"Finding God in All Things"

June 2, 2021

Bonnie Johnson Shurman

Jan. 20, 1944-June 2, 2011

Today is the 10th anniversary of Bonnie's death. I am among the many people who loved her and miss her kind and warm presence. She was an extremely generous woman and expressed her love as wife and mother,  daughter, grandmother, and friend, in a way you could count on. 

More than a decade ago, when she was first diagnosed with leukemia, her husband Daniel Shurman told me that she was interested in doing the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, and asked if I could suggest a book that she could use. She did the Exercises and I was blessed to be her guide. But it was her enormous spiritual gift that allowed her truly embody the Teaching of Jesus, and then to share it with others, just as the Lord asks us.

During the years that her cancer remained in remission, she continued to explore the path that her Lord, through Ignatius, opened. She continued to live her life in prayer, exploring and digging further, following her own inspiration and gifts. This mystical bent was always balanced by the consummate professional, a scholar with common sense. 

She found a link between Ignatius and Julian of Norwich via an informal association of seekers who called themselves “the Friends of God.” She wrote about Julian, Ignatius and the Friends of God when she was studying at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is dated March 8, 2005. 

Thank you, Daniel for being the kind of husband who inspires, and for introducing me to Bonnie, To thank Bonnie for the gift of friendship, I am going to post the paper, “Finding God in All Things,” here.

We miss you, Bonnie. and your gentle presence. We are enormously grateful for the gifts you gave us. May you sing with the angels.

I have given this paper the same title as William Barry’s book: Finding God In All Things, A Companion To The Spiritual Exercises Of St. Ignatius (Barry 1991). I was reading the book when Julian of Norwich was assigned in class. The similarities between Julian’s writings and Ignatius’s were striking to me. Both Julian and Ignatius write of multiple sensory experiences with God occasioned by life-threatening illness. Before I understood that Julian was born 150 years before Ignatius, I considered that her visions, like mine[1], might have been delirious manifestations engendered by Ignatian-style guided meditations. When I realized that she lived long before Ignatius, I abandoned the paper I was writing on the general topic of asceticism to delve deeper into parallels, coincidences, and possible connections between these two late medieval mystics.

The theological proposition of this paper is that the writings of Julian in circa 1400 and the writings of Ignatius circa 1525 are representative of a distinct spirituality: God as Friend. God as Friend is a paradigm shift from the dominant spirituality from the 4th century: Deity of Christ; it is distinct though related to two paradigms which were soon to emerge in the reformation: Salvation by Faith Alone and Incarnational Participation. At the end of this paper I will argue that the paradigm of God as Friend is finding new relevance in our time, hence bringing a renewed interest in both Julian and Ignatius.

In my search for a “social network” connecting Julian and Ignatius, I learned about an informal group called “Friends of God” from one of the many websites devoted to Julian. The name for this “association of pious persons, both ecclesiastical and lay [also men and women], alludes no doubt to John 15:14-15[2] … Friends of God appears to have had its origin in Basle between the years 1339 and 1343, and to have thence extended down the Rhine even as far as the Netherlands” (Walsh 1909). I am skeptical that Julian herself had any direct connection with the informal network of German mystics, but there is indirect evidence at least that many of them had access to her writing. One version of Julian’s Short Text (the so-called “Amherst Manuscript”) also contains writings of Friends’ mystics Marguerite Poerete, Henry Suso, and Jan van Ruusbroec (Holloway 1997). The manuscript had been in the Brigittine Syon Abbey; it was owned by the Lowe family and through them found its way to the Low Countries and Rouen (Holloway 1996). While there is no direct evidence of who might have read it and when, there is enough indirect evidence to conclude that Julian’s ideas were circulating among German mystics following her death circa 1425. The German mystics influenced Ignatius through the Carhusian and former Dominican monk, Ludolf of Saxony (Gieraths 1986). Ignatius is known to have read and re-read a four volume Spanish translation of Ludolf’s Life of Christ and to have been profoundly influenced, even converted, by what he read there (Ignatius 2000, p. xiv; Loyola 2000, p. xiv).

The references to Julian’s writing in this paper come from a “Long Text” version translated from the manuscript found in the British Museum. As I read Revelations of Divine Love (Julian 2002), I noted about sixty passages expressing ideas similar to those found the Spiritual Exercises, far too many passages to discuss here.[3] I am concentrating on five concepts that point parallel notions of God as friend; in particular, I am limiting myself to the best examples that reveal similarities in their views of how people carry on friendship with God various media/modes. I use quotations from the work of each to document my argument that friendship with God is created and maintained through intimate communications which take at least five different forms: imagery, senses, colloquy, consolation/ desolation, and prayer. In the conclusion of the paper, I also point similarities in how they describe the nature of this friendship in their discussions of sin, love, goodness, choice, and the indwelling of God in our nature.

Communication is the sine qua non of any friendship. To have a concept of friendship with God, therefore requires that there be some form of media which constitutes that communication. For both Julian and Ignatius, imagery is the most important media and the Passion is the most important topic of that imagery. In examining Julian and Ignatius’s imagery of Jesus’ Passion, such in the illustrative passages below, it is easy to dismiss their perspective on friendship. After all “Body of Christ” imagery was a common theme of medieval piety yet friendship with God was not. I have little knowledge of other writers in the “Body of Christ” genre, so I cannot say that the friendship imagery of Julian and Ignatius is unique. What I observe in their imagery, however, is its intimacy. Both show intimacy with Jesus’ body; this use of imagery signals closeness, friendship.

… All the precious blood was bled out of the sweet body that might pass therefore, yet there dwelled a moisture in the sweet flesh of Christ as it was shewed (Julian 2002, p.). 

… Blood of Christ, inebriate me. Water from the side of Christ, wash me. Passion of Christ, strengthen me. O good Jesus hear me. Within Thy wounds hid me (Ignatius 2000, p. xlv).

Simply imagining another in a prayerful way can also create a close relationship with the one imagined with the need for conversation as we typically understand that term. A few months ago my husband and I were contacted by a friend to provide direction to on-line medical information for a friend of his with a rare bone marrow disease. We started to email with both Jim and his wife about Jim’s illness and potential resources in Palo Alto. Mostly we prayed intensely for Jim and also for his wife; we never spoke with them even by phone. When Jim died unexpectedly from a heart attack, both Daniel and I were devastated; we still cry at the thought of Jim. We had lost a dear friend, one whom we knew only through imagery, email, and prayer. It was a dramatic Julian-Ignatian lesson for me: I felt so close to this person and that closeness was entirely the product of my imagining his circumstances and my daily prayers for him. Knowing Jim in this way helped me to experience God in a fresh way; I learned how I can know God without human encounters just as I had known Jim without these encounters.

Imagery in Julian and Ignatius is not only visual, it is also multi-sensory.

I HAD, in part, touching, sight, and feeling in three properties of God, in which the strength and effect of all the Revelation standeth (Julian 2002, p. 197). And then shall we, with His sweet grace, in our own meek continuant prayer come unto Him now in this life by many privy touchings of sweet spiritual sights and feeling, measured to us as our simpleness may bear it (Julian 2002, p. 90). 

The Fifth contemplation will consist in applying the five senses to the matter. … seeing in imagination the persons, in contemplating and mediating in detail the circumstances in which they are… hear what they are saying… smell the infinite fragrance and taste the infinite sweetness of the divinity … touch, for example by embracing and kissing the place where the persons stand (Ignatius 2000, p. 45).

Communicating with one’s Godfriend goes beyond merely experiencing God through ones imagination and senses; both Julian and Ignatius converse directly with God. Throughout the Julian text, she is posing questions to God, and God is answering her, for example: “AND thus our good Lord answered to all the questions and doubts that I might make, saying full comfortably: I may make all thing well, I can make all thing well, I will make all thing well…”(Julian 2002, p. 61); the result of this is conversational. Ignatius uses the term “colloquy” to refer to conversations with God (and also with Jesus, Mary, and the Holy Spirit on occasions): “The colloquy is made by speaking exactly as one friend speaks to another” (Ignatius 2000, p. 24). These two examples exemplify a pattern of “shewing” vs “exercise” that I find over and over as a distinction between these two books: Julian shows her communication with God; Ignatius instructs the maker of the exercises to perform these same kinds of communications. Thus, “revelation” in Julian becomes “exercise” in Ignatius.

God has special kinds of communication with Julian that I would call, following Ignatius, “consolations” and “desolations.” In Ignatian spirituality, consolidations and desolations are the movements of the spirit—“internal movements” by which we can discern God’s will in our lives. Those making the exercises are taught how to listen or feel for these movements and thereby to guide their lives in accord with God’s will. Again, we see that Julian experiences these interior movements but makes no methodical use of them. Ignatius’s biography describes how he initially experienced them much as Julian did and then learned to put them to use in his own communications with God.

AND after this He shewed a sovereign ghostly pleasance in my soul. I was fulfilled with the everlasting sureness, mightily sustained without any painful dread. This feeling was so glad and so ghostly that I was in all peace and in rest, that there was nothing in earth that should have grieved me. …This lasted but a while, and I was turned and left to myself in heaviness, and weariness of my life that scarcely I could have patience to live. This Vision was shewed me, according to mine understanding, sometime to be in comfort, and sometime to fail and to be left to themselves. God willeth that we know that He keepeth us even alike secure in woe and in weal. And for profit of man’s soul, a man is sometime left to himself (Julian 2002). 

God alone can give consolation to the soul without any previous cause. It belongs solely to the Creator to come into a soul, to leave it, to act upon it, to draw it wholly to the love of His Divine Majesty (Ignatius 2000, p. 119 section 330). ...When one is in desolation, he should be mindful that God has left him to his natural powers to resist the different agitations and temptations of the enemy in order to try him. For though God has taken from him the abundance of fervor and overflowing love and the intensity of His favors, nevertheless, he has sufficient grace for eternal salvation (Ignatius 2000, p. 116, section 320).

On the topic of prayer, Julian and Ignatius could not be more similar. Yet, it is not as simple to point to parallel passages as with the preceding topics. For them, prayer is not just a “doing” – not just a message we send to God, in the form of a petition, for example. Rather, prayer is a way of being in which ones very foundation, ones “ground” is God and therefore prayer is fitting ourselves to that Ground of our being. Julian puts it this way:

OUR Lord God willeth that we have true understanding, and specially in three things that belong to our prayer. The first is: by whom and how that our prayer springeth. By whom, He sheweth when He saith: I am [the] Ground; and how, by His Goodness: for He saith first: It is my will. The second is: in what manner and how we should use our prayer; and that is that our will be turned unto the will of our Lord, enjoying: and so meaneth He when He saith: I make thee to will it. The third is that we should know the fruit and the end of our prayers: that is, that we be oned and like to our Lord in all things; and to this intent and for this end was all this lovely lesson shewed. And He will help us, and we shall make it so as He saith Himself; Blessed may He be! For this is our Lord’s will, that our prayer and our trust be both alike large. For if we trust not as much as we pray, we do not full worship to our Lord in our prayer, and also we tarry and pain our self (Julian 2002).

“Grounded in God” has several implications. First, that prayer is about the will of God and our place in that will. From this the next implication, only implicit in the statement above, that God is eternally present and has already “answered” our prayers in our very existence, our salvation, and in all that we enjoy: “The first is our noble and excellent making; the second, our precious and dearworthy again-buying; the third, all-thing that He hath made beneath us, [He hath made] to serve us, and for our love keepeth it. Then signifieth He thus, as if He said: Behold and see that I have done all this before thy prayers; and now thou art, and prayest me” (Julian 2002). Julian cautions us not to go looking for this or that way that God might have answered our small petitions, but to understand that God is answering even the prayers we have not yet asked. So how then should we pray? We should pray that “our will be turned unto the will of our Lord.” The true end of our petitions is that we become like God, indeed that we are at one with God.

William Barry describes the same understanding in Ignatius in his chapter entitled, “Grounded in God: The Principle and Foundation” (Ignatius 2000, pp. 33ff.). God is up to one action; we can experience the creative action of God which is always at work (Barry 1991, p. 39); Ignatius draws out the implications of our place in God’s one action in the Principle and Foundation: “We must make ourselves indifferent to all created things… Consequently, as far as we are concerned, we should not prefer health to sickness, riches to poverty, honor to dishonor, a short life. … Our one desire and choice should be what is conductive to the end for which we are created (Ignatius 2000, p. 12, section 23). In other words, it is about God’s will; our prayer is our participation in that will. We are engaged in the world of God’s creating and God is already answering the prayers we have not yet made.

We have seen in both of these late medieval mystics a central concern with our relationship with God and how that relationship is continuously created through various media. The relationship is one of love. While both mystics write extensively on sin, theirs is not the sin of the medieval church or of Jonathan Edwards. Indeed, Julian comes as close as one might in her day to saying that her Church is misguided in its notion of sin and salvation (Julian 2002, p. 104). Ignatius’ first week of the Exercises is devoted to examining one’s sin, but the point is not to berate or belittle the maker of the Exercises. Rather, the grace of the first week is the experience of love. “Ignatius expects that God will reveal our sins in such a way that we will actually be consoled. We are to have an increase of faith, hope, and love, be moved to tears of sorrow for our sin, but also to tears of love for a God who has been so good to us” (Barry 1991, p. 51). The heart of the message from both Julian and Ignatius is the goodness of God, the love of God, and the freedom which God gives us in the hope that we will choose to put God at the center of our lives, and participate in God’s mission.

Both mystics are saying that we must look in the world and in ourselves to find God. Their piety is finding God in all things, starting with finding ourselves IN God. “For our Soul is so deep-grounded in God, and so endlessly treasured, that we may not come to the knowing thereof till we have first knowing of God, which is the Maker, to whom it is oned” (Julian 2002, p. 133). This is such a contemporary message; it is not surprising that both mystics are being read more in our time than in any time of the past, including their own.

I have argued here that both Julian and Ignatius provide us with kataphatic paths to relationship with God as friend, one in which we are constantly called to God’s mission, but never coerced or threatened. We are called to examine our own sins, not the sins of others; we communicate with God who already God loves us and forgives us already. This is a contemporary theme. These are mystics for our time.

Notes:

1 Since this is not a “personal reflection paper,” I will not discuss further my own experiences. Suffice to say that the parallels I find in Julian’s writings to my own experiences were the motivation for my choosing this topic.

2 “You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because I have made known to you everything I have heard from my father.”

3 References to “Pages” in Julian are to the original manuscript pages; references to Ignatius are to pages in the Vintage-Random House version with section numbers referring to Ignatius original sections.

References

Barry, W. A. (1991). Finding God In All Things A Companion To The Spiritual Exercises Of St. Ignatius. Notre Dame, IL, Ave Maria Press.

Gieraths, G. M. (1986). "Life in Abundance: Meister Eckhart and the German Dominican Mystics of the 14th Century." Spirituality Today 38 (August): Supplementary Book.

Holloway, J. B. (1996) The Westminster Cathedral/Abbey Manuscript of Julian of Norwich's Showing of Love. http://www.umilta.net/westmins.html.

Holloway, J. B. (1997) Godfriends: The Continental Medieval Mystics. http://www.umilta.net/godfrien.html.

Ignatius (2000). The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. New York, Random House.

Julian (2002). Revelations of Divine Love. Grand Rapids, MI, Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Walsh, R. (1909). Friends of God. The Catholic Encyclopedia. Online Edition, K. Knight. 6.

The Realm of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius

I was a Jesuit for eleven years and have some experience with the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. I did the thirty-day retreat in the novitiate and a 19th annotation retreat when deciding whether to be ordained or leave the Society. Finally, a friend, a secular Jew and a man of deep compassion, asked me to lead his Episcopalian wife through them while she underwent treatment for leukemia. This is that story.

This last experience was profound and, in many ways, signaled that the Exercises, as Jesuit discipline, had escaped the shelter and confines of the Order that Ignatius founded and had been home to them for 500 years.

Daniel Shurman’s wife, Bonnie Johnson, had been diagnosed with Leukemia. She was going to be in isolation for at least 30 days while her immune system was destroyed so that she could receive a bone transplant. She decided to undertake the Exercises while being forced to be virtually alone.

Thirty days became almost 80 days and included several near-death experiences. I suspected that she had a very grave diagnosis and that the chances of her survival might be slim.  Her doctors confirmed this as the treatment progressed. This might be more like hospice work than the Exercises as I had experienced them. 

It’s a given that a director of the Exercises will have his or her own director.  I was then and still am on the fringes of the Catholic community. I reached out for backup and consulted with several Jesuits but decided to use my Zen teacher as my guide rather than any of the directors with whom I’d talked. This was, I suppose, a result of my own needs, but the level of discomfort among the Jesuits I spoke with about dealing with death and the process of meditation was startling.  Another factor was my gut told me the best way to do the Exercises exactly as Ignatius indicated (or as best as I could), without any interpretation or adaptation, and just allow whatever grace was available to work through on its own.  This is how my teacher and I work with the koans, which are more recondite than the Exercises, traversing language, culture, and time very distant from our own. 

Most of the Jesuits I talked with tinkered with the Exercises, substituting their more modern, enlightened take on Ignatius’s straightforward and rigorous approach. It’s impossible to avoid interpreting, adding layers of meaning. Sometimes, this helps, but more often, it gets in the way. My work on the koans leads me to believe there is a level of work that’s like hitting gold—beyond experience and interpretation. It is unpredictable.

In Bonnie’s case, it was a given that she’d interpret. She was a woman of extraordinary accomplishment both in her personal life and her intellectual life, a leader in her Episcopal community as well as someone whose work was highly regarded in the world of Silicon Valley, where she explored the effects of technology from the human side, both in product development and user interface. But even during the strenuous medical treatment, she always returned to the sequence of meditations, the specified number of prayers and meditations, and the examen, as closely as possible to Ignatius’s recommendation.

When she was finally released from Stanford Hospital, the medical team told her that they’d done about all they could and that she ought to go home and get her affairs in order. It was unexpected when her blood indicators showed that she was disease-free after a few months—almost miraculous. During what is called “The Election” in the Exercises, she looked at ordination in the Episcopal church. Within a few months, she began a three-year program at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, worked on the connections between the exercises and the mysticism of Julian of Norwich, asked the well-known author Bill Barry, S.J. to be her spiritual director, edited one of his books about friendship with God, began a career as a lay preacher, and worked as a chaplain in nursing homes on North Carolina where she and Daniel lived on the outer banks. It was more than eleven years before her cancer returned with a vengeance, and she died. Alas, there was no “real” miracle to use for canonization—just the total miracle of life itself.

Although I am still skeptical about the Exercises and what they do, that mindset exists more in the realm of speculation, which is where it should be. I do think/know that Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises come from another source, which is precisely where to look. 

When I seek inspiration to work for justice and make a difference, I reread Alinsky’s rules for radicals to get a template. When I want to be inspired by the life of Jesus and search there to discern the Will of the Creator, I turn towards the Exercises. This gift from Ignatius and the Spirit has escaped the bounds of his organization. Exactly right again. 

This is Bonnie’s story.

Bonnie’s Writing:

"Finding God in All Things"

https://jesuskoan.blogspot.com/2021/06/finding-god-in-all-things.html

Bonnie Johnson Shurman

Jan. 20, 1944-June 2, 2011

For more of my writing on Father Ignatius’s Exercises, here is a list:

Newsflash! Pope announces changes to the Spiritual Exercises

https://jesuskoan.blogspot.com/2024/01/big-changes-for-jesuit-spirituality.html

Looking at The Particular Examen of Saint Ignatius with Fresh Eyes

https://jesuskoan.blogspot.com/2022/01/looking-at-particular-examen-of-saint.html

Occam’s Razor of Emotional Discernment

Novacula Occami

https://jesuskoan.blogspot.com/2021/09/occams-razor-of-emotional-discernment.html

Head versus Heart, Faith and Reason, Reason and the Emotions

The Discernment of Spirits in the Spiritual Exercises

https://jesuskoan.blogspot.com/2021/10/head-versus-heart-faith-and-reason.html

The Dynamism of Desire, A Book Conversation

https://jesuskoan.blogspot.com/2022/01/the-dynamism-of-desire-book-conversation.html

A Zen reflection on Yom Kippur

 

For years, I had been hanging onto my resentment towards a person who really did abuse me mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and sexually. Something had to be done.

Then a Zen friend asked a good question: “Is forgiveness an act of will?”

Psychologists define forgiveness as a conscious decision to release feelings of resentment or vengeance toward a person or group who has harmed you, regardless of whether they actually deserve your forgiveness. It's a choice that allows a person to forgive another for an offense or act that was illegal or immoral. It is intentional. When a debt is forgiven, there is a release of any expectation or commitment to repay or compensate. When someone forgives someone, they let go of negative emotions. 

In terms of the law and psychotherapeutic practice, as well as perhaps even the Talmud, these definitions are helpful; however, as a Zen practitioner, I wondered if they went far enough. I’m going to posit forgiveness as a way to move beyond the past, in the sense that the trauma becomes a complete chapter of personal history without any lingering effects in one’s present, everyday life. I’ve set the bar quite high. But it is Yom Kippur today. Forgiveness is an act of God. It is a way to follow God. We all make mistakes. We all need forgiveness.

Some people define forgiveness as a command to forget the past and simply move on. I actually find that injunction extremely annoying. I’ve been told that I didn't have to condone the act, but I had to forgive to live fully and dispel the darkness, or something like that. My instinct tells me that if the past is not fully complete, part of being compassionate is to acknowledge what happened fully, rather than simply setting it aside. 

I also hate being told what’s in my best interest. Thanks for advice I didn’t request. But now that I’ve owned up to my off-the-shelf response, perhaps I can examine why I resist this blanket injunction to forgive. I want to decide when, what, and if to forgive. If the offense or event is not in the past because it’s not in the past, that’s a limit to simply declaring something ancient history. And suppose I’m being enjoined to dispel the darkness of past events that are blatantly evil and destructive. In that case, just dismissing them and their consequences under some command to “move on” is not particularly useful or helpful simply because it’s not honest. These are the sort of events that will inevitably repeat themselves.

My friend Susan Murphy, an insightful Australian Zen teacher, pointed to the story of Jesus at Capernaum when he healed a man whose friends lowered him through the roof of a house where Jesus was with some friends—the crowd so dense that this was the only way to get Jesus’s attention. Some version of the story appears in all three synoptic gospels.

The writers of the story clearly distinguish between two aspects of Jesus' healing. First off, Jesus says, “Your sins are forgiven.” That’s the most important one: the man’s faith and that of his friends have caught the attention of Jesus, and he does what he was sent to do, forgive sins. But it is, after all a teaching story, so there are objections: scribes and Pharisees, at least rhetorically present, ask, ‘How can you forgive? That power belongs only to God.’ And here are the words Jesus responded with in Mark’s gospel: "Why are you thinking these things? Which is easier: to say to the paralytic, 'Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, 'Get up, take your mat and walk'? “ The man stands and picks up his mat, demonstrating Jesus’s power, but it also says, compared to forgiving sins, that was the easy part. In the blink of an eye, the past becomes the past.

Why the deliberate separation of two events or two sides of the same event? Forgiveness is an act of grace and God. In the story, the disappearance of the physical impairment becomes the past. Jesus is neither a charlatan nor a soothsayer nor a fake miracle worker; the act of forgiveness belongs to God alone. However, in most cases, depending on factors we cannot fully understand, there may or may not be a sought-after, usually magical physical cure. However, this nuance is usually left for a commentator or preacher to address at a later date.

This is Susan’s observation: “When Jesus told the paralysed man who had been lowered through the roof for a miracle, ‘Pick up your bed and walk,’ effectively he was acting not in the name of supernatural power but in the name of the forgiveness he was asserting he had a right to bestow. ‘Justice is mine,’ says the Lord. What I see here is that the true miracle was not the performance of a nature-bending act. It was forgiveness. He veered away from performing miracles after that. They were cheapening his teaching. . . . Forgiveness is surely the actualising of love.”

I just let a Zen teacher provide the midrash for a Jesus story, so now I’ll spin a Zen tale from the threads of the Gospel..

A small band of Zen monks carries a paralyzed brother to meet Jesus in Capernaum and get his blessing. Like the throngs of people I see in India lining up for darshan, they’re seeking some relief for their sufferings, but following their training, our Zen monks don’t have too many expectations. There, I’ve set the stage for a Buddhist encounter with Jesus. 

Their Zen training actually adds a lot of work. They have to carry their brother a long way from a distant Eastern ashram. Then they find the materials and tools to fashion a ladder to get up to the roof. They certainly can’t steal one. After determining where Jesus was sitting, they carefully cut an opening in the ceiling, not hurting anyone in the room with falling debris. Each one of these actions is deliberate, requiring planning and effort. The work is performed as carefully and mindfully as possible. They’re monks after all. I didn’t mention that they might also have to learn Aramaic, but there’s already enough to do without that, so let’s throw in the magical appearance of a good interpreter.

Somehow they climb down into the presence of Jesus with the brother they’ve just lowered in a sling, and hear, “Your sins are forgiven.” 

They also hear the Pharisees' question: “Doesn’t forgiveness of sins belong to God?” "Good question," they say, and the dharma combat begins. The Pharisees are the fall guys in the Gospel stories, but not for our Zen monks: What is forgiveness of sins exactly? What is there to forgive? Are a misstep or an evil act the same? These monks live by the Law of dependent origination, Paticca-samuppada. Something in their brother’s past resulted in his paralysis. At least in that regard, on the surface, although Jesus does not talk about any cause for the man’s affliction, there seems to be a tacit acknowledgement that it was the result of something in his past, his sins. In Zen they were taught to chant: “All my ancient twisted karma from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, born through body, speech, and mind. I now fully avow.” 

I promised therapy. Here is an examination of the mental results of past events.

I recognized my personal connection to this Jesus story, and I thank Susan for providing the context for me to work into. I am the paralytic lowered through the roof. Among my sins were sexual dysfunction and frustration; there was alcohol and substance abuse; there were the silly issues with partners that popped up—when I managed to find someone willing to put up with my defensiveness. I would have certainly preferred to exit the dead-end process earlier. I can imagine the possibility of having time and energy to explore other avenues, but daydreams are most often nothing more than dreams.

And yes, I regret those lost opportunities. It is not difficult to be truly forgiving and compassionate when you really comprehend the pain of your own life. But expanding the story just a bit, it also applies to another person’s life. It seems to actually spring up naturally without effort or responding to a command to move on. And, in my case, it happened in its own course after I was willing to do the work of unraveling the complex story of my abuse.

Why do intelligent people believe nonsense? Because when we’re vulnerable and in pain, we need to experience compassion. The real answer to the question about "moving on" is that the compassion and forgiveness had to be for myself. And because I’ve opted for the Zen route, it was not like just falling through a hole in the roof or being lowered into a Blessed Presence. I traveled from afar with the help of companions, and I remained angry long enough to get to the heart of the matter. That was my good luck, at least for me, that route could not be short-circuited.

The hip New Age coffee house sage will tell you that not forgiving only hurts you. There’s no one to break but yourself, so why not “Move On”? By contrast, in legendary Zen, a deceptively ordinary lady at the tea stand doesn’t order you around. Instead, she asks a simple, innocent-sounding, straightforward question: “Hey, Mr. Paralytic, is that ‘not-walking-mind’ past, present, or future?” A good answer might allow you to step into the radical present. The past is past because it’s past; the future might exist in hopes and dreams, perhaps sadly colored with regret; the only place to walk into is this moment.

If there was a tea stand in Capernaum, you can bet that there were crowds like the ones surrounding Jesus. Zen is oftentimes a lonely practice, but maybe a few stragglers found their way there after Jesus had performed enough miracles for one day. They might be lucky enough to come armed with some good questions. That might take some work, work that’s still to be done, like finding a path to forgiveness.

In Zen, forgiveness is an act of will if you refuse to settle for an easy way out. Then the Blessed Presence thing just happens. That cannot be willed.

For Jon Logan, John Piane, Eddie Logan, Lilly Logan, and their families. In deep gratitude.

Issan Dorsey and Some Undisclosed Secrets of the AIDS Epidemic

What follows is an interview I did with Marlin Marynick for his book, Undisclosed: Secrets of the AIDS Epidemic.

1/27/2012

I'm a gay man in San Francisco. I've been living here since 1974. I'm a former Jesuit—I’d been in Berkeley studying theology—and when I came out, I stayed. I did all the crazy kind of things that people do when they first come out—particularly the men of my generation who were just beginning to do the things we were really capable of in spite of all the discrimination against us. I drove a cab for a number of years, and I started a wood shop, perfect for a guy with a degree in theology, but I didn't really feel much like practicing any religion. When I met Harvey Milk, I joined the fight for gay rights. I had a partner, and we tried to build a life here in gay Mecca.

Then, all of a sudden in the mid-80s, our friends began dying, huge numbers. .. first it was called gay cancer, then it was called GRID. nobody really knew what it was, but it was terrifying. Towards 1987-88 I felt that I had to do something, although this was also a process of me overcoming my own fears, of dealing with them. I had many friends who were diagnosed, and everybody was dealing with the fear, the loss, and the not-knowing what we were really dealing with.

In 1988, I met a gay Buddhist priest, Issan Dorsey. Friends had told me that he was a remarkable guy, but my first impressions were that he was actually rather ordinary, far more effeminate than any of my gay friends, and not in any way “spiritual” as I understood the word.

Issan, “Tommy” Dorsey, did have an unusual path to Zen. He had been a professional drag queen and a heavy drug abuser, which was not terribly out of the ordinary for gay San Franciscans 40 years ago. He was also a very bright, funny, human being, and he had just started an AIDS hospice. (He himself died at the Hospice of the disease on September 6, 1990—he’d contracted HIV from his partner, James). I was blessed to be able to be with him during the last few years of his life, and helped him create Maitri Home and Hospice for People with HIV.

I had first moved into the Zen center on Hartford Street to practice meditation, to get away from a relationship that was ending, and to put some perspective around all that. Very quickly after I packed my bags, my partner and I closed our business, we made and sold furniture, and ended our relationship. So there I was living in this Zen center-hospice, and I started doing some general carpentry work, fixing bathrooms, getting rooms ready for the men who would live with us. It just was the next thing to do, right in front of me. This quickly lead to finding money to pay for the building materials; then more organizational stuff; and by 1990, I followed Steve Allen as executive director of the hospice. Looking back, it was something that my Jesuit training, and everything, prepared me for though I didn't have much experience with non-profits and no experience in health care.

Back then, people with HIV/AIDS died quickly after being diagnosed. . . 3 weeks, 6 weeks, a few months, perhaps a little bit longer in rare cases. It felt like we were picking up bodies off the street. Some months, 100 men died in our neighborhood, the Castro. You'd walk down the street, pass someone you knew who looked pretty healthy. Then you'd see him 2 weeks later and he’d aged 40 years. Within a year or two, I said to myself, "Oh my god, where did my friends go?" No one knew what to do, or how to behave around those infected—these were friends. Of course, a lot of us were afraid of catching the disease, because no one knew how it was transmitted, although we had our suspicions, no one really knew. No one knew if it was poppers, or kissing, or if it really was sex, drugs, and rock and roll. That didn't appear on the horizon for a while because no one wanted to give up those things. Sexual freedom was part of our emancipation, or that’s what we thought. Denial was a big part of the epidemic’s horrifying spread through the community.

Issan said that the only real thing that we could do was to take care of what was in front of us, take care of life as it presented itself. He said HIV was like a guest who’d come and knocked at the door, and couldn’t be turned away. When one member of the small meditation community, JD, became so sick that his partner Pierre could no longer care for him, despite the misgivings of some in the community—Issan could be very firm, even stubborn, when he was sure of the next thing he had to do—he moved JD into the bedroom next to his. And he began looking after his immediate needs, which included martinis after evening meditation, spicy hot dogs, and cable TV. It was a very simple concept—just take care of people in the most basic way and sustain a normal life for as long as possible. And be as happy as you could—no matter what.

And then something unexpected happened, JD did not die quickly. The symptoms of the disease worsened; he could no longer walk and was bedridden, but when a supporter gave Maitri a motorized wheelchair, JD became a teenager with a hot rod, missing meals, and staying out past curfew. He found a new boyfriend who was also disabled, and they began to spend the night together. We moved him from the second floor to the street-level front room of the second building, where he held court. Four or five other men would be in his room watching campy movies on VCR at all hours. He stocked his small refrigerator intended for medications with soda and beer, and in the front window a hydroponic wheatgrass farm, for health, of course. All this really tested some zennish sensibilities, and the CNA staff. But despite complaints, Issan remained firm in his support for JD. When JD returned one day from Oakland—he’d taken BART across the Bay—with an iguana, no one believed that he would actually take care of it himself. He did. In fact he smuggled his pet onto a plane when he went back to Florida to spend his last days with his mother. The story of the lizard squirming around under his shirt while JD locked himself in the toilet at 30,000 feet became the stuff of legend. I think that JD’s story is also a real example of what kind of life is possible when your guests are not bound by some rigid rules for how you expect guests to behave.

Even if people couldn’t see the compassion in what Issan was doing, almost everyone trusted him enough to give money. Another friend of his bought the building next to our small Victorian house, and we bought back the lease. That gave us room for another 5 people. Within a year, we had 8 beds for people with HIV-AIDS, plus 6 people to take care of them, Issan, Phil Whalen, a zen priest, as was Steve Allen, and his wife, Angelique, Michael Jamvold, myself, and David Bullock. We shared a life together—we meditated, had fun. We worked hard and cried.

Maitri was a ragtag operation. We learned, and we would create a Buddhist hospice piece by piece. I began to spend time helping people get their paperwork arranged for the end of their life, getting everything straightened out with their partners and their families, taking care of the kinds of things that come up towards the end of life. I asked social workers and lawyers to help, and everyone I asked stepped forward.

What also started to become clear, we were charting new territory. We were the only Zen center in the United States to put meat, chicken, and sausages on our vegetarian, Zen table. People with HIV need protein. There were a lot of other things that broke rules, both in Zen terms and hospice-wise. When we had to take care of getting the drugs adjusted so that people could have a fairly comfortable life, we got help from Visiting Nurses and Hospice (Steve Allen worked out a contract with them to provide a full-time nurse and certified nursing attendants using money already allocated for care from the city). As I started to investigate how we could get money for hospice, I discovered that for most insurance and federal funding, people had to have a 6-month diagnosis to receive assistance, and they couldn't take any drugs, which would prolong life. Issan said that’s crazy because he wanted people to live and enjoy life as much as they could for as long as they could. There was a new, experimental drug called Foscarnet, which prevented, or at least retarded, blindness caused by CMV retinitis. It had to be given intravenously. The nurses from hospice were not allowed to do that with hospice patients, so I recruited a small group of volunteers who learned how to administer it. Then several patients wanted to sign up for drug trials of the new HIV drugs that began to appear. It would probably have been prohibited in more formal hospice settings, but somehow, I convinced VNA to not report any person at Maitri who enrolled in a drug trial.

The partner of my friend Michael, who was dying, called Maitiri “the house of death” when I suggested that he move Michael in. I was pretty offended. I saw what we were doing as creating a house of life. As I struggled to keep the cable TV from being shut off and lamb stew on the table, I sometimes felt like I was running “Animal House.” There were lots of humorous, funny things going on all the time. Yes, people were dying, in the 2 + years I was there, 82 people died in those 8 beds, and I was with almost every one of them. I won’t deny that it tested my defenses, that it was trying, and that it was stressful work. There was always a poignancy about life at Maitri. But when death is simply part of life, it becomes easier to sustain what we think of as normal life.

Bit by bit, we did put something together, and what we created is now the longest surviving AIDS hospice, “home and hospice for people with AIDS,” in the city. The morbidity rate from HIV/AIDS has gone down enormously, thank god. Only a few people actually die in the hospice now, so the current staff deals with things like drug addiction, and adherence to medical protocol for the antiviral drugs, respite care, things that Issan would have encouraged us to do to make life as normal and happy for as long as it lasts. What we did in the early days of the epidemic and what continues to be done now is really extraordinary.

By the time he died, I realized that Issan was a truly extraordinary man. He had more than an extremely funny sense of humor. He’d worn a skirt, or as he used to say, "I still wear a skirt, but I renounced the heels." His speech was always entirely in plain language. And he really was a Zen master. When this drag queen, substance abuser par excellence, started to sit in meditation with Susuki Roshi, he sat down and looked at the bottom of his feet, and said to himself, oh my god, they are dirty. . . and he started to clean up from drugs, and meditate. He also discovered what was important for his own life. In official Zen, he went as high as any man can go. For me, he was an absolutely extraordinary, terrific human being.

The Cosmic Coincidental Control Center may be at work.

If not, let’s kick-start it.

July 1, 2025

Before the last Enneagram International Association Conference in July 2025, Jerome Wagner and Patrick O’Leary, both former Jesuits and pioneers in the Modern Enneagram movement, gave a presentation on their experiences before all the books, before Palmer, before Almas, Sandra Maitri, and Naranjo’s new, Spanish SAT groups. Along with a small cohort of Father Bob Ochs’s first enneagram students, they were the only people who had never signed either a non-disclosure agreement or a pledge of confidentiality, which became the focal point of the lawsuits that followed. This is part of my correspondence with them regarding that early history.

I have neither applied nor would I be admitted to the august halls of high-level Enneagram deliberations, but I will take your emails as an opportunity to sound off on the early days of Enneagram enthusiasm. My perspective is quite different. The “8” in my email address comes from neither 7 nor 9 being available among the addresses Google offered me when Gmail was in beta. So I’ve left it as the impetus of a strong eight-wing to cut through the inertia of a nine. 

I find myself in a very reflective period right now. I have been isolated in Asia for the last seven years, beginning during the COVID-19 lockdown in India, which was extremely restrictive. It continues. For the past two and a half years, I have been in Thailand, leading a solitary, almost monastic life. I did not foresee any of this, but things have a way of happening. I have been reflecting and writing. 

My retreat is not self-directed. Since 1988, I have been a formal Zen student. I work on the koans in a structured way—the whole nine yards, including daily meditation and frequent meetings with my teacher. I’ve tried helter-skelter, but I wind up in lalaland pretty quickly. I started zazen as a confirmed atheist, but as I said, things have a way of happening, and my current teacher is in the same lineage as the Jesuit Zen Master Father Emiyo LaSalle. So when pressed for a faith statement, I call myself a Jesuit agnostic.  Why am I saying any of this? I woke up this morning with a relatively rasa tabula, and I'm tired of watching Trump on YouTube destroy most of what I hold dear about being an American.

You will be addressing a self-selected group of Enneagram enthusiasts. And it’s an off-the-record exchange. Perfect. My views are unvarnished, critical, and extremely grateful. Of course, it is not the only perspective. This is completely off the record, but I’m presenting it to you for your use. I never aspired to teach the Enneagram, but I am now fairly adept at developing the kind of concentration that enables self-observation.  You said you were going to invite people to talk about what has remained part of their practice. The Enneagram, Naranjo, Ochs, and SAT have been an enormous part of what, I suppose, is my spiritual narrative for more than 50 years. And because it is so basic, it remains. Like being a Jesuit.

The first thing that I would say to the assembled host is that not one of them would have an Enneagram job or income without Bob Ochs. Not a one. Hameed and Sandra’s teachers are few, and they are the only Enneagram teachers who do not, in one way or another, trace their lineage to Ochs. The other exception is perhaps a person with a vaguely Sufi name, Laleh Bakhtiar. However, I would still bet that even he or she would not have written a single word or worked with a single student if it were not for what Bob did at considerable personal cost. It was enormous. 

My sources are my recollections of conversations with almost all the early major players, except Ichazo, plus my experience of SAT for the whole time Naranjo taught in Berkeley; I did not miss a meeting in five years. I am a Nine, though I posed as a Seven, and I think I would characterize my participation as “dogged.” I was not one of the stars -- sometimes to my chagrin. Other times I consider it a blessing.

I have maintained close contact with several members of the first, second, and third SAT groups over many years, and we continue to unpack our experiences. I cannot say if Hameed would even remember my being in the group. That’s OK. He’s as boring now that he's become an enlightened being as he was in Group 1. But to begin the list, I was very close to Father Joe Scerbo, a gay Franciscan friar who is now gone; MM; Michael Smith; Glen Lewis, who was in Arica with Caludio; Daniel Shurman; AL, very full of herself; and CD, toitally full oif herself; Claudio and Rosalyn; Catherine Thur. We all talked. Charlie Tart is still a pompous asshole. He didn’t remember me when I reintroduced myself at a talk by his teacher, Sogyal Rinpoche, founder of Rigpa, who was credibly accused of sexual misconduct. Charlie was too busy congratulating himself and kissing ass to pay me much attention. I didn’t miss much. I’ve had email exchanges with Idries Shah’s son, Tahir, who is a truly remarkable guy. He was a classmate of a friend, Cynthia Merchant’s brother. Cynthia was not in SAT but became one of Claudio’s close assistants when his teaching was mainly in Spain and South America. She is seamlessly bilingual. I got in touch with Tahir because I loved his writing and wanted to cross-check information I had heard from Ochs about Doris Lessing and Tahir’s father. I mention all these names so that you know that I ain’t just whistling Dixie.

After I left the Hoffman Institute, on a whim, I asked Claudio to allow me to interview him about a possible article I was calling “The Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram.” He spoke with me for several hours a day over a week or so. I prepared a transcribed version of our taped conversations, and he gave me permission to use the material as I saw fit. Alas, I lost the whole damn thing in a computer crash and the tapes disapeared in some attic clear out between boyfriends. So I will rely on my memory and intuitive sense to recreate Claudio’s reflections. They were not very positive. I have some very subjective ideas as to why this is so, and when I get to that material, I will say so. (Spoiler alert: it was the drugs.)

Where to begin? The Jesuit Transmission of the Enneagram. Claudio was emphatic: there was no Jesuit transmission because “they” (you guys, Helen et al) made too many mistakes. You could not type an Eight if your life depended on it. Helen said something like “In our work, we see far more Eighths coming into the 'Work' than Claudio did. When I quoted her, he might have even used the word “bullshit,” though he rarely used gutter talk. Another thing that I remember well about this series of interviews was that there was no humor, a few nervous chuckles, and no jokes. It was all deadly serious.

Claudio asserted that he had only authorized Bob to convey his “indications” to the Jesuit groups (JSTB and Loyola), and that was it. There was to be no personal spin or interpretation. As an example, he cited the “now infamous” meeting where all of you, priests, nuns, men, and women, were to disrobe as a sign of fearless self-inquiry and surrender. He said that Ochs would not have dared give that direction on his own. AL tells me that it was she who came to the group that night in Chicago and had everyone take off their clothes in the closing ceremony; everyone did. I have just heard the story. It was more extreme than the directions or “Indications” given to any Berkeley group. Claudio told me that the idea came to him on a sudden “whim.” 

Both Claudio and Icnazo’s “holier-than-thou” shtick gets a bit heavy. When I say that Naranjo granted me permission to use the material as I saw fit, that was a significant gesture, and he delivered the statement of release or commission in a very formal tone. He made a big deal in these interviews that his notes and Ichazo’s Arica file had escaped without his permission, and their use was unethical, even immoral, because we had all pledged not to use any material without explicit permission. I think I know the source of the major leak (I’m sure, actually), although it is also the source of a lot of denial and counterargument. I can talk later about the missing 73rd (think the number is correct) that Ichazo did not retrieve when the 10-month Arica training was completed. 

(Helen also states somewhere in the court documents about her use of Osacr’s enneagon that she never saw nor used Ichazo’s confidential and, I presume, copyrighted notes. Oh, that Helen is a slippery one. She’s almost Jesuitical. Of course, she saw it, but you will never get me to say that publicly.)

To get Claudio to share, I let him control the conversation. There was a clear, definite subtext: he was deeply upset (I’ll use a gutter expression, “pissed off”) about the huge number of Enneagram titles available. I didn’t press the question. Market share was the true source of the upset. That he considered many of the interpretations to be misdirected, if not entirely flawed, was secondary. Believe me, he didn’t read many (if any) of your books; rather, he heard reports about the typing and might have cross-checked here and there. The issue was that he’d lost control. Although he always spoke of Oscar in a guarded, slightly disapproving way, it was always couched in the mystery that Ichazo was the link between the Enneagram and Gurdjieff’s teachings. With that link was some (to me) weird, esoteric, almost mystiical connection. Ochs had no authorization to pass on that imprimatur or seal of approval because Naranjo imagined Bob had bungled the job, which was unforgivable.

Let’s pick up the timeline again. These interviews happened after Naranjo had stopped returning Ochs’s phone calls; it might have been when I was still at Hoffman, but before 9/11. The serious and hurtful blaming had begun and was taking its toll. Bob had stopped teaching at the JSTB, or anywhere. He moved out of the small faculty residence that I found on Hillegass Avenue at the American Baptist Seminary of the West. Perhaps he had been asked to leave. When we talked, he was evasive. He told me that he’d rented a tiny, dark in-law apartment in a converted garage, in a very Asian neighborhood up the hill in El Cerrito. The Jesuits had given him a leave of absence, or sabbatical, plus a small stipend. I was not clear about his canonical status, but his connection to the Society was tenuous at best. He told me that he told his superiors he was working on a book, and they were (how shall I say this?) eager to see results which would never materialize. I surmised that they really didn’t know what to do with him. 

As I said, Claudio had stopped returning Bob’s phone calls, which upset him terribly, and he was no longer visiting the tantric Master Yogi Chen. His only visitor was Susan Diridoni, a lovely woman from either my group or the one directly after mine. I knew Susan and knew that she and Bob had a romantic connection. Susan has also died. I would never have mentioned their intimate connection while they were alive. I am not even sure if I should now, at least publicly, though Bob would not be the first heterosexual Jesuit to develop a strong, exclusive, romantic relationship that at some point included sex. Theilard apparently had a lover, and I knew the woman who filled that role for Avery Dulles, though I am absolutely sure they never had sex.

I called Bob at regular intervals for perhaps a decade. Sometimes it would take him a week or more to respond. We would meet at a particular restaurant where he could eat, particularly a Peruvian one on Mission in San Francisco. He complained that he had no energy; he found a doctor/dietician who prescribed a matchbook-sized piece of protein to be eaten between 1 and 4 in the afternoon. Or something that crazy, so crazy that it would drive a One off the rails. 

He told me that he was trying to write. At the time, I found hundreds of titles, which had increased to more than 300 the last time I surveyed them in 2019. https://enneagrambibliography.blogspot.com/2019/07/all-things-enneagram.html

He was not jealous, though he did mention that all these (his) teachers were generating good incomes and he was living on less than 2,000 USD a month. It didn’t feel like jealousy. I recognized a burden in the way of One’s, to compare and contrast his output very critically. It paralyzed him. It was a sense that he had been the source of so much good work, but every time he started to write, he would produce a few pages and then mercilessly throw them in the waste basket after a week. He felt obligated to produce something unique, worthy of the guy who kicked the ball into play, and he couldn’t do it.

I asked him what he wanted to say. He would respond vaguely that no one had ever looked at the major authors of the Western canon from an Enneagram perspective. However, somehow typing Tolstoy and launching into an analysis was not working out. I didn’t know how to respond, but my gut feeling is that, as with some of the more extreme Enneagram enthusiasts, he was asking the Enneagram to do something that it is not designed to do.

He was obsessed with two writers, Camille Paglia and Doris Lessing. How he lumped them together, I don’t know. With Paglia, I sensed some vindication that he’d been treated badly, even excluded for unjust reasons, and with Lessing, he was obsessed with finding another path to Gurdjieff. He told me that part of his practice was to write to Idries Shah — that letter writing was a revered Sufi practice. Shah might have sent a sentence or two back. When he died in 96, Bob wrote letters to his son as he was sure that Tahir had inherited his dad’s mantle. When Tahir responded that he was not a Sufi teacher, Bob continued to write his letters. He told me: “That’s what he’s supposed to say.” 

Looking back, I have to consider that Bob, a truly important person in my life, had suffered a psychotic break. He lived in a cave and entertained bizarre obsessions. His superiors were helpless. Bob was a solemnly professed member of a religious order with a track record of involvement in a significant spiritual movement. That credential has no value in the real world of academia and job applications. Thank God they did not cut him off. He would have been helpless. He told me that Susan had a profitable therapy practice and helped him out. (She also probably watched out for his mental state.) I was not in any position to help. I was also on a marginal income. Part of me wondered where all the people he’d helped were. Why didn’t he receive invitations to speak or contribute articles? Of course, by the time we had our Peruvian dessert, I realized that it would have been impossible to work with him. He gave us the Enneagram, and when it chewed up his life, we had to stand by helplessly.

Eventually, my calls became far less frequent, and he stopped responding. My own life was in deep shit. After going to meetings and quitting crystal meth, I did a year of intense traditional psychotherapy at Langley Porter. I had tried to trick myself into believing that the Enneagram, or Zen, could do the work of healing. In some ways, it made things worse, or maybe just brought them more into plain sight, while leaving any corrective actions for another time. I’m a Nine so you know how that went. 

I’m a recovering addict. I’m coming up on 15 years clean and sober. I’ve managed to travel the world; I write and tutor English, primarily to Buddhist teachers who want to work in English — that is where the money is for them. They do not pay me. I’ve worked on translating a Zen sutra into Tibetan that has been missing from their canon since approximately 950 C.E. I call myself the executive translator, getting the right materials to the right people at the right time, raising money and organizing the work. I know the Sutra well, but I do not know Tibetan. I have no temple. If I manage to return to India, I will be one of only three or four Zen teachers (and two of them are Jesuits) in a population of over a billion. Lots of Buddhists, though not many Indians. My teacher and I think that I might try to start a meditation hall near the Jesuit houses of formation in Delhi. There are 4000 Indian Jesuits now, more than in either the US or Europe. My boyfriend went to one of their colleges in Bihar.

So, how did things with the early Enneagram get so fucked up? I have a simple answer that is pretty straightforward, but one that is not talked about for good reason — it was the drugs. I didn’t use any drugs during SAT, not even during “Lines,” when it was recommended. Later I took LSD once with supervision, but I became addicted to crystal meth for amost 6 years. So I have to be careful with my judgmental One wing, but the first of the Steps is admitting that life with drugs had become unmanageable and out of control. 

The drug use in SAT was out of control, though everyone claimed that it was normal, or even a privledged state of mind. Almost everyone used drugs pretty much continually. Every weekend a new drug was passed around. People were always high, coming down, or recovering. There were drugs to summon the angry protectors, drugs to calm them, drugs to invite the Virgin to drop her viel of protection, LSD, MDA, MDMA. It was also illegal. Claudio could have lost his license if he had recommended any of these drugs, as several members later did, notably Speeth.  

Naranjo was perhaps the biggest abuser. He taught when he was high; he avoided teaching when he was high; he eventually had to quit SAT to dry out. He was brilliant, and he was a fucking mess. He was in no state of mind to conduct any solid or useful experiments. SAT was not a pharmaceutical spiritual testing ground. There were no controlled debriefings; there were no sober monitors. And of course, we couldn’t talk about it. Ochs was involved, perhaps not to the degree that most people in SAT were, but he experimented. I know because we shared the same floor at the faculty residence at the American Baptist Seminary of the West. Ones are not good drug addicts. Save that for Sevens. He tried to hold down a position at a Jesuit house of study; he failed. I left the Jesuits, moved to San Francisco, and drove a cab. 

I have more to say.  I'm not sure what to do with this, but thank you for allowing me the opportunity to say it. I have a few things to say about the Gurdjieff cult and how Helen obtained her information. You may have some suggestions. I think that this information about SAT and drug abuse does need to be said, but I am not clear enough to know how to do it effectively. You see, what you guys did was in so many ways some of the most valuable of all the Enneagram work. You saved it from the cult. Bob always told me, “Ideas make a difference. Good ideas can be a source of good action.” The Enneagram is such a source.

Going to button this up and call it a day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfjgO2amPSY&list=PLBqkQmExk0GJ_UdSxaSzbR_BDjcw1xGVR