on buddha and christ

I was talking with friend. She was raised Catholic, then became a Buddhist for 10 years, and is looking a being Catholic again. Though, in reality, she realized she never stopped being Catholic even when she was a Buddhist. A fellow Buddhist even commented to her once, "You practice Buddhism, but you think like a Catholic."

She realized that Buddhism is often about the self, while Catholicism is about the relationships and the community. Though in the end they both emphasize how the individual is part of the whole, they just come from two different angles. One starting with self, the other starting with community and both attempting to reach a similar place.

We talked about how the countries that Buddhism is most popular in are countries and cultures where most people grow up always thinking about their relationships and communities: the communities, families come first to the self. So it makes sense that Buddhism gets people to think of themselves more.

But in the US community churches are the predominant religion, getting people to think about participating in a community, creating a community, because Americans grow up always thinking about the invididual.

She mentioned how it made sense that Buddhism would be embraced by Americans as we are always thinking about ourselves anyway. Though she did find a few Buddhist communities to participate in. She also found Buddhist circles that were not quite along the lines of "what would Buddha do?" like creating a hierarchical structure of spirituality and creating classes to achieve in that strucutre. She said they had made Buddhism in a Christian model, which in the end, makes it more Christian than Buddhist.

Goes to show, people can tweak religion in many different ways. And how sometimes though we think we've left the religion we were raised in, it's really that it's so ingrained that it never left us.

Religion and spirituality seems to be about getting us to think beyond who we are, but we can also use it to remain where we are. And like most things it's not so much that one religion is good and another is bad, it's about how we set up the structure and how we let that structure shape us sometimes for good, sometimes for bad.

In the end, I'm reminded of what my high school history teacher told me before I got married, after feeling mixed about returning to the Catholic church. She said, "I'm a member of this church. This is my church." The church is not one thing, its an institution, and organization that is shaped by its members. I as a member have an ability to shape the church as much as it shapes me.

Tomorrow we become Godparents to the hubby's twin nieces. We will promise to help raise and guide them in their spiritual lives, presumably Catholic. In the end it's another rite and ritual to bind our families together, to committ to one another, to create our community.