When God and Zen Come Together

I was raised with God in the house

September 2026.

My father came from a strong Christian family, a mission background, with a vicar among them. His parents were mission people, and the world they handed him was a particular one. You are born a sinner. He did his best to pass on what he had been given. He read the Bible to me, the Old Testament and the New, many times over, and he took me to church. It made a deep impression on me.

But I could not connect with the way he practiced it. It came to me as guilt, and as shame. Something above you that you go under, harsh and dominating. I never took a stand against God, I never argued with it, I just did not want to go that way. It felt superficial to me, so I left it alone.

Then I grew up, and I went into life very unsure of myself, taking whatever was in front of me.

The years of falling apart

In the middle of my first marriage I could not keep going.

By any ordinary measure my life was successful. That was the problem. I could not believe that this was all it was, my own life for my own sake. There had to be more. The question took hold of me and would not let go, and for a couple of years it tore me apart. I divorced. I left my job. I was looking for the end of the world. There were times I did not know how I could go on at all.

And then one day my mind fell away.

I saw for the first time, I heard for the first time, I felt for the first time. Free. Everything was simply there, and I knew that I was there, and that I was all of it. I knew I had come into this life to live for the sake of the whole, and not only for myself.

That changed everything. I went and lived with others who were practicing.

The one thing I would say about it now is that openings like that come down again. They do. There I was afterwards with the same conditions I had before, the same self, the same difficulties. What was different was that I now knew what I was here for.

Where I am now

Many years later I am a woman in her sixties, and my path has brought me to a solitary coastal town where there are not many people and not much going on.

I thought I knew what life was about. I thought I knew who I was. All of it has fallen apart. I do not know what life is about, and I do not know who I am, and that is fine. I am at peace with that.

And still there are the hard times. The loneliness gets very strong and I cannot be with it. I feel the suffering of the world and I am powerless in front of it, and I do not know what to do with that. There are days when I cannot see what the next step could be.

Faith as a state of mind

It is in exactly those places that I have come to understand faith differently than I did as a child.

Faith is a state of mind. It is putting the mind to rest. Not searching, not knowing, not looking anywhere else. In Zen, this is not faith in something. It is a real  experience realizing everything is perfect as it is. Even if it hurts and doesn’t go the way you wanted it. It is trust in the Way when I cannot see the way, and trust that this life, exactly as it is, is not outside this moment.

In real distress, it is the most powerful thing available. It is a deep surrender to faith: all ideas or wishes to know or see things to be any other way than they are dissolve. The nervous system settles, the body eases, and then you take the next step, and the next step, and the next step.

A woman lived in this house before me. She was a strong Christian and the house is still lit by her life here. She lived here many years with her husband, who died before her, and she grew very old, and she was happy. She was one with God, they said. That is a state of mind too. Complete surrender and relaxation, knowing that whatever happens is all right, that it is God’s will.

There are times, in the real not knowing, when there is no solution and nothing to do but give in and let go and put the mind to rest. And in those moments I want to bow. I bow, and I bow, and I bow down to the higher will, without knowing what that is. That is faith. It is entering a state of mind that just knows without knowing that everything is perfect as it is.

In my Zen line, I bow to the Buddha and the ancestors, who lived in that same deep faith. Faith in awakening. Faith in practice. Faith that this very life is the Way.

We say in Zen that not knowing is most intimate.

That is where the two come together for me. In Christianity it is surrendering to God’s will. In Zen it is letting go of the need to know and control. They are not the same, but for me they meet in the bow.

Not the God I was handed, who wanted me on the floor. This is a bowing that comes from underneath, out of genuine not knowing, with nobody making me do it. It opens the heart. It relaxes the body and the nervous system. It puts the mind to rest.

It is raining hard today. I have been alone a long time. And it is deeply meaningful.

Amen.