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.