“Don't Give Up!”

Comments on Joshua Rothman's article in the New Yorker: "Should You Just Give Up?"

Sisyphus couldn’t stop pushing his boulder—but you can.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/should-you-just-give-up

Far be it from me to enter into a debate with a reputable self-help writer. He writes for the New Yorker, so God help me, but I will call him out. Joshua Rothman seems to indicate in his latest article, “Should You Just Give Up?” that sometimes—actually, as a general rule—we should scale back our dreams to land within the parameters of reasonable or “doable” and thus escape being disappointed or disillusioned. We’d be happier campers.

Who am I to argue with a man with such august credentials? I am an 80-year-old failure who has faced at least an equal share of unhappiness as most living, breathing humans, but since I entered religious life as a Jesuit when I was 23 after an Ivy League education with its promise of a cushy life with lots of cash and prizes, I have never given up on my dreams. They have, of course, changed and morphed, but they are still as strong a motivating factor as they were on August 15th, 1966. What is most important, however, is that at 80, I am still living my dreams. Life is challenging, exciting, and new if I’m not careful, although when I get up from more frequent naps, I find myself remembering people and events decades old with clarity and sometimes even wonder. But the most frequent emotion is a deep feeling of gratitude. 

However, when Rothman dug up some anecdotal evidence from Kennet Roshi, I dug in my heels. He cites another self-help writer, Oliver Burkeman, who advocates “imperfectionism.”  Burkeman invokes the British Zen master Houn Jiyu-Kennett, who, instead of lightening the burden she placed on her students, made it “so heavy that he or she would put it down.” Once her charges saw their situations as “totally irredeemable,” they gave themselves “permission to stop struggling.” Burkeman counsels: “Instead of setting out to become a master meditator—and buying the requisite books, candles, cushion, and app—you should simply try meditating for five minutes today, and see what happens.”

I am at least 25,000 hours beyond the meditation time I might have logged using his five-minute rule. I also know the first person in the US that Kennet authorized to teach. We talk at least twice a week. Just standing in those qualifications, I want to ask Mr. Burkeman who the fuck he thinks he is to be telling people to give up on the dream of becoming Zen Masters so that they can settle into some kind of semi-pleasurable mediocrity? We need more Zen masters. You have examined the state of our world and, noticing that innumerable unhappy people have given up their dreams, your best advice is just to wake up and do a fact-driven pro and con list to settle on some achievable goals. Then you cite all the pop psychologists you’ve delved into in your 20-year writing career and find evidence that people have been pie in the sky and perhaps just getting real and seeing what they can reasonably do is the best way out. Jung told us just to do what’s at hand. 

I’m not giving blanket advice that talking to someone with perspective isn't valuable or that, when pursuing a quixotic project, talking to a lawyer or accountant is a bad idea; far from it. Perhaps Burkeman is drawing the wrong conclusions from his Kennet anecdote. Maybe it was not to give up at all, but rather to see the situation for what it was, head-on, with no illusions, and then change your approach and give up a strategy that is not working. Yes, of course, stop struggling, but that is not advice to give up. It just means to stop struggling and perhaps stop daydreaming. Go deeper into your dream and discover what it tells you. I am also sure Kennet said to wake up, but certainly, she did not counsel anyone to shut down their dreams.

Picking up the priest from Sacred Heart

Book of Serenity, Case 8: Baizhang’s Fox (Gateless Gate, Case 2)

Once, when Baizhang gave a series of talks, a certain old man was always there listening together with the monks. When they left, he would leave too. One day, however, he remained behind. Baizhang asked him, “Who are you, standing here before me?”

The old man replied, “I am not a human being. In the far distant past, in the time of Kashyapa Buddha, I was head priest at this mountain. One day, a monk asked me, ‘Does an enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?’ I replied, ‘Such a person does not fall under the law of cause and effect.’ With this, I was reborn five hundred times as a fox. Please say a turning word for me and release me from the body of a fox.”

He then asked Baizhang, “Does an enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?”

Baizhang said, “Such a person does not evade the law of cause and effect.” Hearing this, the old man was immediately enlightened.

I don’t know exactly why, but after meditating a few mornings ago, my mind was engulfed by the memory of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

I was driving my Veterans cab. Late, very late one evening, I received a call from the dispatcher to pick up the priest at Sacred Heart Church on Fillmore and Fell Streets. It was a ghetto parish, not a Jesuit Church, though the devotion to the Sacred Heart was inspired by the visions of the seventeenth-century French mystic Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, who had been guided by her Jesuit spiritual director and confessor, Claude de la Colombière. They are now both saints. I was never much drawn to the devotion, as it felt too saccharine, but I did admire Blessed Claude.

It had to be about 1990. The Church was abandoned in 2004. It had been home to San Francisco’s largest African American Catholic congregation. The San Francisco Black Panthers served breakfast there, and it had been one of the centers for the Catholic anti-war movement, which I’d been part of in the late 60’s. My kind of church.

Originally, we were told the Church was being shuttered because of the huge cost of a seismic retrofit and condemned as too dangerous for public worship. But then it was repurposed as a roller-skating rink called “The Church of 8 Wheels.” Apparently, we don’t care if wild, wacky skaters lived or died. The Convent across Fell Street had already been taken over by a very small Tibetan monastery that’s now gone. 

But that night, I had been called to assist at one of the holy sacraments, a mission of mercy, anointing the dying.

The priest was waiting for me on the church steps rather than the next-door rectory. He was wearing his soutane, with a narrow purple stole beneath a cheap parka. He probably greeted me, but I just remember that he said, “Saint Mary’s Hospital.” Nothing more. At first, I took him for distracted, but I realized that he was carrying the Blessed Eucharist. “Recollected” would be a better word.  

The hospital was about 20 blocks away, across the Pan Handle, very close to Saint Ignatius, the Jesuit church. Under 10 minutes at that time of night. I am almost certain that I blessed myself; I may have even said, “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” I was now part of a holy rite. The immediacy forced all the Jesuitical arguments about the Real Presence into the background. In that moment, the Lord was real, even his Heart of Compassion. 

As we turned up Stanyan Street, past the ER, the priest said, “main entrance.” I knew the pedestrian door closer to Shrader. He was visiting one of his parishioners, perhaps an old friend, not a gang stabbing victim. One of the Jesuits would have been called for an emergency. I knew for certain that I was present for an intimate moment, the passing between our world and the universe of the Unseen. 

He tried to press a five-dollar bill into my hand. I refused. I watched him quickly climb the steps and ring the nightbell. I waited until the door opened and he disappeared. 

I may have paused for a few minutes to reflect, but not long. I had to pay more than $60 in “gate” fees for my cab before I actually put money in my pocket. There were many nights that I barely paid for dinner. I had to stay alert for my next fare.