence born out of religious strife. But faith should really be about practice, not just belief. I would say that one should only be considered a Christian not because one believes in the Trinity, or that Christ died on the cross for us, but rather, that one tries to walk the path of Christ. This means living one’s life according to the example of Christ. How you live your life should be the key to salvation, not whether you go to church every Sunday, or whether you believe in the resurrection of Christ. This should be true of all other religions, especially those that believe in devotional worship. Ultimately, life remains a mystery. We will never know for sure what happens to our individual spirit beyond life, whether there is a Heaven or Nirvana out there. But Heaven or Nirvana can be found in the here and now, in the timeless, eternal present of a life well-lived. This means a life lived according to the essential teachings of most major religions in the world: a life emphasizing the spirit rather than the flesh, a life of humility, love, compassion and material simplicity. Almost all religions encourage their followers to live a life without greed, cravings, and aggressions. They teach different versions of a golden rule (“to not do unto others what you don’t want others to do unto you”) which emphasizes empathy. Since virtue quells the self-centred ego, living a virtuous life which undermines the ego takes us beyond all pairs of opposites, bringing us closer to the state of blissful transcendence. In living this way, we are constantly reminding ourselves of the ultimate reality that we are not separate and isolated beings but part of a larger whole. Mencius, for example, believes that all humans are born innately good, each with the seed of compassion in his or her heart. It is only because of negative influences later in life that a person begins to lose touch with his innate goodness. He illustrates this with the example of a man seeing a young infant about to fall into a well. Having no connection with the infant, and without thinking about it, he would at once jump to the rescue and pull the child back to safety. Schopenhauer, the 19th century philosopher, goes even further to say that, time and again, during critical but unreflective moments, an individual’s immediate response to save a stranger’s life at the risk of sacrificing his own is something even more deeply instinctual than his will to live. This, he suggests, is an indication that deep down in our unconscious memory, we know that we are not separate individuals but connected beings, all parts of something larger than ourselves. If there is ever an eternal truth, it is that we are ultimately one, that we gravitate toward wholeness, not separateness. This is the underlying cosmic code. It is written in all of us.
Even though we must guard against an over-attachment to our bodies while neglecting our spirit, the body is, nevertheless, our only portal to the soul. We need to honor our bodies and observe them closely. When we feel loved, or frequently engage in acts of loving-kindness, our bodies would, more often than not, feel better, and our immunity to illnesses would also improve.
When we are always anxious, fearful, isolated, or when we feel angry, jealous and hateful, our bodies would also sense the conflicts and constrictions that these thoughts and emotions engender. Any thoughts and emotions that separate us from those around us are likely to manifest themselves negatively in our bodies over time, and the opposite seems to be true with thoughts of connectedness and oneness. Whatever mysterious connections there are between our mind, body and soul, I am convinced and intuitively feel that they are all ultimately connected to the universal soul or transcendent source that we are all part of. If we live contrary to this truth, our individual beings suffer as a consequence.
Other than religious practice in the most universal sense, I find that engaging in the world of arts---music, literature (especially poetry), dance and other art forms---also brings me closer to that blissful state. Perhaps because when we are seized by something beautiful and sublime, our egoistic instinct to constantly prance, preen or draw attention to ourselves is momentarily crushed and we are in a state of ecstasy (ekstasis, meaning simply “standing outside” in Greek). Even the act of reading a novel takes us away from ourselves, for the time being living vicariously other lives, empathizing with other people’s situations. A number of artists have described the creative and artistic experience as something nearly spiritual. I once had a rare personal experience while listening to the Largo Movement of the New World Symphony at the beginning of my illness. It was a moment of deep, deep peace, an overwhelming feeling of wellness, bordering joy. This moment of epiphany was brief. It came suddenly, and was gone in a short time. But it gave me a glimpse of what it must be like to have a mystical experience, and to live a more spiritual life.
There are, indeed, various approaches to God. Whether it is through devotional prayers, meditation or service to others, as well as the transformational experience of art, as long as one continues to practise the emptying of one’s ego, one is on the right path to a life of freedom and spiritual growth. To live in the world and yet not of the world, to care and yet not to care, to live a life of compassion and grace, and to dwell in the lightness of one’s own being---that is the life I want to pursue. And if this is the life that we all try to live, the world would be an infinitely better place to live in for all of us.