The Buddha teaches detachment. Meanwhile, Saint John of the Cross illustrates the Ascent of Mount Carmel with a sketch bearing the words

nada nada nada y en el monte nada

“Nothing nothing nothing and on the mountain nothing.” He is saying that our own desires must die to be united to God; the desires die along the path, and they stay dead “on the mountain”.

For the Christian living in the world, this naturally raises two questions:

• Do Christians, with the Buddha, also believe in detachment?
• Are Christians living in the world asked to follow a way that kills their own desires and, in some way or to some perceptions, “alienates” them from themselves? Are Christians living in the world asked to pass by the road “nothing nothing nothing”?

The answer to the first question is easy. Detachment, in Christianity too, is a virtue. It’s a necessity. It’s Step One. In some measure, it comes even before contemplation. René Voillaume writes,

… a certain number of religious and also lay people have not yet discovered the appropriate asceticism for keeping, in the world, a mastery of self and thus the possibility of contemplation. I think we can define this necessary asceticism as the acquired aptitude to maintain such a psychological, nervous, and physical state that we can be spiritually attentive to the present moment… We become incapable of living in the present moment, because we… are not sufficiently detached… in a word, because we have lost control of our self.

Detachment means fortitude in the face of temptations and moderation of the use of goods; it means not giving in to our passions when our reason – or, possibly, a higher divine logic – suggests something is better. This is simply a question of trying to live a moral life. It’s not even a question of union with God. It’s just the laws of nature written on our hearts.

Christianity agrees with Buddhism: detachment is good, even if things are good.*

The second question is harder:

Are Christians living in the world asked to follow a way that kills their own desires and, in some way or to some perceptions, “alienates” them from themselves?

Is the way of the Christian outside the cloister also “nada nada nada y en el monte nada”?

I think yes, but I think it will necessarily manifest itself in the world differently than in Carmel or in Saint John of the Cross’ prison cell.

If one is withdrawn from the world by design or by circumstance, there are room, space, and time for a complete death to the sensory images that are normally provided by the world. In other words, it is probably more literally possible to kill our desires, even insofar as they are naturally elicited by stimuli.

Outside the cloister, these – shall we say – “luxuries” or “privileges” don’t exist. Being tossed this way and that by the waves of the world, up and down, over and under, we will always have images, sensations, and desires pound on us. I really mean it: they pound, they push, they shove, they not not stop. Does God still want us to die to our desires?

John’s constant teaching is that God will strip us of that which is not proportionate to God. What does this mean for the Christian living in the world?

• Works can be proportionate to God – but only if they are immediately inspired by the Holy Spirit through the virtues and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit (predominantly the active Gifts of Counsel, Fortitude, Piety, and Fear of the Lord).
• Thinking can be proportionate to God – but only if it follows the same logic as works, but with the contemplative Gifts (Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge).
• Actual desires guiding our lives, a crippling dependence on images or imagination or our senses, anything less than detachment – no, God will not have that. Our imagination and our senses are fundamentally good; but attachment to them? Nope!
• What will God fill us with when our desires are “empty” or we have learned to ignore them in themselves and as ends in themselves? Only himself. Just himself. God takes away our desires and, if necessary to give us something better, alienates us from even some of the good in us, just to create more space for himself.
• The time during which we are stripped of these desires can be like a “dark night”. But it’s not Saint John’s “typical” contemplative-cloistered dark night. It can be a dark night of the soul lived outside the cloister. (I’ve tried to offer some thoughts on that elsewhere, however sketchy they may be.)
• The times after dark nights, when we still remain united to God through an overriding divine love that weathers life’s emotional and physical ups and down, are also not necessarily typical of Carmel or Saint John’s prison cell. But they are still or still can be a union “on the mountain”. And on the mountain, we are dead to ourselves still.

That’s Christianity. That’s the demand made on us all, whether we will be contemplatives in the cloister, contemplatives on the road, actives, or active-contemplatives – wherever the Spirit leads by his Gifts and promptings.

Is Christianity easy?

No, because it demands everything. Even some of the good in us, God may kill it just to make us his. God is jealous: the Ten Commandments do not lie.

But yes, it is easy, too, once we let go through the dark nights and just follow him. It is a Cross. There are many Crosses. The night is dark. The mountain may be humanly lonely. To be alienated from ourselves is really a loss. But the Gospel also tells us that Jesus’ own “yoke is easy”, and his “burden is light” (Mt 11:30). Wherever the loss exists, it exists to bring about a far greater good.

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* We didn’t seriously think that Christianity asks less of us than Buddhism, did we? Think about it. Jesus suggested that our righteousness has to surpass the righteousness taught by the scribes and the Pharisees (Mt 5:20). We’re demanded to do better than any and all good counsels that haven’t got as far as explicitly bringing us to Jesus himself – even counsels taught based on the Word of God. That’s not to say the Pharisees or Buddhists are necessarily worse sinners. It just means that their – and our – actions must go beyond the limited scope of their – or our – taught words.