On the Road Home: A Spiritual Journey Guided by Remarkable Women

A review by Kathy Grassel

It was several months ago that Sr. Antonia sent me a video, which I immediately stuck into my VCR and watched with great interest. It concerns a young woman named Christina Lundberg who experienced a close brush with death and was awakened to the great questions of the meaning of life. Off she went with her camcorder on a spiritual search that took her to India and Tibet, then back to the U.S., back to India and Nepal, and back to the U.S., looking for her path on which to practice to discover herself.

Well, okay, join the club, one could say, but what was unique about Lundberg’s journey is that she decided to do her seeking by seeking out female teachers. She wanted to “meet wise women and understand the feminine face of God.” While none of the twelve or so wise women she met and interviewed told her that men and women were different in any way — in fact quite the contrary — she nevertheless stuck with these women as her mentors and teachers to propel her along on her journey. Sr. Antonia Cooper was one of those women. I’ll be getting to Lundberg’s encounter with Antonia later in this story, as there is chronological logic to the way in which our seeker has put together her script, so come along on Lundberg’s spiritual travelogue to her inner self.

Our protagonist went to India with an American film crew to record a speaking engagement by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He is the only man we will see in the documentary, but his words and the huge crowds he attracted piqued her interest in Buddhism, which seemed to offer a different way of looking at things than her Presbyterian Christian upbringing. While there she met an American woman named China Galland who had written a book about Tara, considered to be a female Buddha in the Tibetan tradition. “She was a woman so devout in her spiritual practice that it was said that the only reason she wasn’t a completely fully enlightened Buddha was that she didn’t have the male form. She lived during a period where it was believed that to be enlightened one had to have a man’s body, so she was encouraged to pray to be transformed into a man.” She said no, that since most Buddhas have chosen to come in the form of a man, it would be more helpful if she came as a woman, and thus she vowed for all time until all suffering is ended to only be enlightened in a woman’s body.

When Lundberg heard about an elusive abbess nun named Khantrolma high in the mountains of Tibet, said to be one of those enlightened female incarnations, she went off to find her. Mind you, a viewer at this point can feel the thin air and high winds in these mountains, not to mention sense the intense spiritual vibration surrounding the activity of the holy abbess’ nuns in the monastery. When the abbess, wearing a herder’s hat and missing many of her teeth, finally agreed to see her, she had this to say, “There are no special teachings just for women. The Buddha taught that both men and women have the same capacity for enlightenment. You must study and practice the Four Noble Truths. These are teachings from the Buddha that will lead you to enlightenment. You will never find the freedom you are looking for unless you realize directly the meaning of what the Buddha taught.”

For those who need a refresher on the Four Noble Truths: (1) There is suffering. (2) There is a cause for suffering. (3) There is a way out of suffering. (4) The way out is Spiritual Practice.

Lundberg came back to the United States, resolved to try to integrate her Christian upbringing with her new knowledge of Buddhism and also to include Native American wisdom in her search. She was still seeking women’s wisdom, but now not only for her benefit and other women’s, but for the good of all.

From Tibet to around the corner from her home in New Jersey, she met Prof. Dorothy Austin, an Episcopalian priest who had studied Buddhism and Hinduism. “I remember when I was just graduating from college. I began to imagine myself as a simple parish priest and I went to visit my minister. He said, ‘Well, now, you know, let me just say this to you. You’re very bright, you could do any number of things, but I can assure you that it’s not a priest that you want to be, and that’s because God doesn’t call women to the priesthood.'” According to Austin, who did become a priest, the rise of feminist consciousness for women in religious community meant an enormous crisis of identity and faith. Her way out was to cross over to participation in other religious traditions — in her case Hinduism and Buddhism — giving her new sources and a new way to look at her own Christian tradition.

Rev. Austin explained the Buddhist concept of suffering, the First Noble Truth, as something different from a Christian one of disease and disability and pain. “This life is mortal. There is no such thing as permanence. This is a great lesson to come to, that in this life it’s guaranteed we are going to lose everything. We’re going to lose all the ones that we love, and we’re going to lose our own life. We suffer because we cling, because we don’t take seriously the fact that nothing is permanent, that we can’t hold on and keep anything.” Austin goes on to say that in the West there is a great deal of misunderstanding about this, that the teaching is interpreted that one shouldn’t care or need to be engaged. She is saying, no, that by learning to not cling, we are ever more deeply engaged.

An African American woman, Prof. Janice Willis, raised Baptist and now a practicing Buddhist and the head of the religion department at Wesleyan University, elaborates that we seek happiness in all the wrong places. “To be happy, we get this, and it didn’t provide the happiness. Or, I’d be happy as soon as I could be rid of this, or when I finish this project I’ll be happy. It just builds. We never finish with our desires. They will rise up as long as we have a mistaken notion about how things exist. The true nature of the world is impermanent and changing all the time.”

Lundberg then interviewed an Australian nun, Robina Courtin, living in the USA, ordained in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and the editor of Mandala magazine, who says the way out of suffering is hard work. “One of the major steps that we have to take, which is very painful for us, is to begin to take responsibility for this awful problem of always thinking it’s the other person who is the cause of the problem. If I look into my mind, I can see a quality called anger, for example. Then I think, I’m angry because you said something unkind to me. I’m seeing this anger, but I’m putting the responsibility onto you. In Buddhist terms there is a fundamental first step that has to change. I have to see that it is my anger, I did it. It was something that arose in my mind in response to something you did. Saying it’s my anger doesn’t mean that you are right in doing what you did, but that’s not the issue in Buddhist terms. The issue is to look sincerely and precisely at your mind, your mindset, your own characteristics to see that if you could change some of them, wouldn’t it make you happier. We are the creators of our own reality.”

The End of Suffering, the Third Noble Truth, is advanced by experiencing the interconnectedness of everything. For this, Lundberg went west to visit Native American wisdom teachers Dhyani Ywahoo, a Cherokee, and Lorrain Fox Davis, a Cree Blackfeet, whose cultures are the embodiments of interconnectedness. She traveled back to India to experience darshan with Ammachi, an Indian saint and roundly known as the Divine Mother, after which she met with Khandro Rinpoche, teacher and abbess of Buddhist nunneries. “The best and the most needed thing that we can do is to practice,” Khandro said. “You cannot read and listen to teachings only; at some point in your life, they need to be practiced. You have to start meditating. You have to actually bring the teachings into your life, and frame your life according to the teachings. Appreciating the teachings is very good, but it is not sufficient for enlightenment.”

So after a 16-day intensive retreat at a nunnery in Nepal, Lundberg came back to the USA, from round-the-clock chanting to the round-the-clock noise and bustle of New York City where the culture is definitely not oriented toward inner development. Again she sought advice from American teachers on how to understand the Fourth Noble Truth, Spiritual Practice.

Here is where we meet, finally, Sister Antonia Cooper. Lundberg describes Sr. Antonia as a Franciscan nun who inspired her with her “unorthodox” methods of spiritual practice. “I was first introduced to T’ai Chi Chih back in 1991,” Sr. Antonia says. “One day in particular I was sitting for centering prayer and I was anything but centered. My body was quiet, my mind was all over the place. I got up and started to do T’ai Chi Chih, and after a half hour I sat back down to center, and I was in such a different place. It was like I was energized, and yet very focused. It’s the gift of tai chi chih that I can attribute the deepening of prayer life. Only when I can get to that interior stillness is when I can know God.” The video shows Antonia instructing her classes. Viewers will recognize Bird Flaps Its Wings: “Make sure when you straighten up your legs that your fingertips are pointing to the earth…. One more time… a wrist circle…we’ll do one more set.” Antonia explains that the energy in centering is based on Chinese philosophy in which it is believed that if there is any tension, or if the chi energy is not able to go through the meridians that there is a danger of disease, pain or illness. So the energy is released when one does the movements of tai chi and the circular movement allows the energy to circulate. It is evident that Sr. Antonia has infused her Catholic tradition with the essence of tai chi chih practice when she says, “God isn’t three hours ago — that’s when we can get really guilty. And God isn’t future, because that can become quite anxious. God is right now, and the only moment I have is right now.”

And so, there you have it. Before she ends, Lundberg speaks to several more women about practice, what it is to them and why it is so essential. If I may editorialize a little, even while Christine Lundberg seemed to take an eternity to make up her mind, and while she seemed to be looking for a magic bullet from just the right teacher, I believe that Christine Lundberg is on to something. The fact that she chose to seek out women spiritualists gave the journey a whole new twist, because, you see, men, because of their positions of privilege in any given religion, have not really had to do the nitty gritty work of getting at Truth. Males can preside over parishes, zendos, sanghas, ashrams and temples, dispense the sacraments, lead lives of comfort and get respect without ever having to look within themselves. For centuries, if not millennia, women have been excluded from the clergy, from respect as spiritual teachers, even from the possibility of enlightenment. So what do they do if they feel a call? They do many things, as evidenced by these women brought to the fore by Christine Lundberg. They search outside the mainstream, delve into traditions from all over the world, combining wisdom (yin female) and skillful action (yang male) to fashion a fresh gestalt of East, West, aboriginal, new age and old age. As one of the women remarked, “We have to keep turning in the direction of beauty, in the direction of love, in the direction of being buddhas, or saints, or Christ.”

What is the result? An Australian living in the U.S. with shaved head and saffron robes, editing her magazine with a laptop perched on her knees in lotus position. An Episcopalian priest wearing cloth of the clergy meditating on a zafu. An African American professor lecturing about the Buddhist concept of emptiness. A young girl from India who rejects her arranged marriage to eventually become a beloved Divine Mother. And finally, a Franciscan nun beginning a simple practice of Tai Chi Chih who would later be named international Guide of T’ai Chi Chih, looked up to by hundreds of practitioners from many countries, most of them women themselves, seeking spiritual succor by combining this moving meditation practice with their own tradition. As Antonia observed at the end of the documentary, “The end of the journey is God, and yet God is in the midst of the footsteps in that journey.”