I carefully read Ross Douthat’s New York Times article “Looking for Faith? Here’s a Guide to Choosing a Religion” several times. Though he is sympathetic, Douthat claims he’s not a card-carrying member of Opus Dei, but it seems certain that he is close to the right-wing Catholic apparatchiks who have seized control of the American Judiciary. Looking at his theological position in the article, I find little evidence to shake my conviction that he is an Aristotelian rather than a Christian as I understand the word.
I will frame my argument against him with the same non-denominational slant he espouses. He begins with an evocative description of a second-hand bookstore where long treatises by Dun Scotus were piled on top of Wiccan texts. There was a vegetarian restaurant attached. I lived in Berkeley at about the same time as Douthat was growing up there. I knew those bookstores well. He might have been describing Moe’s or Cody’s; I’ve been trying to remember the vegetarian restaurant. They were like our Dunhuang Caves, and I sympathize with his motivation. I’d just left the Jesuits with certain knowledge that the church to which I’d dedicated myself had no lock on the truth, but “[b]ut it’s harder, in a pluralist society, to pick just one religious option as more likely than all the others to be true.”
I will follow his line of argument. He proposes that all men and women, if they look deeply enough, have a basic need for some experience of transcendence and, thus, the need to rationally choose one of the basic religious formulations floating around in our universe. People are somehow less human if they neglect this basic need. And, not accidentally, he can help.
This is a lousy predicate floating on a raft of unproven assumptions.
Let me flesh out my argument by reframing it in the context of the current Super Bowl hoopla. We could posit that most humans need to get excited, eat hotdogs and cheese wizz, get caught up in a bit of national excitement, and root for a team. The evidence for this position is right in front of us. We might also extrapolate that this need is universal because sporty expressions ripple out into cricket, rugby, and even table tennis. If I can learn the basic rules of American football, turn on the TV, and watch a game, I might also admire some feats of physical prowess. Even if I do not find it very interesting, and I object to the high level of serious bodily risk involved, it could be argued that I have ticked enough boxes to support the claim that there is a basic human need to be “sportive.”
Almost two decades ago, I met an Australian Zen teacher, Susan Murphy, who is also an accomplished filmmaker, TV producer, and writer. It was an upsetting period of my life. I was struggling with my koan practice, and, not unsurprisingly, this was coupled with huge knots in my emotional life. I sat next to her for the final seven-day meditation retreat before she received her authorization to teach independently, a very powerful connection with her both as a Zen teacher and a human being, enough to travel down under for a few months to see if I wanted to uproot myself and figure out a way to live in Australia and work with her.
She and her partner, David, lived in a Sydney suburb, a small town called Balmain. I jumped on a ferry near the famous opera house, and 15 minutes later, I was helping prepare dinner in their sprawling, comfortable home.
David is a minister of the Australian Uniting Church and an academic whose specialty is religious cults. I liked him immediately. He was the pastor in Balmain, and his church was a coffee shop near the town center during the week and a congregational meeting hall on Sunday mornings. The arrangement appealed to my Yankee sense of thrift. I discovered that David’s actions were always close to his intentions. I stayed with them for perhaps a week in a small upstairs room until the flat I’d sublet closer to Oxford Street opened up.
One evening, in a light-hearted conversation while cooking dinner, David asked, “Do you have a team?” I told him that I was not very interested in sports but that in San Francisco, I had followed the 49ers. He was firm, “You gotta have a team, mate.” If this were a condition for friendship, I did some research that evening and decided that I could back the Sydney Swans Australian football club. I liked their name and their logo. David approved of my choice. He thought that, at some point, we could go to a match together.
On Sunday morning, I went down into the coffee house to help rearrange the furniture for the religious service. I was to be directed by a young Iranian immigrant who was in charge as much as anyone was in charge. He was extremely handsome. I suspected he was gay. He was clearly a newcomer to Christian worship, and his participation was as serious as it was studious. Over the next three months in Australia, I met at least a dozen other young gay Iranians. One cut my hair. He confirmed that there was a kind of underground railroad for gay men in danger of being executed in Iran. Australian denominations were allowed to sponsor men and women who faced persecution in their homelands. I am unsure of the exact way that gay men found welcoming congregations in Australia, but if they were able to book a flight out of Teheran and had the name and number of a sympathetic pastor when they landed, they would not be returned to the hangman’s noose. This checked one huge essential box of my subjective qualifiers for transcendental experience.
Over the next month, through Susan, David, and a Catholic religious who’d converted to Thai Buddhism and taken the Precepts, Bante Tejadhammo, I discovered a strong network of active Buddhists, all the flavors with lots of cross-cover, robust practices, and a very open and supportive gay sangha. I was asked to give a dharma talk about how Issan founded Maitri for a huge (to my mind) group of Zen practitioners at “The Buddhist Library” in Camperdown. That led to another talk for Bante’s group at the Sangha Lodge in another low-key Sydney suburb. The topic of hospice seemed to generate a lot of interest and enthusiasm, the kind that was looking for a project, and it was an overflow crowd. As I recall, there were well over a hundred people in attendance, including many ethnic Thai, Cambodian, and Vietnamese families, along with many gay men. Something that I’d never experienced in California.
Over the next few weeks, I met with several individuals and small groups who’d developed work proposals for hospice care. One man, an architect, had drawn detailed plans for a residential community in a remote location for individuals who were seeking a conscious death. Others were more community-based care closer to home. All the plans were, to my mind, feasible with the right financial support. Everyone who came to see me was aware of this and looking for that extra push to help them realize their dreams. At this point, I began to realize that I did not have connections to the Australian resources that were required, but on a more fundamental level, I had worked with Issan founding Maitri but did not have his skill in guiding another’s practice when it came to living and dying, totally present and serving others.
Sydney was also interesting as a thriving international hub of gay culture. I liked Oxford Street and the clubs, though there was a preponderance of very ordinary drag. The shows were not Priscilla, Queen of the Desert--more like Madge Makes Coffee with Complaints. I knew that there had to be a more intellectual and cultured gay life, but that would take time to discover. I developed a brief romantic fling with the lead singer in an ambient techno band that had just released a CD that shot up to number one in the local club scene. I had a few lovely, intimate experiences. Gay life seemed to be filled with rich possibilities.
Back in San Francisco, my internet sleuthing uncovered an organization called the Sydney Gay Buddhist Sangha. I was on the steering committee of a San Francisco that shared the name. We met weekly on Sunday afternoons at the Hartford Street Zendo. I made contact with the Sydney group. There was a membership list, but it seemed to have faded due to a lack of leadership and a regular place to sit. Here was my chance to see if it were possible to develop a practice group closer to the heart of gay life rather than on the University of Sydney campus. At Hartford Street, the gay community welcomed straight friends. In Sydney, it was the other way around. This was perfectly OK, of course, but I wondered if there was a segment of interested gay people who might feel more included if the meditation hall were closer to the gay ghetto.
David told me that my team, the Sydney Swans, rented rooms to outside groups in their downtown clubhouse, a few steps from Kings Cross and Darlinghurst, Sydney’s Castro district.
I forget who made the initial contact, but yes, they had a room for rent at a reasonable price and would be delighted to host a Sydney gay meditation group. They also invited us into the club's dining room for a buffet meal afterward for a nominal fee. They would be grateful if they had some idea how many would be eating. I didn’t press for vegetarian options. During the simple negotiations, I tried to imagine the San Francisco Giants opening their downtown headquarters to a gay meditation group. Even though English was a common language, I realized I was light years, or Kalpas, away from my cultural home.
I ran a small announcement in the local gay rag. We began our group there once a week, with about 10 people sitting. It was very egalitarian, without a dharma talk. Instead, I had some basic meditation instruction and time for sharing after two periods. I found one of the participants particularly annoying, so I considered it a win.
Now, I started to realize what David meant. I’d arrived at making some choices about my spiritual life, but not with Douthat’s Neoplatonic model. Instead, I was living my life and letting the traces of my choices leave a clue about its direction. I realized living in Australia would be too expensive, so I had to return to San Francisco. However, I had learned that I needed a team. It is not an easy path. Although the alternatives seem more straightforward intellectually, they lead to a straight-jacketed position. Thank you, David.
