Stepping Out From Under the Shadow of God

Originally posted on Tuesday, April 20, 2021

The Gateless Gate, Case 32, Blue Cliff Record, Case 65: 

A philosopher asked Buddha: "Without words, without the wordless, will you tell me the truth?"
The Buddha kept silence.
The philosopher bowed and thanked the Buddha, saying: "With your loving kindness I have cleared away my delusions and entered the true path."
After the philosopher had gone, Ananda asked the Buddha what he had attained.
The Buddha replied, "A good horse runs even at the shadow of the whip."

Mumon's Comment

Ananda was the Buddha's disciple, but his understanding was not equal to that of the non-Buddhist. I want to ask you, what difference is there between the Buddha's disciple and the non-Buddhist?

Mumon's Verse 

On the edge of a sword,

Over the ridge of an iceberg,

With no steps, no ladders,

Climbing the cliffs without hands.

___________

A friend asked, “If convert Western Buddhists just set up a competing cult, what’s the value in that?’ Then, because it was a rhetorical question, he answered himself, “The West doesn’t need another religion.” My first impulse was to agree, but when I realized that the koan was about asking questions. That put every answer into a new perspective. I believe some of the answers to my own questions; others I rebel against; some cannot be answered.

Although we cannot identify the “philosopher”with certainty—sometimes it’s rendered, “the pagan” and one teacher even calls him a “Hindu”—this much is clear, the Buddha’s questioner is not a member of the sangha or a lay follower. Sadhus, Confucian scholars, philosophical atheists, pagans, Unitarians, even Jesuits, people who may not even be interested in learning about the Buddhist Path, I have many friends in all those categories.

When I first heard this koan, I took it as validation of my strongly held opinion that no one, not even Buddhists, should try to convert anyone. Who am I to convert anyone? I have a hard enough time with myself. And as the Lord Buddha himself didn’t have anything to say, it was further proof that I was on the right side, or if I were a betting man and took Blaise Pascal’s wager seriously, I picked the right pony.

But I was selling the koan short. The Buddha kept silent. This might be an invitation for introspection and not a confirmation of some rule not to proselytize, but did the Buddha really pass over the philosopher’s question in silence? What if it was an invitation to examine my own questions to see how much they were merely a reaction to the unspoken admonitions of my training both as a Jesuit and an ordinary human? 

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 Buddhism is non-theistic; it does not entertain the question of divinity, neither affirming nor denying a supreme deity, certainly not in the same way that Christians do. In the realm of dogmatic theology, statements about the nature of divinity are the coin of the realm, and for Avery the existence of a personal deity was a deal breaker. 

But 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 and loving, not disapproving or forceful. He may have been trying to push me towards a more traditional faith, but I couldn’t respond.,“Of course 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. Again, we’re back to questions and answers. 

Avery however was a Jesuit through and through, and I might have countered his proposition with an invitation to inquiry, but I didn’t have the skill to turn a rhetorical or speculative question into an opening for discovery. 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 restrictive notions about God that Jesuits famously argued about with M. Blaise Pascal and the Jansenists.

Working with the koan opened up that opportunity again.

Avery framed his statement as a tautology. In logic it’s known as the excluded middle: the law (or principle) of the excluded third, principium tertii exclusi. Another Latin designation for this law is tertium non datur: "no third [possibility] is given." 

Wittgenstein says this constitutes a statement empty of meaning. Framing the question that way, did Avery cut off the possibility of even seeing or imagining anything but God-or-no-god? Despite what’s almost universal acceptance of monotheism at this point in time, it is simply one formulation that won the cultural and political “god” debate. It wiped out a huge range of numinous experience, or reduced it to a series of distinctions within the “God, Yes or No” conversation, turning monotheism into a kind of shibboleth* that separates believers and excludes atheists and materialists.

The outside questioner couldn’t force the Buddha to either take that position into account or exclude him or herself from the Way. That would be simply framing a question for a incorrect answer. Our philosopher doesn’t misstep.

There is an old adage in spiritual life that there are no bad questions. Frankly in my view this is little more than just trying to ease any inhibition from asking whatever questions might pop up. Given no picking and choosing, bad questions do not exist, and in the realm of good questions, there are better or more ‘useful’ questions when we are seeking to clear our path.

I am a former Jesuit*, and to be clear, I left the Jesuits and the Roman Catholic Church. However it is impossible for me to change that part of my training, no matter how much I find myself outside the tradition. For me the practice of meditation has been more like stepping out of the shadow of God. There are innumerable spiritual possibilities hidden in between dogmatic statements, mixed in with syncretism and heresy. They exist in a kind of shadow world that is a rich vein for exploration. Maybe Jesus wasn’t bodily resurrected from the dead, but the myth still opens a window into the human psyche. I can happily remain agnostic and explore that possibility.

After the philosopher leaves, Ananda asks the Buddha what the philosopher had attained. Poor Ananda. He missed the opportunity to ask someone who might have pointed him towards a useful answer. If he’d asked the philosopher, for example, how meditation had changed his worldview, we’d be in practice territory.

So Ananda just gets to wrestle with a puzzling shadow. Perhaps that was a gift. 

I need balance. If not, I get lost in a long theological rant and call it spiritual practice. Sitting quiets my mind just enough so that I can hear other voices besides my own. The rants calm down. Hearing and listening, however, are just the first steps towards understanding, and ultimately compassion. I encourage anyone, no matter what beliefs they cherish, to practice meditation with their whole heart. 

There are several “philosophers” who have attained fluency in Zen practice, Christians, Jesuits, other Catholic religious, a Unitarian minister, and one UCC minister, a friend, who have followed this path and become teachers in the koan tradition. I won’t even try to predict where their practice will take them or their students, but may their practice help relieve suffering and free all beings.

Father Ignatius would have approved of the Buddha's “shadow of the whip” answer. I think that it might point to the heart of the Jesuit-Zen connection. Go ahead. Ask the question of your own self: "Without words, without the wordless, will you tell me the truth?"

I have translated Wittengenstein’s answer into Latin.

De quibus loqui non possumus, nobis tacendum est.

[About what we cannot speak, we have to remain silent. Or

What we cannot talk about, we must pass over in silence.]

I will let the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins cap this conversation (from The Habit of Perfection):

Elected Silence, sing to me

And beat upon my whorlèd ear,

Pipe me to pastures still and be

The music that I care to hear.

Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:

It is the shut, the curfew sent

From there where all surrenders come

Which only makes you eloquent.

Avery died on 12 December 2008; I was told that among the few personal items he carried with him when he went into hospice care was the image of a painting I did when we lived together in New York. Your friendship was a precious gift. Thank you.

___________

Because this has become a Jesuit koan, footnotes are mandatory. 

*Shibboleth comes from the Hebrew for “ear of corn.” In the Book of Judges we learn that the Isrealites used it as a password because it was difficult for foreigners to pronounce. Mispronunciation didn’t just exclude. It marked them for death.

*Here is Pascal’s bet. 

“If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is...."God is, or He is not." But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.

Do not, then, reprove for error those who have made a choice; for you know nothing about it. "No, but I blame them for having made, not this choice, but a choice; for again both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault, they are both in the wrong. The true course is not to wager at all."

Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. 

Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.

"That is very fine. Yes, I must wager; but I may perhaps wager too much." Let us see. Since there is an equal risk of gain and of loss, if you had only to gain two lives, instead of one, you might still wager. But if there were three lives to gain, you would have to play (since you are under the necessity of playing), and you would be imprudent, when you are forced to play, not to chance your life to gain three at a game where there is an equal risk of loss and gain. But there is an eternity of life and happiness. And this being so, if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only would be for you, you would still be right in wagering one to win two, and you would act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to stake one life against three at a game in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain. But there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite.[12]

*I entered the Jesuits just after Jean-Baptiste Janssens’ tenure as Father General. Janssens was a remarkable man, the recipient of the title, “Righteous among the nations” for his courageous act of hiding a large group of Jewish children in the Provincial's residence in Brussels. 

He was also not known for a lax interpretation of Jesuit discipline. His letters to the brethren were filled with more admonitions than Saint Paul. He began with the Latin heads up, “Taceo--I pass over in silence reports that many Jesuits are smoking,” which was in no uncertain terms an order: “stop smoking.” Needless to say, examining the restrictive Jesuit norms brought a great sense of freedom, almost as much as rebelling against them. But even Buddhists agree that behavioral norms can promote liberation. 

Police Murder a Member of the Tender Zendo

 Blue Cliff Record, Case 63: Nanquan Kills the Cat (Gateless Barrier, Case 14) 

The priest Nanquan found monks of the eastern and western halls arguing about a cat. He held up the cat and said, “Everyone! If you can say something, I will spare this cat. If you can’t say anything, I will cut off its head.” No one could say a word, so Nanquan cut the cat in two. 

Night is night, and black is black.

There is no saving the helpless cat

Sliced in two.

Are they just bad monks?

Not one could open his mouth and

Move his tongue.

Later on that was the case 

If you release time and space.

An idiot playing a hat game claims to have saved the day

If not the cat.

He danced around on his head turning the world upside down

Meow.

Nan Ch’uan claims to set the record straight and turns 

The world right-side up.

Or does he?

The Blue Cliff Record dates from 1125, and the last editor of record was Chan Master Yuanwu Keqin who died ten years later. The Gateless Gate, which contains the same koan, was published a hundred years later in 1228 by the Chinese Zen Master Wumen Huikai. The editors were both Chinese. Both seem like heartless old pricks regarding cats, but both try their best to honor the precepts by teaching some monk break dancing and including it in the Koan, not as an afterthought..

I found this koan annoying (I am sure I am not alone); why are we left with blood on the floor? What the fuck was going on that paralyzed the monks’ tongues? The sight of Nanquan wielding a big knife? No, of course, he won’t really do it they think, but he does. Is there another case in the koan collection that involves breaking one of the grave precepts? That is the reason why it is famous. Or is it? It may be one of the only koans where we can reasonably assume the encounter happened: a teacher called Nanquan killed a cat in a monastery. It’s also the reason why so many people hate the case.

Black is black and dead is dead, but both Kequin and Wumen allow for dancing. Where do I stand more than 12 hundred years later? I would like to stand with dancing and making a fool of myself, but I know I cannot change the color of night. My date is approximately 2006.

I have been practicing and teaching meditation for over half a century, the majority in Zen practice. In the early 2000s, I taught basic meditation in the yoga studio of the Central YMCA in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, which I called the Tender Zendo. My teacher at the time, John Tarrant Roshi, told me that Zen’s strict form would be inappropriate for most people who would be coming. He recommended basic mindfulness practice, or “clearing meditation,” associated with the Elder School. He gave me a few books and set me off on my own. I was to check in every so often, which I did. 

A core group of almost five to eight people sat together every Tuesday night for nearly seven years until the building was sold to be converted into housing for a law school. Though there was a huge turnover on those 15 cushions and chairs, a few people consistently showed up and 

dedicated an enormous amount of energy to their practice. Among them was a young African American who called himself “Jihad.” 

Jihad was very handsome and had great eyes. He had gone to UC Berkeley on an athletic scholarship. He was a Cal Bear, even a star player, though not big enough to be pursued by a professional team. I don’t recall if we discussed that, but I found out later. He was intellectually gifted. And he was gay.

I asked why he’d changed his name. He told me that he was engaged in a holy war.  It was after 9/11, and few Americans knew of another interpretation of the Qu’ran’s injunction to followers of the Prophet. Jihad was fighting his demons in a way that inspired me: he was a meth addict, and meditation was his way of cultivating contact with his Higher Power. He sat in meditation with a fierce determination, almost as if he were on a Crusade. His war was the disciplined and serious work of gaining sobriety and finding a path for his gifts. 

I was very careful to be just a meditation guide, not a teacher, and certainly had no sexual entanglement. But we had many conversations. I learned that his brother had been killed by gang rivalry in East Oakland. I learned that his single mom was very involved in the black church. When he decided to sign up for the Peace Corps, he asked my opinion, and I did think that spending time in Africa might be a great thing. He went to Kenya. He loved urban Africa but hated village life--so much that he quit and returned to San Francisco.

One week, he told me that he was going into residential rehab and would not be coming for the duration. This was long before I ever had any personal experience with meth. 

But then one night when he was in treatment, he called me. He sounded desperate. He was sure that the doctor had messed with his medications. He knew it was wrong, not working. He felt crazy. I thought he might be paranoid, but all I could do was listen. I tried to call him back the next day, but the rehab wouldn’t connect me because I was not family or a professional connected with his treatment. I tried saying I was his spiritual counselor, but no luck. He may not have even been there. 

The following Tuesday night, I heard noise at the door while we were sitting. It was just a few feet to the right of my cushion. I thought I might have seen him, but I am unsure—my memory is not that clear—but I did hear his voice. Jihad had rushed up the stairs. He was fighting with the desk clerk who’d followed him and blocked him from coming in. They were loud. After a few minutes, I started to get up and go to the door but the noise stopped. Later, at the front desk, the clerk told me that he thought Jihad was high. He could not let anyone in the building if he suspected they were on drugs. He was sorry, but those were the rules.

The next day, I tried to call him again in the rehab, but nothing. That brief glimpse of him (if I did see anything) trying to get into the meditation hall was the last time I saw or heard from him. A few weeks later, I got an email announcing his funeral from someone I did not know. It was a friend who explained that he just went through his address book. He apologized that it had to be so impersonal, but he was in shock.

He’d been shot by police at a popular restaurant in the Castro when someone on staff had called to complain about his behavior; he was a big black guy acting strangely. The team they sent was trained to kill. Jihad ran into the kitchen and grabbed a knife. Witnesses said there was no reason for the police to have opened fire. The police said they’d not been trained to diffuse a situation when a drug addict’s treatment has failed. The bullet went straight to his heart; he died instantly. 

At least his mother would not have to hold her beloved, handsome son dead and disfigured, though how could there be any consolation in that?

I was shocked and devastated. I cried for three days. I wondered if things might have turned out differently if I had gone to the door and opened it, talked to the guy from the front desk and sat with you, talked with you, my friend. But like the monks in Nanquan’s waring monastery, my tongue was tied. I was haunted by that question. I will never know. Of course having learned my own lessons about sobriety the hard way, I realize that I did about all that I could have done, but somehow that is not enough.

Twenty years later I still ask that question: why did I not get up and open the door?

The Verse

Yes, there is a holy war worth fighting. Maybe we have to really turn to Hafiz for an answer.

“You Were Brave in that Holy War”

You have done well

In the contest of madness.

You were brave in that holy war.

You have all the honorable wounds

Of one who has tried to find love

Where the Beautiful Bird

Does not drink.

May I speak to you

Like we are close

And locked away together?

Once I found a stray kitten

And I used to soak my fingers

In warm milk;

It came to think I was five mothers

On one hand.

Wayfarer,

Why not rest your tired body?

Lean back and close your eyes.

Come morning

I will kneel by your side and feed you.

I will so gently

Spread open your mouth

And let you taste something of my

Sacred mind and life.

Surely

There is something wrong

With your ideas of

God

O, surely there is something wrong

With your ideas of

God

If you think

Our Beloved would not be so

Tender.

And finally the Koan supplies a monk who thinks he has the turning word: He’s just a wise-ass who comes on stage to do his little dance to delight the cat killer for the cheap laugh. I’ll punch his fucking lights out, and then ask him to cover his head and do pooja for Jihad.

Slurping is Zen

“If slurping is zen, that means that loud, ostentatious slurping must be god damn close to enlightenment.” Zen Master Q

When I first sat down with the man after he’d been named head priest, he began a long talk about wood, wind, fire, and water in traditional Chinese medicine. His line of questioning puzzled me. He seemed overly intent on learning where I was on this strange wellness scale and what I should do to right my balance. Over the course of our conversation, I learned that he was almost always cold and had killer headaches, which should have been my clue: he had no idea what he was talking about but hoped it might help him. What this had to do with meditation or zen was beyond me; what this had to do with me was also beyond me unless he was angling for my sympathy. Nonetheless, I hung in for almost an hour. I did observe that I could be assured that when it came to wearing a robe of the proper color for an esoteric ceremony, or at least one that didn’t clash, I would be in good hands, but that I shouldn’t trust him to diagnose Chinese wind malfunction. If I were training myself to ask pertinent questions, I might have tried “Why don’t you shut up?” 

I remember one afternoon when I sat down to noodles with Phil Whalen in Chinatown. He was extremely happy. He said that the best way to handle personal frictions in the sangha was to invite the warring parties out for a plate of noodles. This was, in his view, the key to good spiritual leadership--the way they did it in the old country. Not a bowl, not a dish, but a plate, plenty all around, and that slurping was not just OK, but expected. Apparently, after enough slurping together with the smiles that the lovely warm tastes brought to everyone’s lips, disagreements would vanish like the mirage they were, like everything is. Or so he thought. The conflicts raged on. I finally figured out that he loved a plate of noodles and that he loved food.

 ramen properly) from the ramen master.

There are hazards for Westerners trying to do Asian religious practice, and I just scratch the surface. We don’t know what the fuck we’re doing. We start by imitating, like a child learning language. Everything new has a name. We point and ask what is that? We do everything our teachers do as precisely as we can. We walk, we dress, we eat, we chant, we sit, we chuckle, we pout, we guffaw, we bow, we prostrate, we suck our lips and fumble our chopsticks, we hush our harsh voices as if that would quite our cavorting western minds, and we at least pretend that we are listening and observing. We stop saying thank you because gassho sounds more holy, more proper. The irony is that in the end, we really only end up being poor imitations of a bit of cultural hanky panky. I had issues with all of it, but I did it nonetheless.

Why could I not learn that slurping is zen? This is what is offered, like the proper scent of aromatic oil with a bony finger pressed on the right acupuncture spot or the stinky smell of burning sagebrush chasing away the bad spirits, helping increase the proficiency of my erections and enhancing sex. I have very little affinity for Japanese cultural artifacts, though I love sushi. 

It is not us, or more precisely, not exactly the real me I thought I’d find if I spent years pretending that it might help me be more "the me" of my dreams and fantasies. 

Phil would laugh and say that many of his fellow religionists from the old country thought Americans could never really do Zen anyway. But if they “came round” and asked questions, Japanese zennists would do their best to answer, whether or not they had a good answer. They had to. It’s in the job description. It’s also the script: question, answer, response, wash, rinse, repeat. A cultural anthropologist might begin to examine if there is any real learning going on, or perhaps if there were a real Zen master on the horizon, he or she might be able to detect a dud. But I find cultural anthropologists only slightly helpful and have a hard time listening to the Zen master who is doing Chinese medicine to cure headaches while fretting about the color of his robes. Regardless, this is the soup that I landed in. I have to let it cook.

I want to talk a bit about cooking the stew. I need to smell something more than burning sage or Zen aroma oil, more than a mediocre rendition of a Japanese recipe. Smell is universal. It doesn’t need a cultural anthropologist or a skilled linguist to squeeze the meaning. If it’s good there’s an instant response. Sometimes, there is an ingredient that I might have been trained to hate. Thus, I might lie and say, “I’ve developed a taste for Filipino Bagoóng alamáng,” but for the most part, perhaps after some initial hesitation, I can smell something good on the fire or at least be able to discuss my attraction or aversion without putting on a fancy, culturally appropriate uniform. 

Although Phil claimed that he was not a Soto priest, and he said exactly that on more than one occasion, he wore the uniform and carefully performed the rituals. I didn’t really believe him and thought that he might have just had some technical objection or was teaching me to try to look deeper. Perhaps he really believed that only the Japanese could ultimately get zen.

I lived with Phil at Hartford Street Zen Center from 1989 to 1994. I moved in towards the end of October of 88 and Phil moved in in January of 89. He had been living with Britt Pyland for a year after he left Santa Fe and his long tutelage with Dick Baker, but despite his deep friendship with Britt, he wanted to have a real zendo with a formal structure. Over the 5 years we lived together, he was in the zendo every morning at 6 AM and every evening at 6 PM. I don’t think he missed one session. Perhaps I’ve forgotten once or twice that illness kept him in bed.

Conversation with Phil was marvelous. He did love his food and could weave a spell describing the ingredients of the real Chinese menu at Nam Yuen Restaurant in Portsmouth Square that he, Allen, Kerouac, Gary and a host of others went to after anyone published a poem, had an inspiration, got laid, or just came by for lunch. It was a place that didn’t fear the true flavor of taro root. Phil could talk about anything if prompted, but he rarely talked about poetry, and hardly ever his own. (He once lectured on HYMNUS AD PATREM SINENSIS, but prefaced it by saying the Roshi told him to). However he would quote pages and pages of other poet’s work he admired, all the sonnets of Shakespeare, pages of Whitman, stanzas of Wordsworth and Blake, but not much of his contemporaries. No Ginsberg for example, although he might say he remembered one about a guy in a supermarket, go look it up. Once he quoted a fairly long piece by Gary Snyder. The experience of hearing poetry was different than talking about it, or analyzing it. When someone asked about Gerald Manley Hopkins, he answered by reciting carefully each word of the first long stanza of The Wreck of the Deutschland.

He was perhaps the most widely read man I’ve ever met. He was also legally blind in those last years, and we read to him. He had a personal library of maybe a thousand volumes. It was stored in four plain wooden bookcases, pretty simple standard fare. I helped move him in when he arrived at Hartford Street, and moved the library once more when he shifted to small set of rooms with a private bathroom in the basement of a building we took over next door to #57. He was stern and demanding as a work boss. There were a precise number of bank boxes. Each row from each case had an exact order. You couldn’t mix them up because he would never be able to reconstruct the idiosyncratic Whalen system. But when he said “Kid, get that book by old Luk Luk (Charles Luk, Buddhist monk and writer), second case, third row, sixth book on left, open to page 58 and read the line, I think it starts at 6,” I got his logic. The first time he did it, I was flabbergasted. By the 20th time, I thought that he had to have a photographic memory. It was uncanny. But that is how a blind man who has a long standing love relationship with the written word organizes his library, his life and his practice.  

People often ask, they wonder how a Westerner might come to a spiritual practice that is so difficult to translate from the culture of Japan. It is not like turning the texts of the sayings of Jesus over to a group of translators well versed in Aramaic, Greek and Hebrew. Bowing and sitting don’t translate except in sore joints and training the attention. The nuance and delicate meanings are not easy even if we understand canonical Japanese. The standard answer is that we are in pain, life is suffering is a core principle that the Buddha taught, and he also pointed to a difficult path that leads to freedom. Abstractly, that is a good answer to an abstract question. But there are several pitfalls to picking up a manual of mental health from an Asian tradition and prescribing a remedy for an unfavorable shift in the wind whose expiration date had passed by several millennia. 

So yes, it is almost a universal truth that we approach the Great Way carrying our experience of pain and dissatisfaction. But we also smell something in the air, we hear something in the poetry. We bring all of ourselves, not just our pain. Even if we’re blind, there is a love for words that we can hear. Let freedom ring.

 

New Age Scum

I spent over a decade as a Jesuit with vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. I’ve known and talked with hundreds of priests and seminarians, members of religious orders, and parish priests. They are scholars, missionaries, mystics, teachers and preachers, gay and straight, celibate and non-observant. The vast majority are dedicated men and women who follow the way of Jesus and give of themselves to help others. I knew only three men who were in any way implicated in the sex abuse scandals that rocked the foundations of the church, and only one had inappropriate contact with adolescent boys. Two spent time in prison. All paid dearly for their behavior, careers and lives in shatters. 

Of course, we are dealing with human nature, and human nature being what it is, we can be sure that the problem still exists. The best we can do is set some ethical standards, try to enforce them, and ensure some consequences are in place to act as a deterrent.

However, don’t imagine that sexual abuse is confined to Roman Catholic priests and religious. People like me who think that leaving the church of your mothers and fathers opened up vast fields of honey and bliss will find that some issues do not disappear by substituting one religious pantheon for another. 

What is it with these guys?

And they are always guys. I am going to talk about two cases of men in New Age groups who had to know that their sexual acting out was immoral but did it anyway. When it threatened to become public knowledge, they were swift to duck for cover. Words no longer had any meaning; it’s all circumlocution. This is, for me, key for discerning the pathology. Cardinal Edward Egan was caught in a nasty argument about condemning gay priests for the cost of paying retribution to abuse victims. His response was classic: "I would just say this. The most important thing is to clean up the truth. And the truth is I have never said anything." Of course, the truth is, Your Eminence, that you said many things. Just because your statements were lies and double talk does not cancel them out or make us deaf. They just require cleaning up. (Hint: the truth doesn’t need a thorough cleaning. It’s us, Eminence).

But before I discuss the cases of two men I know personally, I want to talk a bit about the public discussion of sex abuse. It seems there are two paths, and both have severe limitations. One is complete denial and silence; the other involves talking too much. 

Swami Muktananada hid behind the religious persona of a holy man and never admitted to having sex with underage girls. It came to light after he died. The religious sect he established continues to say nothing. The irony is that everyone knows about his sexual behavior. If followers believe in Sidda Yoga and his successor, Gurumayi, they are asked to participate in the public lie, and Muktananda gets away with his sins in the name of a higher good. The brother of his anointed successor was expelled from the group for sexual misconduct, and his name was expunged like a scapegoat. The income stream was protected.

The Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was also a serial abuser, but he never pretended to be a celibate holy man. In Osho’s case, drugs clouded the picture. In my view, neither were models for living a spiritual life. It is stupid to rely on Muktananda, Gurumayi, or Rajneesh as role models to guide a life of integrity.

My example of talking too much is a man I knew who wrote a book hoping to become the poster boy of registered sex offenders. Jake Goldenflame was convicted for molesting his daughter, served a jail sentence, and then worked hard to get on Opray to talk about it. He wrote Overcoming Sexual Terrorism: 40 ways to protect your children from sexual predators (2004). I spoke with him weekly when he began his project. He eventually hired a ghostwriter with a track record and produced his book. His goal was to become the expert on protecting children against the likes of himself. In the end, to quote one of his critics, Kathleen Parker (April 2, 2005, The Spokesman-Review): “His self-outing is a form of therapeutic confession that purges his own demons while imposing them on the rest of us. He feels better, and we need a bath. Our passive complicity constitutes, if not tacit approval, at least a level of involuntary involvement that is both voyeuristic and prurient.” I should not have tried to help him. He defended his pathology by refusing to deal with it. He set a trap, and I fell for it, I suspect, out of some impulse to be fair-minded and even-handed. I didn’t recognize the pathology, and the pathology remained unchallenged.

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I write with a heavy heart. On June 28th, my great friend Stan Stefancic died; We communicated briefly after he was diagnosed with cancer, and I tried to express how much I appreciated our friendship over the years. I remembered our conversations. We could talk to each other in a no-holds-barred way, even when we disagreed. Our worldviews overlapped, and we generally held similar opinions and assessments. The bone of contention was what actions were appropriate. Stan was far more conservative, supporting the status quo. Me, I am no company man.

There was one situation where the obligation of friendship prevented me from talking openly about a case of sexual exploitation by a man we both knew. Now I can talk about it. Before, the consideration that he and this man were also friends held me back. Stan used his considerable skills to try to craft a settlement to address the young girl’s needs. He failed. I remained hesitant to write, endlessly weighing the pros and cons. However, I am no longer obligated to be silent, or perhaps it has become the obligation of friendship to speak up, and I have been freed to speak. What I wish to discuss goes far beyond friendship.

The other case is a man who abused his daughter. I’ve known him for many years. We were in Claudio Naranjo’s SAT Group. I heard about his abuse from his wife whom I’ve known for decades. The mothers of both girls are dear friends, and I trust them to talk with their daughters and speak the truth. These mothers also tell me they do not talk a lot about the incidents because it restimulates the abuse. 

I cannot name names. Both the men I’ve talked about are still alive. In neither case was there a formal accusation or trial. The man from the SAT Group disappeared into obscurity in a small town on the East Coast, and the other still has a position in the Hoffman Institute. I do not have the resources to undertake an investigation, nor would it be appropriate. I am not a party to the injury. Their mothers have not taken legal action. They need to create a safe space so that their daughters have a chance to heal—another reason why abuse remains in the dark. 

However, in a broader sense, we were all injured by both men’s abuse. This is what I want to talk about. It is a difficult conversation for all of us in the spiritual community because it reflects poorly on the work of personal self-observation I value. Like the priests of my youth or Swami Muktananda, who provided comfort and reconciliation and then destroyed it, these men's actions have obstructed the path of introspection for other people. 

But we must find ways to talk about sex abuse. One of the mothers wrote, “It’s difficult to even think about. And when this happened in your own family, it’s really hard to believe it. Yet they can’t remain hidden since they’re incredibly toxic if they do.” The first step seems to be to admit that there is abuse. 

However, just holding abusers accountable does not seem to be enough. Looking at the history of a few very high-profile cases in the Zen community leaves me with the impression that permission to blame tends to restrict the conversation to blame. Communities write up what they consider to be clear ethical statements for their members and teachers or others in positions of trust and then imagine that they have fulfilled their responsibility. But the cycle of blame does not end. Sometimes, removal and discipline of the offender bring back some semblance of normalcy, but in almost all the cases I am familiar with, there is a stubborn layer of rehashing the argument that persists. Why?

Is it because the insult to our sexuality is so intimate that it touches a deep level of personal trauma--a trauma that remains unresolved and ever ready to raise its nasty interior argument? Was it that the trauma was never really addressed? Denial has thousands of dark paths. That was my situation when Bob Hoffman’s sexual abuse surfaced many years later. 

Is it because, in our attempts to be OK with co-workers of sangha members, we gloss over the subtle, covert, and offensive sexual messages that come from a staff member who had been deeply involved in a sex cult before he or she sought therapy? We’ve simply failed to identify the depth of the pathology. This was the situation with Jake Goldenflame.

Is it because after the sexual revolution of the Summer of Love, the new normal has become so muddied the water that personal boundaries are weak and ineffective? There is a thin line between setting boundaries and not judging individual choices. In cases of pedophilia, the harm is so clear that it should not be hard to keep boundaries, but in many cases, the boundaries vanish. That was undoubtedly the case of many Roman Catholic bishops and religious superiors who chose saving face over weeding out and exposing the relatively few priests and religious who abused young men and women and nearly destroyed an institution that has guided and comforted men and women for thousands of years,

Was it that in these cases, the sexual nature of the abuse forces it underground, and when it surfaces, the sudden reaction is uncontrollable? Or is it instead that we, despite our practice, have not been able to move past “the blame game?” 

It is our obligation. The practice points to the only way we can heal: deal with our reactions, settle what was hiding, and examine ourselves before and after we lay blame. Of course, it will be different for each of us. Because I cannot recommend a general fix-all, it does not free us from the obligation of dealing with ourselves.

None of the above discussion, however, removes any consequences for an abuser’s actions. I will tell anyone connected to the Hoffman Institute, directly and without hesitation--you are complicit. You can ask some hard questions if you are considering one of their programs. The organizers allowed this man to escape with no consequences, personal or financial. He is still in good standing within the organization and in the financial stream. And they have failed in their first duty as a therapist, “to do no harm.” They’ve poisoned the well.