An unexpected email a couple of days back wondered if I would be willing to remember a time when author Peter Mathiessen was a member of the Zen center I then attended. The writer was planning a biographical framework for Mathiessen and, even if I didn't know Mathiessen well (which I hadn't), perhaps a sense of those times would be useful to the writer's efforts.
OK, why not?
But the request (we agreed by email to talk sometime next week) sent me down in the basement or up in the attic of memory, straining to recall times when devotions and efforts were pedal-to-the-metal for me. There was a time when I had the energy and drive to bust my buns. Mathiessen played little or no role, but he was part of the wallpaper of my existence at the time.
At the time....
It did not fall in on me all at once that the walls erected to protect me from the world's claws were two-edged: Yes, protection can protect, but simultaneously anything that protects also hems in with its cloisters. To be safe is to be unsafe, but as I say, that did not occur to me from the get-go.
Likewise it did not occur to me that religion (or spiritual life or whatever you want to call it) was largely a rich-man's sport -- a sport that George Orwell might rightfully point out could hardly take wing without a full stomach/good education/etc. The fact that its expositors can beat the drums for humility and poverty and simplicity and devotion ... well, check it out. No need to be snarky about it -- just check it out. A well-appointed crib and lunch menu is not necessarily a bad thing, but I do think it's worth being honest about.
Everyone, rich or poor, will probably bump a nose against their own protective walls. Death, disease, drugs, and divorce (for example) can make anyone go "ouch" but how anyone greets and copes with the ouches ... well, spiritual life is not the only go-to salvor.
Make it better, please.
But what, precisely, is "it?" The answer to that can lead to some uncomfortable delving and back in the times when I suppose I knew Matthiessen a bit, I was just getting used to the prices I was to pay in search of "it" and the ways in which it might be nourished. I was, at one time, going to the zendo perhaps 40 hours per week. I had not yet flunked out of the monastery I thought I should join, did, and bumped my nose badly....
... Leading me to the generic description of my own practice: "I wouldn't wish my training on my worst enemy and I wouldn't trade it for all the tea in China."
Poor little rich kid.
The man I finally settled on as my "Zen teacher" once shaped my practice simply:
"Take care of your family."
OK, why not?
But the request (we agreed by email to talk sometime next week) sent me down in the basement or up in the attic of memory, straining to recall times when devotions and efforts were pedal-to-the-metal for me. There was a time when I had the energy and drive to bust my buns. Mathiessen played little or no role, but he was part of the wallpaper of my existence at the time.
At the time....
It did not fall in on me all at once that the walls erected to protect me from the world's claws were two-edged: Yes, protection can protect, but simultaneously anything that protects also hems in with its cloisters. To be safe is to be unsafe, but as I say, that did not occur to me from the get-go.
Likewise it did not occur to me that religion (or spiritual life or whatever you want to call it) was largely a rich-man's sport -- a sport that George Orwell might rightfully point out could hardly take wing without a full stomach/good education/etc. The fact that its expositors can beat the drums for humility and poverty and simplicity and devotion ... well, check it out. No need to be snarky about it -- just check it out. A well-appointed crib and lunch menu is not necessarily a bad thing, but I do think it's worth being honest about.
Everyone, rich or poor, will probably bump a nose against their own protective walls. Death, disease, drugs, and divorce (for example) can make anyone go "ouch" but how anyone greets and copes with the ouches ... well, spiritual life is not the only go-to salvor.
Make it better, please.
But what, precisely, is "it?" The answer to that can lead to some uncomfortable delving and back in the times when I suppose I knew Matthiessen a bit, I was just getting used to the prices I was to pay in search of "it" and the ways in which it might be nourished. I was, at one time, going to the zendo perhaps 40 hours per week. I had not yet flunked out of the monastery I thought I should join, did, and bumped my nose badly....
... Leading me to the generic description of my own practice: "I wouldn't wish my training on my worst enemy and I wouldn't trade it for all the tea in China."
Poor little rich kid.
The man I finally settled on as my "Zen teacher" once shaped my practice simply:
"Take care of your family."
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