A retreat with a Zen Buddhist master deepened a married couple's own Catholic faith and understanding of 'mindfulness'.
When Tong saw an advertisement for a retreat reading, "Happiness is here and now!" he was attracted to it immediately and as a result he and his wife, Christina, booked in for the experience, along with 1,400 other people. The retreat would be lead by Buddhist meditation master, Thich Nhat Hanh at the YMCA Youth Camp in Wu Kai Sha, Hong Kong.
"We are used to doing several things at once, in our lives in Hong Kong," Louis Tong said, adding "that often we are thinking about what we will do next. We attend Mass, but our minds are wondering about something else. Sometimes it is deliberate, sometimes unintentional, but either way, we are not mindful about what is going on. We are distracted. We are not present to the here and now."
At the retreat, Thich Nhat Hanh was introduced as one of today’s most influential Zen masters and a rare combination of poet, scholar and peace advocate, explaining that he had been exiled by his own government for campaigning against the Vietnam War.
Thich Nhat Hanh has established a Buddhist community in France, called Plum Village to promote the art of what he terms 'mindful living'. "I found his method practical and easy to understand," Tong explained, adding that he also spoke about being conscious and 'mindful' of what we are doing all the time, whether meditating while eating, sitting, walking or, what he called 'reconciliation', which he explained as, 'touching the earth'.
The retreat has helped Tong raise his own awareness and respect for life. "Everything we did made us focus on that very moment. Each practice trained the mind to handle one thing wholeheartedly, mindfully, while focusing our concentration through being conscious of breath".
Tong's experience at the retreat prompted him to reflect on the Lord’s Prayer. We pray, Your kingdom come, as Jesus taught us. "But what is the kingdom on earth? How do we realise it?", he asked himself.
Tong notes down his thoughts: "We can recognise it when we receive communion, believing the feeling that God is in us and we are in God, and we are in communion with the community, as Jesus taught us and St John recorded in Chapter 17 of his Gospel. But how do we maintain this consciousness when we leave the Church and go back to our busy daily lives?".
Tong's experience at the retreat with Zen master, Thich has helped him find a practical and concrete way of 'mindfulness'. "I found mindfulness in meditation," he explained. "The focus is on the slow breathing in and breathing out. Gradually the mind quiets down, emptying itself to complete purification and opening it to our true nature, which is above the level of existence or non-existence."
Tong compares this experience with what we read in Psalm 46:10: Be still and hear that I am God. "God is so close to us in the silence and the stillness of our meditation, so much so, that we can hear him speaking to our hearts," Tong explains.
Tong believes that it is the search for this type of recognition of God that tempted so many Christian people to the retreat run by the Buddhist meditation master.
Fr Jim Mulroney SSC is a Columban Priest and the Editor of 'The Sunday Examiner' which is the English language paper of the Hong Kong diocese.