AROUND THE KITCHEN TABLE

By Lloyd Ratzlaff

In our living room stands a Laughing Buddha lamp which I gave Larraine one year as a Christmas present. It was one of a kind in the lighting store. I hoped Larraine would like it, and she does; but I'd have bought it no matter what.

This Buddha's name is Hotei, a pot-bellied, embeaded little man with a wide grin, holding a boat over his head, and inside the boat a globe of light. Hoisting the load straightens his spine and forgives the fat belly, but Ui-yui what a crick he must have in his back! Even so, catch him unsmiling if you can.

Hotei does not sit absorbed in nirvana. He lets the Old Man with the golden face stay under his bo-tree, while he himself carries a gleam around the world, all the way into our living room. It makes no difference to him whether I switch the lamp on or grope in the dark; he upholds his globe, lit, unlit, and never wearies of serving up that smile. He pushes me out into my world, does not forbid me to take my own way, and never fails to show me what to come home to.

I salute you, Sir. I vow to lift and smile.

_
On my desk is a Gnarled Mannequin who turned up one year in my room at a retreat when I pulled aside the bunkbed. There he lay, slivered Sasquatch with a hole in one side, his right leg broken and his left hacked off, two jagged arms imploring heaven and earth to pick him up. He's a light burden and an easy wooden yoke, and I think he could stand on his head easier than Hotei for all his laughs.

But he's gibbled even in resurrection.

I salute you, Sir, and vow to bear my own torn-to-pieceshood.
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There is a phrase in the Catholic mass: “Christ shared humanity so that we may share divinity.” But it seems Christianity flirts at the fringes of this notion, and recoils at the bolder thought which other traditions declare openly: Thou art That. Buddhism itself is not bedevilled by images of some Divinity “over against us,” and remaining forever so.

When we try to imagine a God, we're distracted first by anthropomorphisms - He, She, or It (though we can scarcely picture the neuter). And we complicate things further by situating this deity elsewhere - in the future, or in a heaven that necessarily dwindles as we mature and confront scientific cosmologies, until there is no “where” in which any Deity can live as the centre of His/Her/Its own universe. This is a bitter pill for anyone trying to “believe” some theistic dogma on penalty of eternal perdition.

Once the Buddha asked his disciples: “Have I said there is a God? Have I said there is no God? I see more than I tell; for if I did tell, you would be distracted from practice into speculation.” He made it clear that anyone else could also become what he was. Thus, Buddhists vow to become Buddhas; whereas Christians seem caught in trinitarian abstractions, forbidden to imagine becoming Christs, yet nonetheless relentlessly urged to be Christlike. My own tradition's Saviour suffered from a theological dilemma of being both Model and Substitute. But Jesus himself apparently did not have this problem: May they be one in us, as you and I are one.
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Life is laughter and light; life is crucifixion and disfigurement. And yesterday, down by the riverside,

blue water
white snow
white clouds
blue sky

Ratzlaff is the author of two books of literary non-fiction, The Crow Who Tampered With Time and Backwater Mystic Blues; a contributor to a number of literary anthologies; and editor of Seeing it Through, a collection of senior adult writings. Formerly a minister, counsellor and university instructor, he now makes his living as a writer in Saskatoon.