Kindle Notes & Highlights
Trappist monk Thomas Merton says that comparing Zen and Christianity is like comparing tennis and mathematics. I think Zen and Christianity are more comparable than that (and Merton probably does too, since he says this in Zen and the Birds of Appetite, which is full of comparisons of the two traditions), but I would say that practicing Zen as a Christian is like playing tennis as a mathematician. If you’re a mathematician and you want to play tennis, you just keep on being a mathematician and you also play tennis. There’s no special trick to it.
Brian noticed that I and my friends Laurie and Jennifer, who also became Catholic as adults, entered the church already disgruntled about certain things. As he says, we got baptized and five minutes later said, “Okay, I’ve had it with this!” He finds this amusing and wonders if it’s a new phenomenon in Christianity.
