Buddhist-Catholic ethicist thinks God must change - Christian Tobias Meeker, who describes himself as 'profoundly Buddhist'

National Catholic Reporter, Dec 3, 1999 by Pamela Schaeffer

After several years in the monastery, serving as infirmarian -- the monk who cares for monks who are sick -- Meeker began to hear a call: "Come away and be alone with me." At first he regarded the call as "temptation," but the community released him to go to a hermitage for an indefinite period of time. He had no electricity, no running water, but he had the luxury of silence and time -- 13 months. During the period, he said, he began again to experience "the continual presence of God."

Unimpeded by daily distractions, repressed feelings -- resentments, anger -- surfaced. In the way of a Buddhist, he acknowledged his negative emotions and let them go. In the way of a Christian, he learned not to be conformed to those emotions, but to life "by will."

"I felt as if I emerged from a dark tunnel" -- all those years of illness and dryness -- "into life," he said. Meeker left the monastery in 1980, convinced that God was leading him out. IN 1983 he earned a master's degree at Yale Divinity School while working as a chaplain intern at a hospital and a hospice. He returned to the Ozarks, began working as a chaplain at St. John's, met a nurse, Marie, who became his wife and adopted a daughter, Madonna, who is now 11. He funded the ethics program at St. John's in 1987.

Meeker's job goes much further than implementing the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, published by the U.S. bishops in 1995. Rebecca Pruitt, who worked with Meeker is Springfield, said he is able to empower people who consult with him, sometimes about the hardest decisions of their lives, so that, with a little coaching, they are able to apply their own values and make decisions that feel right to them.

"He doesn't work out of an ethicist-as-expert model," said Pruitt, who is ethicist for Mercy Health System of Oklahoma. "He believes the Holy Spirit is alive in every person."

Meeker is often consulted -- called in on cases by physicians to a degree that amazes his peers around the country -- to help people make end-of-life decisions. He averages about 300 consultations a year, a third of them from outside St. John's, he said. He also works with five ethics committees and, when invited, speaks around the country.

Meeker doesn't worry about what Buddha called "the non-essential questions": the existence of God, the existence of the soul, whether creation is of God. Such questions have led to a speculative Christian metaphysics that he finds discomfiting: the Scholastic model, for example, which describes God as unchanging and all-powerful, in control of everything to the point that he willed his son to die.

"How could you worship a monster like that?" Meeker wonders.

He finds the concept of God as unchanging to be absurd, preferring contemporary process theology's concept of a God who suffers and changes. "If you love, you change," he said, adding: "I believe that God, in God's great love, is pouring himself out to us at every moment," he said, "in every conceivable way."