Who are the most Zen-like Christian thinkers? St. John of the Cross seems to be the one that's mentioned the most, with Meister Eckhart a close second. I've also seen at least two references to parallels with the thought of Blessed John Ruysbroeck. Van Balthasar draws implicit parallels between St. Therese Lisieux and Zen by referring to the "Little Way" as existentialist (Zen is perhaps the existentialist outlook par excellence) and, based on my amateur reading of Story of a Soul and Zen texts, there are heavy, heavy parallels (which were the subject of this 2008 piece).
But there's another one that I've never seen mentioned and, I don't think, I've ever considered until just recently: de Caussade, whose Abandonment to Divine Providence is laced with a Zen-like attitude. Just one example. Here's an excerpt from a classic Zen poem by P'ang:
"In my daily life there are no other chores than
Those that happen to fall into my hands.
Nothing I choose, nothing reject.
Nowhere is there ado, nowhere a slip."
Compare that to a few passages from Abandonment:
"There is nothing better for us than to do what God wants at any particular moment."
"[N]othing should be rejected, nothing sought after . . ."
"There is nothing . . . we have to choose."
I also like this heavily Zennist sentence: "Mystery makes the soul live by faith; for all the rest there is nothing but contradiction."
Postscript
After writing the above, I ran across this at Wikipedia: "Writers such as Alan Watts have found in Caussade an Occidental, Christian-theological analogue to the Eastern religion of Mahayana Buddhism, particularly Zen Buddhism.[citation needed]"
Interesting.
Benedict Groeschel, incidentally, called Abandonment an "absolute classic" and, if I recall correctly, said he read it every year.
