Back to Lenten Practice

Copyright March 28, 2024

Wednesday Feb 14, – Thursday Mar 28, 2024

It has been years since I even noticed Lent much less formally practiced and prepared myself for the central mystery of the Christian faith. I didn’t design the practice that I am going to outline below specifically for these 40 days. I had been writing about my relationship with Avery Dulles, a wonderful man from whom I learned an enormous amount, whom I loved and, as a quirk of fate, happened to be a famous and well regarded, even revered figure both in the Jesuit order and the official Catholic Church. My guess is that he might have been disappointed when I stepped away from the more orthodox expressions of the Christian faith, but he was never harsh or judgmental. He always treated me as a friend, and was extremely generous. The initial impulse for my investigation of the question of god’s existence came from our last face to face meeting before he died. He asked me some pointed questions that I blew off at the time. I want to take them up more carefully and with the love that our friendship demands.

Another focus for my investigation has been the Compañeros y Compañeras. In 1997 I met my dear friend Morgan Zo Callaghan at a meditation group I organized in San Francisco's Tenderloin, and shortly after he introduced me to this group of mostly older, former Jesuits, their wives and partners, a few of their children along with some like minded friends as well as one or two men who are still in the order. Since then I have been part of their rather informal online exchange. Since Covid we have been unable to visit face to face, but the internet has provided an open forum for continuing the conversation about exploring this "Jesuit DNA." 

“Jesuit-Ken” is one very distinct side of my own spiritual DNA. In my various Buddhist circles, I am known as that Jesuit guy. Several Jesuits and former Jesuits have been authorized to teach Zen, but I am not in that group. I was only in the Jesuits for a decade, and when I left, I turned my back on the training. I talked about my Jesuit roots with only a few friends. Actually I indulged a kind of hostility towards the institutional church like so many gay men of my generation. Though I gave myself wholeheartedly to Zen practice, there were still traces of a real Ignatian prejudice. It’s taken years of careful Zen work for me to uncover the obvious. My feet were so equally planted in either camp that it created an illusion of indifference. I became known as a Jesuit Buddhist. 

In my last conversation with Avery, he addressed Buddhist-Ken. The title I gave the draft was “A Buddhist Addresses Arguments for the Existence of god.” When in the course of my conversations with the companeros y companeras, I talked about my utterly disastrous philosophy oral exam with Father Ed MacKinnon, I hit on the missing sentence in the title of my project, “A Former Jesuit Weighs the Arguments in Favor of god’s Existence in the Zendo.” Ed if you’re watching, I apologize. In that summer of 1969 I might have been drunk, but I was certainly hungover. I hope you can see from my current effort, your teaching did make an impression. Here I am 55 years later trying to thread the logical needle you carefully laid out.

In the few weeks till Easter I certainly can’t settle the arguments about the existence of god, but, following the age-old Lenten practice of penance and purification, I hope to clear away some of the underbrush obscuring these old questions, at least for me. And to do this I will work as both a Jesuit (at least as much as memory, will and stamina allow) and a Buddhist. I continue to get up very early, make some coffee and then settle into zazen for upwards of an hour. I have continued to meet regularly with my teacher Edward Oberholtzer via zoom to check on my work with a koan collection, The Blue Cliff Record.. After breakfast I dedicate another three to four hours researching these well known arguments for god’s existence as they continue to be argued about to this day. This task has not been altogether pleasant. My 80 year old mind is creaky, and misunderstandings from my days as a Jesuit philosopher still lurk in the shadows. But I’ve discovered that I am not alone, far from it. The majority of these strictly philosophical arguments themselves seem very cranky, but there seems to have been a few important clarifications of the basic work that Aquinas undertook. The resources online are actually far more vast than what was available at Weston College and Boston College between 1968 and 69.

Then I write. I am not hampered by academic rules and conventions. I know that this can be what we used to call the occasion for sin, but I also don't owe allegiance to any religious authority, and thank god the days of the stake are over. Although I will try to be as balanced as any aspiring bodhisattva can be, I know that I have a definite point of view, which I will state as clearly as I can and then like a good Jesuit scholastic and Zen student try to refute my own argument. I will also try to have as much fun as possible. 

I take this work seriously. Half-way through this project my wonderful friend KA told me that he was considering becoming Catholic. Needless to say I was startled, but the obligations of friendship dictate that I be as available as possible to K and not stand in the way his heart is leading him. So in a way, it is love and friendship that have turned my attention back towards the faith of my birth as well as my Jesuit training. One of the standard descriptions of relationships among “X” is “It’s complicated.” I can check that box. A more complete title of this project might be “A Buddhist looks at arguments for the existence of God, and a former Jesuit weighs these arguments in the Zendo.” 

And finally my conclusions surprised me. I cannot even pretend to have reached a satisfactory resolution to the issues that I tackled. But I have at least been able to tie together a few fragmented questions that have been floating around, put others to rest, and sketch out a new line of investigation.

Note: In most of this essay I use the lower case “g” for god. Capitalizing God as an honorific carries so many linguistic nuances and preferences that have come down to us through the ages, I would like, and try as much as possible to separate us from our preconceptions, and treat god in the discussion as a concept and not in the preferential way that the usual capitalization “God” might infer. I do not intend it to be either theist or atheist, just neutral. When referring specifically to YHWH or Jehovah, of the Father in the translations of the Jesus gospels as they come to us, I use the honorific “God.’ Or I try to, I may not always be consistent. 

A Buddhist addresses arguments for the existence of god.

During our last meeting Avery Dulles said to me: “I hear that Buddhists haven’t settled the God question.” Of course he knew the answer—most Buddhist schools are non-theistic; they do not entertain the question of divinity, neither affirming nor denying a supreme deity, certainly not in the same way that Christians do. But in the realm of Catholic dogmatic theology, statements about the nature of divinity are the coin of the realm, and for Avery the existence of a godhead, a personal deity, was central along with expressing or “confessing” your assent to its existence.

That afternoon, despite our friendship, or perhaps because of that bond, I felt as though Avery was trying to pry out an answer that would undermine my Buddhist “beliefs.” His tone was friendly, loving, even playful, not in any way disapproving or forceful, but he was nonetheless serious. He may have been trying to push me towards a more traditional faith because for him, as for most serious Christians, assent to the existence of God, saying “I believe,” is key to salvation. I couldn’t respond that I still believed in God because honestly I was leaning more towards the agnostic end of the spectrum, an answer that would surely have disappointed him. My love for the man overrode any other considerations.

Avery was a Jesuit through and through, and I might have countered with an invitation to inquiry, but I didn’t have the skill to turn a rhetorical or speculative question into an opening. I didn’t know how my friend would take it, perhaps almost as blasphemy although my real fear was that he would have just made fun of the question—and me.

We might have waded into the tricky currents of sweeping, generalized truth statements that leave one floundering on rocky shores, or to return to my original thoughts about placing my bet on the right pony, the kind of restrictive notions about God that Jesuits liked to argue about, for example with M. Blaise Pascal and the Jansenists.

In a way this inquiry is a belated response to my friend. I am calling it “A Buddhist looks at the arguments for the existence of god.” In my view, examining the question of God's existence can only be done in terms of the question as posed and not in some universal ontological context of “than which nothing greater can be conceived.” We’re back to questions and answers. Spoiler alert: I will be arguing in favor of what I take to be the basic Buddhist non-theistic response.


“Why is there something?” (Hint: The question is itself un canard, French slang for "a hoax" or "a fabrication")

Firstly let’s look at the question itself. “Why is there something (as opposed to nothing)?” is a religious question. It is not scientific or psychological. It might be philosophical, but I will need to set some parameters. My characterization is not going to win me many converts among my religious friends who have been trained in the traditional seminary rendition of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s theology. Some even call it “the Big Question,’ encompassing questions of belief and unbelief, who we are, where we are in the universe, and how we got here. Our answers are expected to have the clarity of a clarion bell dispelling our doubts and clearing the path to salvation. Proponents and believers say that it deserves, even demands an answer. There is “Something” but we are going to define exactly what that something is. Or get as close as we can.

I am going to argue that it is not a good question. It is concocted, and deserves hair splitting questions directed at the disambiguation of all possible answers. It is poorly formulated which skews any answer. It’s really just a canard designed to introduce the question of god into ordinary discourse and untimely leads us down a rabbit hole. Any answer is at best an assessment of probability rather than a true statement. (See Ed MacKinnon’s paper: the proposition is a statement that can be held by reasonable people rather than a proof as in science or mathematics).

If we examine the way that a child learns about the world, his or her first question might be “what is that?” pointing to Fido. Then he or she might ask “why did Fido bite me?” or “Is Fido hungry?” but certainly not “Why is Fido there?” You usually don’t get to that before post grad philosophy and debating Kant’s idea of denotation or Gilbert Ryle’s “Fido-Fido fallacy” which he and Wittgenstein label “primitive word magic.”1 In our case “Something” becomes “identified meanings,” vaguely about god. This is much like the neo-Platonists identified the deities of Mount Olympus with ideas and virtues in order to pass the muster of logic. I am not saying that such questions are out of order, but that they need much more explanation and definition before we are allowed to label “something” as ontology and demand justification for its existence.

And because I am going first, I will lay out my objections.

Why “why is something?” is not a good question. We can begin with the concept of negation. It posits “not-Nothing.” However, there is no definition of “nothing” other than it is not all that presents itself to our minds, and even that is just my extrapolation or inference. (And it serves no purpose in the argument other than to get god in the door).

“Something rather than nothing” is not ordinary language. The way we normally speak does not include the inherent logical claim that we cannot know that something is something unless we posit its negation. We have to imagine a world in which “what is so” is not. That is of course absurd, and certainly not the ordinary turn of words. Joni Mitchell teaches us that “you don’t know what you got till it's gone.” What do we get when we take away something? Her answer is “a parking lot.” To be clear, her answer to the question is “what’s left, or what did we replace it with?” and not what is this thing (state or condition) that you are naming “Nothing?”

Ms. Mitchell is pointing to a strategy to affirm our knowledge (and appreciation), not an ontological definition of nothingness. Following Aristotle, Aquinas posits an orderly universe governed by natural law in which man has his place to know and serve God. In return he is promised cash and prizes (which he may or may not receive, another problem to which he will return later). At this point it is enough to say that It is also possible and legitimate in this universe to take away any promised benefits. That is variously called estrangement, hell or sin. Aquinas knows all this through faith, not reason or empirical observation though Aquinas does claim that there is no contradiction between faith and reason. When Darwin, Einstein and Heisenberg et al blew the supporting physics all to hell, modern schoolmen filled in the blank with whatever cosmological ideas they fancied, but again I would point to the neo-platonists filling their empty blanks with virtue and form when they kicked out Zeus and his buddies. Sleight of hand. Bunk. That’s a technical term.

I hesitate to use this analogy but why not, we are all adults. When Bill Clinton was asked in his famous deposition before Congress (and I hung on every word) if there was a sexual relationship between him and Monica Lewinsky, he initially said there "is" no sexual relationship (US News & World Report, Ronald Brownstein and Kenneth T. Walsh). He went on “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the—if he—if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.” Some commentators said that this was his pitch to the Talmudic scholars among his judges. I contend that he just needed to get himself out of a hot pickle. Theists using the word “something” to bridge the gap between science and faith are not much better than Clinton parsing the verb "to be.” And I don’t need a Rabbi to point to the duplicity because that is what we are doing--parsing the verb “to be.” There has “to be” something out there or we’d find ourselves in a hot pickle.

Let’s go back to our little Freddy or Frederica learning that Fido is a dog, and that there are some useful ways of behaving that will help avoid being bitten by Fido. They include feeding and training and learning to gauge Fido’s moods, as well as how to get him into his dog house if need be. But the question for me remains how do we get from there to “why do we have Fido rather than not-Fido?”

How did this become the religious question and why is it so important to get the correct answer? And to lay out the direction of my paper. I’m going to ask a Buddhist before Thomas Aquinas though I might use him as my reference point when I try to describe the hot mess that his religionists get us into. I am going to characterize four arguments for the existence of God. My intention is to just see if I can hold them as an object of meditation, in a good Buddhist way, but as I write them, I find myself trying to demystify them. They each have become almost a caricature of our culture’s way of thinking through these questions.


1 Meaning, Use and Rules of Use, Raziel Abelson. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

A Weed Wacking Roshi goes to Mass

 Blue Cliff Record 22.1

My friend James Ford recently wrote a heartfelt piece about attending a service in Boston's Kings Chapel. I’ve been looking for a response. I had several questions about his almost lyrical reflection on the juxtaposition of hearing mass using a truncated version of the English Catholic Reformation's arcane liturgy in a handsomely endowed Unitarian church.

I emailed him to say as long as it has some singing and dancing, I suppose I could hum along, but I confess, I was initially put off by a koan master’s flirtation with 15th century ritual. The practice of Zen, at least in my experience, has tended to strip away some of the mystery surrounding these observances.

But further examination exposed a new level of entanglement and possibility.

Seekers and Quakers, Ranters, Diggers and Collegiants

James is a well trained, thoroughly modern koan master. He is also an ordained Unitarian Minister, so he has set aside some Church orthodoxy and its insistence on creedal formulations of the mysterious. All well and good. He, I and the Boston Unitarians are on the same page.

I also know from our conversations that he is trying to look at the tumultuous spiritual landscape of right now from a Zen perspective. His interests include traditional Christian denominations, evangelical churches, fringe spiritual movements, and the relatively small but growing number of western Buddhist practitioners from various Asian schools. After some digging, I discovered that King Henry’s abrogating the authority of Rome unleashed a tidal wave of non-conforming religious expression that was similar and even more stormy than our own, but most of the ramifications lay hidden beneath the doctrinal garb of our inherited religions.

I stumbled upon a YouTube series of lectures by Alec Ryrie, Professor of Divinity at Gresham College, London. He’s a committed Christian, and he’s also brilliant. Of course I had studied the history of what we call the early Reformation, at least enough to satisfy my Jesuit examiners, but my training was focused through the narrow lens of the Counter Reformation which my order spearheaded.

I had carefully examined Lutherans, Calvinists, Methodists and, I suppose by extension I can include Jansenists to get ecumenical, but there were also many many smaller splinter sects; historians call them the radical reformation. Who were they? They included the first radical Quakers, but also Seekers, Ranters, Diggers, and Collegiants. They questioned the very foundations of the Christian enterprise.

The events of these few decades were momentous. So much transpired that continues to shape our spiritual lives; the language of prayer; the separation of religious belief from philosophical discourse (I didn’t know for example that Baruch Spinoza had been a member of the Dutch version of the Quakers); the far reaching economic impact of King Henry VIII’s confiscation of Church assets led to secularization and the end of the total domination of the church-state.

Alec Ryrie says that battles are rarely determined by the pacifists. Who can dispute that? However I am loath to give up my cherished position as a Skeptic.

John Earle. (c. 1601 – 17 November 1665) whom I regard as an English Pascal (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) and his contemporary, also felt that one has to take sides. But he is far less rarefied than Blaise. Earle presents the famous philosophical wager as a conundrum with a nihilist resolution: “Whilst he fears to believe a miss, he believes nothing.”

Can I believe anything and do I really have to?

An Age of Atrocity

If I were an actual actor in the real drama of the early Reformation, I might have been forced to take a stance about my beliefs. I remember a conversation I had with my friend Avery Dulles (not sure if this was before or after he was elevated to the rank of Cardinal) but he was serving on some high level ecumenical commission. He told me that he'd worked long hours on some presentation papers. Then came the meeting. It began with a prayer petitioning the God of the doctrinal points they knew they could agree upon. Then Avery stated and explained the Roman Catholic position. He was thanked and applauded. Then the other side’s theologians presented a similar paper outlining their position. They sat down and were politely applauded. Then together they worked out the closing statement: we can agree on X for Y reason and we continue to disagree on the following points for Z reason. We were happy to have this exchange, and pray for our continued growth in the Spirit.

During the Reformation, one of those parties might have been burned at the stake. In those bloody times, the untimely deaths of the heretics or martyrs, depending on your side, could be made into myths, to warn succeeding generations, to train them in some self sacrificial virtue or remind them that some truths could never be compromised. The Inquisitions made decisions about who needed to be celebrated, who needed to be blamed and what lessons the survivors needed to draw.

Thousands were tortured and executed. The authorities of the newly reformed English Church did it as well as the Catholics. In the Spanish Inquisition it was a  matter of life and death for the Jews, conversos, and dissenters who were murdered. 

A lot has changed in the course of a few centuries, but I don’t think that I can erase that part of history that is an affront to the sensibilities that are the product of my own time and religious culture. The Jesuit Saint Robert Bellarmine may have saved Galileo from the stake but I am deeply troubled by his role in the execution of Giordano Bruno and Friar Fulgenzio Manfredi. The temptation for revisionists is to write out the parts of your history that don’t conform with your myth.

Koan Practice for Tudor England

We are already living in the 21st century. Before I introduce some koan practice, I would like to introduce perhaps a consideration, or a caution. Following Foucault, “. . . you cannot find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people.” (Michel Foucault, quoted in Dreyfus and Rabinow,“ On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 229. In this context the other people were the ancient Greeks.)

By chance, I started working with this elliptical koan that I unfolded from Yuanwu’s Commentary for Case 22 of the Blue Cliff Record.* I tried to apply Foucault's question about understanding bridging history. I began using a Buddhist technique to cut away the weeds. It dates from medieval China about contemporaneous with William the Conqueror. Can the record of an ancient Zen master help me decipher the experience of an arcane ritual dating 5 centuries after 1066, during the reign of King Edward VI?

Theology and science fiction love time travel. Let’s see if religious studies linked up with Zen practice can be equally anachronistic. Paraphrasing Yuanwu, can a 21st century Westerner have an authentic Zen experience? At least this might be fun.

A koan: The Family Jewels

When [Hsueh] Feng got to Te Shan he asked. “Do I have a part in the affair of the most ancient sect, or not?” Shan struck me a blow of his staff and said, “What are you saying?” At that time it was like the bottom of the bucket dropping out for me.”

(Allow me to decode some of the language: in 9th Century China "enlightenment" in Zen practice--according to the ancient sect is possible. Feng reports that he experienced it, but apparently that doesn’t settle the matter. Can I might include a modern Zen Roshi using the ancient prayer of the Church of England?)

Yen T’ou shouted and said, “Haven’t you heard it said that what comes in through the gate is not the family jewels?” Feng said, “Then what should I do?” T’ou said, “In the future, if you want to propagate the great teaching, let each point flow out from your own breast, to come out and cover heaven and earth for me.”

(The part of propagating the great teaching is not coded. We get the part about flowing from your own heart. Skipping ahead through several bouts of drinking tea and getting whacked, we move onto what Hsueh Tou’s disciple has to say about tracing the matter back to their root teacher Yun Men and mastering the art of snake handling. What is he talking about?)

“How many lose their bodies and their lives?” This praises Ch’ang Ch’ing’s saying, “In the hall today there certainly are people who lose their bodies and lives.” To get here, first you must be thoroughly versed in snake handling. 

Hsueh Tou is descended from Yun Men, so he brushes the others away at once and just keeps one, Yun Men: Hsueh Tou says “Shao Yang knows, again he searches the weeds.” Since Yun Men knew the meaning of Hsueh Feng’s saying, “On South Mountain there’s a turtle-nosed snake,” therefore “Again he searches through the weeds.”

After Hsueh Tou has taken his verse this far, he still has more marvels. He says, “South, north, east, west, no place to search.” You tell me where the snake is. “Suddenly he trusts his staff.” From the beginning the snake has been right here. But you must not then go to the staff for sustenance.

Yun Men took his staff and threw it down in front of Hsueh Feng, making a gesture of fright.

Thus Yun Men used his staff as the turtle-nosed snake. Once, though, he said, “The staff changed into a dragon and has swallowed the universe; where are the mountains, rivers and the great earth to be found?” Just this one staff--sometimes it’s a dragon, sometimes it’s a snake.

(Then after some detailed snake handling instructions, Yuanwu tries to encourage us by asking one of those pesky Zen Master questions.) Since ancient times, how many people have picked up the snake and played with it?

I personally prefer opera

James Ford attended a truncated Book of Common Prayer service in a revered Unitarian Church. I hope that at least part of the motivation was aesthetic. And that’s perfect. He’s a Unitarian. I am what’s politely called a lapsed Catholic and an ex-Jesuit to boot. I find that after years of meditation, my love for the ritual of the mass has waned, but I won't rule out the power of the experience. Actually I prefer opera, but then I am also gay so it might be genetic.

But after doing some introspection, I am left seeing the similarity with my own situation as well as wondering about the huge waves that lie just beneath any attempt to deal with the numinous ocean that supports our lives. I am a skeptic as much as I am a Buddhist. There is a war inside about what to believe, what is worthy of belief and what beliefs are pointers and which ones might simply be a smoke screen. I would like to remain neutral, but also realize that I don't want to set myself up, in the words of John Earle, as “a hapless peacemaker trying to intervene in a duel getting shot by both sides.”

The contribution of the Zen practice here might be to clear the weeds from the battlefield and perhaps reveal the turtle nosed snake. I can carry a staff, at least in my imagination. “The staff changed into a dragon and has swallowed the universe; where are the mountains, rivers and the great earth to be found?”

For my verse, I’ll echo James with the two stanzas from from Leonard Cohen’s “Treaty” that he uses to close his meditation:

I've seen you change the water into wine
I've seen you change it back to water, too
I sit at your table every night
I try but I just don't get high with you

I heard the snake was baffled by his sin
He shed his scales to find the snake within
But born again is born without a skin
The poison enters into everything


* Here is Case 22 and the portion of the commentary that I used.