My leaving the formal Catholic fold was a long, slow process, with hours of prayer, personal introspection, and my share of suffering. However, I can pinpoint the moment I knew I was done to an exact day and hour.
For most of the time I lived in San Francisco, I was a member of the Museum of Modern Art. On November 4, 2003, their special exhibition of Marc Chagall’s work was closing. It was a fabulous exhibition; I had already seen it twice, maybe even three times. On that last Sunday morning, the Museum was going to open to members from 6 AM, before the huge crowd expected at 9:30. I had a plus-one ticket. I asked Ty Cashman, a friend and former Jesuit. Ty and I worked with the same Zen teacher; we’d done several seven-day meditation retreats together; he was super-educated with a PhD in philosophy from Columbia; he’d been a student of Gregory Bateson; he taught a class on Spiritual Exercises at a small private university on the Presidio.
We met at 6 AM at Mission and 3rd Street and spent a full three and a half hours with the 153 paintings and other works by Chagall, carefully displayed over two floors of the wonderful building. We spent most of the morning just contemplating. It was not the first time we’d shared the early hours of the day in silent meditation. A few comments here and there, but mostly just deep appreciation for the astounding images of a poor Jew from the shtetl who’d transcended any sectarian feel in his work. Seamlessly incorporating the imagery, even iconography of his adopted country, he’d carved out a spiritual, almost magical world that had actually contributed to healing France after the brutality of Nazi occupation. I can describe it as a spiritual experience.
At 9:30, as we left, I thought that we’d go to breakfast and say goodbye, but Ty said, “We just have enough time to get to the 10 AM Mass at Saint Patrick’s. Let’s go.” I was surprised, but said sure, and we quickly crossed the Park to the high Latin Mass at the predominantly Filipino parish. Right from "Introibo ad altare Dei," Ty and I were leading the whole left side of a large congregation through familiar tunes. His seminary had been in the Midwest, mine in New England, but our Jesuit choir training was shared. The chubby Monsignor noticed us with a broad smile. The emotional participation at mass in a Filipino church is exuberant compared to their Irish co-religionists. Singing our hearts out, Ty and I shared that high.
It came time to receive communion, and we approached the altar. It was something that I don’t usually do. I still believed in the sacrament of Penance, and I had not been to confession, but it felt appropriate. Standing before a rather stern-looking woman, the minister of Holy Communion, she said, “The body of Christ,” and I responded spontaneously, “Praise Lord Jesus Christ.” She stopped, looked at me angrily, and said, “The proper response is 'Amen.’” She wasn’t going to allow any ecstatic response in her line. I followed instructions and said Amen, but in that instant, something changed. It felt irrevocable. I didn’t know it at the time, but it would be years before I again set foot in a Roman Catholic Church to receive the Eucharist.
Was that too extreme? Of course. I could always find a church that was less insistent on the correct formulation. The narrative of Jesus is carefully, thoughtfully, reverently transmitted through words and ritual practices that have been handed down to us over the centuries. I’d been a real part of that transmission; I’d even been to Saint Patrick’s before, when I stood as the ninong for the granddaughter of one of my workers. Over many years of study and prayer, I’d added my own personal, even mystical understanding of those teachings. Now standing humbly at the table of the Lord, I was met with a burst of anger and told that my response was not acceptable, or it felt that way. Of course, there are a thousand mitigating circumstances; there was no right and wrong, but in that moment, the spell had been broken.
I allowed this experience of the Eucharist to devolve into a series of sharp exchanges with many former Jesuit friends about whether one had to have his or her feet firmly in the neoplationist camp before one could talk about the “Real Presence.” And I wasn’t buying it.
And why? And what next?
Do I even want to talk about this moment? I mentioned that both Ty and I had done the seemingly endless hours of Zazen retreats, just sitting from dawn to dusk in a completely still room, usually with a handful of others or, when the leader had a reputation for insight, integrity, or depth (there are a few of those left), crowds. The work in these Zen retreats was the koans. Detractors talk about impossible riddles designed to throw a wrench into the ordinary, expected inner works; proponents speak of craftily designed word games that might provide a startling insight. I’ve had both experiences and many others over the more than 30 years I’ve been working with a teacher on the koans. You are allowed to switch the subject and the predicate. There are few rules in a logical or discursive sense.
The feature of the retreats I want to point to here, besides the concentration and silence, is the meetings with your teacher to discuss the koan and your meditation.
These meetings give Zen its distinctive flavour. You might present an answer to the koan; with a bit of luck and hard work, the teacher will ask a few follow-up or checking questions. Or you might be sent back to the dojo with a hint about where to focus. The length of the meeting can be seconds or hours. I will not add any fiction or wish fulfilment to the pile of idiocy about koan work, other than to say that after many years, I have a clear feeling that I am part of a vibrant conversation about awakening that Buddhists have been having for hundreds of years. And that conversation has been carefully, thoughtfully, reverently transmitted through words and ritual practices that have been handed down to us. The content is different, but the mechanism of transmission shares a lot with the Jesus narratives.
But what is different was more important for me. My koan responses that felt right, where the opening went deep; they were part of a meditation practice; they were spontaneous, without a lot of thinking about what I should say or what would be clever; they came from a place that I can only describe as intimate. A far cry from “The proper response is ‘Amen.’”
I’m getting older, and maybe some of my rough edges are beginning to soften. Now and then I’ve thought about that rather stern woman. I have no idea why she responded the way she did, and it’s none of my business. But I owe her a debt of gratitude. I began to meditate on the Real Presence as a koan rather than rigid dogma from the Council of Trent 500 years ago, a mystery I could enter with a sense of wonder and intimacy.
“Praise Lord Jesus Christ.”
Marc Chagall, The Good Samaritan (1963–64). Collection of the Rockefeller Archive Center. Photo: © Mick Hale.
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