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Perhaps there is a wispy, but very real, difference between "taking things seriously" and "being serious." In the former instance, there is a distance from the subject matter. In the latter, you're just hip deep in the Big Muddy... and there is effort.
The line is blurred by the social convention of allowing others to be proclaimed serious because they are voluble in their praise or blame. If someone is loud enough or horrified enough or talkative enough, they are called "serious." And perhaps they become convinced that they are, in fact, serious ... because others acknowledge them and they therefore acknowledge themselves ... as serious. But is it so? I wonder.
Yesterday, a fellow who had planned to come to the zendo on Sunday but was deterred by the early snowstorm that knocked out power in the region called back to apologize for not showing up as planned. A retired psychologist at 78, I enjoyed talking to him on the phone. He was prepared to step across the line from intellectual puttering in Zen to finding out up-close-and-personal what, specifically, anyone might do in order to practice Zen. His tone on the phone made me like him. He wasn't fawning. He wasn't solemn in hopes that someone might take him seriously. We just talked like a couple of human beings on the phone. And I took him seriously.
But he also made me think of the old Zen saying, "the hard stuff is easy; the easy stuff is hard." There we were talking on the phone and there were any number of paradoxical or poetic or whimsical thorns I might have put in his path. Zen is full of such stuff, just as any spiritual persuasion might be ... stuff to confound the student into reflection and perhaps an awe that would draw them forward. The hard stuff.
But our conversation was easy... just a couple of guys talking. And that very easiness, that very ordinariness ... well, who is confounded and serious about what is ordinary. It's hard to be serious about laughter because laughter is so easy. No one thinks twice ... they just laugh.
I am too old to make things complicated and sometimes I think it is unkind -- really too steep a curve for the people who take things seriously. How much kinder to take things seriously and provide the handholds for a newcomer -- as if the newcomer knew less and the instructor knew more. One of the nicest stories I know about serious Zen students is one I would print out here in full, but it would make this entry too long. So instead, here's the link: Stingy in Teaching, the tale of a teacher who recognizes he has been 'too strict' by talking in ordinary language to a would-be student. So the teacher backs up ... and gives the student a nice formal koan -- something hard -- to work on.
I guess that underlying all the jibber-jabber of this post is the idea that people choose to be serious about whatever they choose to be serious about. It doesn't much matter what the topic is as long as they are serious and don't simply take the subject seriously. It's a horror of sorts and a social apostasy of sorts to recognize that the responsibility lies squarely on the shoulders of the one who chooses. It's cozier to choose a topic that others take seriously as well, to be surrounded by loved ones and to be loved for taking things seriously.
It's easy to take it seriously when a soldier goes on trial for, among other things, chopping off the fingers of his Afghan victims and keeping them for souvenirs. It is gut-wrenching to imagine our sons and daughters doing precisely the same thing because that's what war has the capability of doing to any man or woman. We say, "I'd never do that." But of course the capacity for doing precisely that is inherent in all of us... just as the capacity for chopping off a 'sorcerer's' head cannot be papered over with holy nostrums... or held at a convenient distance when there is video to confirm the event.
Talking on the phone with the man who called made me remember all the really hard stuff in Zen practice -- the legs the burned like fire, the silence that threatened somehow to drive me mad as wave after wave of oily remembrance lapped at my snow-white beaches, the confusing and sometimes infuriating encouragements, the sense of being utterly stymied and in awe and adoring of things that seemed to be just out of reach ... the things I took seriously.
There is something to be said for pointing "over there" in order to see what is "right here." And I imagine everyone has a bout of "taking things seriously" before they consent to "serious up," to choose whatever it is they choose, acknowledge responsibility for that choice, and then dig in. Zen practice is a format I chose. I don't regret it, but as Shunryu Suzuki once pointed out, "It's serious, but it's not that serious." It's serious because I take myself seriously.
But the question arises, how long can you play that game before it wears out its welcome? Pretty damned long is the answer for some ... perhaps a whole lifetime. But for others, it doesn't quite wash: What's the matter with a door knob or a plate of spaghetti or a goodnight kiss or a time of tears? What's the matter with the easy stuff? "Easy" is what anyone might wish for -- peace is "easy," right? -- but when offered the easy stuff, there is a tendency to overlook it or not consider it or just enjoy it ... and why not? Martin Luther King once said, approximately, "It's not what's wrong with the world that scares people. What really scares them is that everything is all right."
I feel guilty sometimes, being unwilling to play the 'hard' game, the scary game. But that's why I'm not a Zen 'teacher.' Too old and too fat and too lazy. I enjoy talking on the phone with people who are sympatico -- people willing to be serious about whatever they are serious about ... but not that serious.
The fellow I talked on the phone with will either show up at some point or he will not. If he does, we will go through the Zen motions -- how to sit, how to bow and a little background. After that, he will decide whether to be serious or just to take things seriously.
It's hard, I know. And I don't make it any easier by declining to make it hard.
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