I met with Frederick Copleston

In 1965 I had a meeting with Frederick Copleston. I have been trying to collect my memories of our visit. It was 60 years ago and not a huge breakthrough event in my spiritual journey so parts of it are hazy and will remain so, but given that I was the only undergraduate on the schedule of a renowned Jesuit philosopher, it was an honor and as you will see, memorable. Father Bill Nolan, the Dartmouth Newman chaplain of course knew that I wanted to become a Jesuit and did everything he could to encourage me which was the explicit reason for the interview.

But the process of memory is notoriously unreliable. Recall activates a selective circuit in the brain, and we tend to recall those juicy bits that support the stories we tell ourselves. Even if the date, time and location are reasonably accurate, even if they can be verified, it still might be difficult to remember if it was a bright day or if the autumn winds were blowing. Even then the data collection system is not as if it were a selfie with the Pope. On top of that the things that we retrieve may in themselves hold some key that we are not fully aware of. There could be some mystery solving to be done, even if it’s just trying to remember the crumbs that you laid on the path to grandma’s house. 

Copleston came to Dartmouth, and stayed at the Newman Center for perhaps a week. I checked the online archives to see if I could identify some event or colloquia in the Philosophy Department. None. Perhaps he had been scheduled at BC, Harvard or Fordham, and Nolan arranged to have him lecture at the Aquinas Center which was something he often did. That is possible, even likely. But it is also likely that even if Copleston were in Hanover at the invitation of the College, he would have stayed at Aquinas House. He was a very traditional old school Jesuit; I am sure he rose at 5 AM every day, did his meditation and then said Mass. Mass would not have been very difficult if the College put him up in a hotel room.

Bill Nolan gave him the office of his assistant for the week, and Copleston had office hours. I’m sure many Dartmouth faculty were anxious to meet him. I remember that my hour was carefully scheduled. I remember what he wore. Over a simply tailored black suit and a tall white collar that I associated with Anglican clerics, he wore what I thought was a very strange robe, even for a scholar priest. It might have been a don’s gown from Heythrop. It was not the long black Jesuit habit that I knew from the Jesuits at Fairfield. There was no sash and the sleeves seemed to be broad black ribbons that dropped from the elbow. I recall that his speech was very precise and soft spoken. I would characterize it as meticulous. He didn’t rush and my memory even after 60 years was that he was a careful listener. Google tells me that he would have been just a few years older than my father, but I didn’t get any daddy vibe. 

He had just published Volume 7 of his monumental 11 volume History of Philosophy: Fichte to Nietzsche; his debates about the existence of God with Bertrand Russell which made him very famous in Catholic circles took place at least 15 years earlier, but I had no questions to ask about his writing or the debate. Perhaps Bill Nolan had told him that I wanted to enter the Jesuits or I did, but I told him about my parents' vehement opposition.

I was now 21 and could enter without their permission, and I was tempted to do that, but I promised them that I would finish college before I set off on what they considered a disastrous career choice. He asked me what I was studying, whether I liked it, and pointed out how it would certainly do no harm when I became a Jesuit. Then he asked why I wanted to be a Jesuit. I may have mumbled something about being impressed by certain scholastics and priests in prep school. Then he got personal and told me that his own parents had opposed his becoming a Catholic priest, but he persisted and continued to treat them with love and respect. He said that they eventually came to support his decision. He thought that it was a good idea that I finish my degree at Dartmouth. After some quiet time, he looked at his watch and said that he would have to begin preparing for another meeting, but that he would pray for me. 

I had an interview with the man whom I imagined could have removed any doubt about Aquinas’s Unmoved Mover argument for the existence of God, and instead received the promise of prayer to resolve a painful family situation. 

Be Here Now all over again

Here is a story from my first year in India along with a few facts about life in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains.

On our first trip to India, my former partner and I planned a weekend trip to meet his sister and her husband in Shimla. She wanted to visit because it was used as a setting in so many Bollywood movies. Early one morning we began our journey on a treacherous mountain road, racing 225 km across northern India in a rinky-dink cab with a madcap driver--even by Indian standards. He careened and jammed, reducing the almost seven hour trip from McLeod Ganj to under five. It was only my second long trip by car in India. This is not a myth: the roads and the driving are unlike anything in the West. Over 350 people a day die on Indian roads, which in a population of more than a billion plus seems miniscule until you figure into the calculation that fewer than 10% of the population use cars. It takes some getting used to.

The power brokers of the British Raj selected this idyllic spot for its summer headquarters when the heat of the plains became too much for their thin blood. A mile and half above sea level, Shimla is now the capital of Himachal Pradesh. It’s a more picture perfect hill station than our humble McLeod Ganj. There’s a pedestrian mall that you get up to via a crowded elevator, a substantial Anglican Church, a handsome stock of colonial buildings still in use as offices for the renowned Indian bureaucracy, lots of restaurants and coffee shops. A few of the fine bungalows that the highly placed British civil officers demanded for their families and staff have been carefully preserved. 

One of the oldest small gauge railroads in India shuttled the overlords, their families and extensive retinue up the steep mountain. Though still connected to the Indian Railway, it’s kept in service as a tourist attraction. You pay your fare, ride a couple of stops, get off, cross the track, and wait for an uphill train. We’re not talking about Six Flags. We’re stepping back at least 150 years into the remnants of the British Raj.

For Hindus, Shimla is also revered as one of the traditional holy sites of Lord Hanuman. Though this goes back to ancient times, a very recent addition to the landscape has been a huge statue of the monkey god, 108 feet, higher up on Jakhu Hill (an anomaly in a land of the metric system, but probably something to do with the cost of concrete and getting to a mystic number. It’s very tall). 

Early in the afternoon our little group took the toy train down hill. On the way back up we were told about a small temple that might be worth a visit. We either walked or grabbed a quick cab from the train station to a very typical Indian temple. Inside the gate one of the baba’s was chanting, breaking coconuts and pouring their milk over the bonnet of a devotee’s car; I noticed that it was not brand new; perhaps the new owner was trying to wipe the karmic slate clean in anticipation of treacherous mountain roads. The only way I can describe it is “very Indian.” Even though I’d met several Indian teachers in California, including Swami Muktananda who came with all the cultural guru trappings, I felt slightly uncomfortable. It was certainly not something that Father Halloran would be doing in the parking lot of Saint Catherine’s--breaking coconuts and pouring the milk over the hood of mother's Ford station wagon, but I can hardly get that image out of my head now that it's planted.

We managed to squeeze past this elaborate ritual and came into a large hall where there was some intense chanting, surprisingly so. In most Indian temples people line up, offer a few rupee notes, get a blessing and leave. As a Hanuman shrine, it was overrun with hundreds of monkeys scarfing up tons of bananas set out as offerings. Monkeys are particularly nasty creatures, and living in a temple courtyard does not make them civilized, but Saturday outing at a temple, and people were posing for selfies with the monkeys using their smartphones. The depth of the devotions was refreshing, but the whole scene still felt very foreign. There was a lot of family talk in Hindi and after a few pictures for the folks back home, I wandered off.

The temple was built into the side of a hill. I descended to the level below the main hall where there was another highly decorated temple on a small courtyard. I was the only person there. I wandered in, and was greeted by a life-sized statue of a baba, sādhu, or monk, lots of fresh flowers and food offerings. I’d stumbled into the samadhi shrine of the temple’s founder. I bowed, turned, and was about to leave when it hit me, really hit me! It was not that particular emotional feeling that Indians describe as bhakti. It was more deep recognition; “I know that man.” The lifelike, life sized, very colorful, idealized figure was definitely a person that I’d seen somewhere. I pulled out my phone and within a few minutes had solved the mystery. It was Neem Karoli Baba, Ram Dass’s guru. Neem Karoli was not from the plains of India. He’d spent his life wandering these hills of northern India. His main temple and ashram were further north in Uttarakhand but perhaps we’d found a subtemple, or the temple of one of his disciples. The deity fit; his protector, not quite sure how to describe the relationship, was Lord Hanuman.

640 × 426

The pieces tumbled together. You’ve probably heard about Ram Das. Who hasn’t? He wrote the wildly popular New Age book called “Be Here Now” in the 70’s. It became one of the Bibles of the hippies. I met him on four or five occasions. He was always extremely gracious and lively. Even in a large group, he seemed to be able to focus on you in a way that felt very personal. During my tenure as Director of Maitri, I asked him to come to Hartford Street to do a fundraiser. I remember that it was after Issan had died and Steve had resigned because Phil did the introduction. 

Even though the enormous death HIV/AIDS toll had begun to decline by the mid-90’s, there were still thousands of infected men facing an early death. An overflowing crowd sat zazen in our small zendo. Ram Das sat in the teacher’s seat and, as I remember clearly, his head seemed to be on a swivel, bouncing around, while all the zennies were stiff as boards, staring straight ahead.

He began his talk with a kind chuckle and said, “I am going to talk about the Self and dying. Oh sorry, no-self, I have to remember that I am in a Buddhist crowd even if the notion entirely escapes me.” Then he began to talk about one of his visions after he first returned from India: to create a center for conscious dying. The idea was to establish a kind of ashram for people who were dying and interested in various conscious exercises, including mediation, during their dying process. He even said that he had a location picked out. Then he said that he, or the group that was working with him abandoned the idea because no one was interested. I wondered why he would throw this out into a group of gay men, the majority of whom were facing death. Was it a kind of challenge? How would they choose to spend their few precious last months, weeks, days?

Then he turned towards me and asked me about the hospice. I said that Issan had been committed to making life as normal as possible for the residents, but we had no requirement that residents had to be particularly conscious, spiritually or otherwise, during their last bit of this-life-alive time; that we were committed to allowing the individual's path to unfold. There were however a few residents who meditated as much as possible. He nodded and smiled. 

We collected a few hundred dollars that evening to help pay the bills, but we received a different kind of gift, not pouring coconut milk over a second hard car, but an invitation to examine what was really important about life, especially when the end is definitely in sight. 

Back to Lenten Practice

Copyright March 28, 2024

Wednesday Feb 14, – Thursday Mar 28, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hiking into the Source

What happens when a meditator searches for the Unmoved or the Source of All of It? It is more than likely that in the hours of silent meditation, within our inner world, we have traced many thoughts, feelings, stories we tell ourselves to their source. You’d think that the search for an Unmoved Mover would be a cakewalk.

We were sitting sesshin up along the Klamath River in a small cluster of vacation cabins. For one of our afternoon meditations Jon Joseph asked a long time practitioner to lead us up into a cavern where he had done some photography. He was a spry old bird, perhaps had a decade on me but moved with the grace of a man years younger.

That afternoon we were to follow one of the several small gushing mountain streams that fed the Klamath. The walls of the ravine were steep. Though the rains were not torrential, it was very wet. We were to climb in silence, maintaining as best we could the practice of walking meditation, kinhin. It was a difficult climb up a very narrow path, the small fast moving stream dropping off sharply to the north. I needed a stick to stay balanced. I had to put more concentration on where I was stepping than my exhalation. The thick green moss covering the stones that were the only toehold was slippery. They were laid out by nature's architect who’d thrown out the handbook for a comfortable and safe ratio for step and tread. It was proving much more difficult than originally advertised. Our spry photographer probably thought it was a stroll in the park. I did not.

Perhaps after a half-hour’s climb we reached a pool. The combination of boulders tumbling down the ravine plus either beavers or storms felling the tree trunks that closed the remaining gaps and formed an expanse of perhaps 10 meters of still mirror-like water. Perhaps the stream was too narrow for the salmon run, but I still knew there was life hiding under the mirror that reflected the tall pines with the bright blue that provided them an almost technicolor background  I could also hear the soft sounds of what were probably small rivulets feeding my source, but had reached some kind of source. It was not the Big Bang beginning; it was not ex nihilo, but it was a beginning.

Buddhists are trained to look for change. We call it impermanence. Even more than karma, it seems to be the one immutable law in the Buddhist Universe.  When I asked my first Buddhist teacher what “Impermanence” meant he said, “You’re going to die and along the way the world is always changing.” When we look for change, for the moment of change, that observation itself changes our world. When I finally got to that still pool high above the Klamath that might have been the beginning of something, feeling my racing heart and the quickness of my breath, I became aware of small, almost imperceptible drips between the rocks higher up. This makes pinpointing or even imagining a first mover very hard if not impossible. It also makes positing an Unmoved Mover such a vague idea as to be meaningless.