The Supreme Koan:
Cotter, James Finn
Straighten our crooked paths THE SUPREME KOAN CONFESSIONS ON A JOURNEY INWARD WITH TWO BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN MIRACLE PLAYS Frederick Franck Crossroad, $12.95, 183 pp. James Finn Cotter THE SUPREME...
...In fact, the easy appropriation of the title "Christian" is risky, anonymous or not, just as the facile donning of the name "Buddhist" is dangerous...
...More, it is a prophetic work, a call to straighten our crooked paths and turn inward...
...The Sleeping Child is waiting to be wakened, the nameless one waiting to be called, the Suffering one waiting to rejoice...
...Zen is the undoing of preconceived ideas of righteous power over others, of elitist, male-dominated, legalistic thought-control in the name of Christ, Buddha, Allah, or Yahweh...
...Like Pilgrimage to Now/ Here and Art as a Way it is personal, but also like The Zen of Seeing and The Awakened Eye it is instructive...
...It is about falling in love with Someone we meet nowhere and everywhere, who is and is not ourselves, who is what we want to be...
...James Finn Cotter THE SUPREME koan, according to Frederick Franck, is the riddle of being human, the question confronting each person who looks inward: Who am I? What is it to be human...
...In this final section, Franck distinguishes between faith as an act of trustful self-giving and belief as adherence to an established creed, and he challenges believers and non-believers alike to become truly faithful followers of a living Way that shines through the disasters and pretenses that obscure his presence today...
...The Supreme Koan is about this metanoia, a change of heart and discovery of the unseen in the ordinary events and encounters of life...
...Franck wants us to begin humbly all over again, with human beings sensing the mystery of inner evil and transcendent longing for goodness...
...How Franck came to this profound and simple seeing of Christ is told in the three sections of this book...
...Imagination, emotion, and reason all come to play (literally) in this moving appeal to the heart...
...Part Two presents the author's own modern versions of these plays, The Death and Life of Every One and Inquest on a Crucifixion...
...The reality is there in Christ and Buddha, but we had better beware of flaunting our faith - it may merely be belief...
...We have only our humanity in common, and that we share in the perfected Image of the Human, the revelation of the True Man, the Original Face, the Self, Christ Consciousness...
...The world has embraced Nihilism wholeheartedly, in images of greed and sex that float up from our television screens on a ''tidal wave of triviality,'' in our politics, business practices, and electronic evangelism, in the absurd worship of the past (as in the Oberammergau travesty that offers the Christian tourist an escape from the Crucified One in his own heart...
...Of all Franck's books - this is his sixteenth - I consider this to be his most important...
...Part One, "The Image Reaffirmed," is an autobiographical sketch of growing up in Holland, the only son of agnostic parents in a Catholic area, a loner secretly visiting a Romanesque church with its life-size crucifix and plaster Sacred Heart and watching the plays of Everyman and the Passion pageant at Eastertide...
...Part Three is an epilogue, "Reflections on Faith, Belief, and Nihilism...
...What is his humanity to me...
...This Christ is not a historical figure but the Risen One, or rather the Rising One who enlightens everyone in the world willing to see him face to face...
...Franck answers with another question: Who is Christ...
...In the Passion Play included here, the Wandering Jew exclaims: "Wherever my eye goes,/I see him rising from a million graves./I am not he,/ yet he and I,/we are not-two...
...What is the sound of one hand clapping...
Vol. 110 • September 1983 • No. 15
