Pedophile priests ruined many lives.

Many people have asked me about how I reacted to the ongoing scandal of priests sexually abusing children in their care. I knew one or two dismissed from the priesthood and one who stood on the right side of history, but whose ministry ended nonetheless.

I was a Catholic seminarian in Boston when the pedophile priest scandal was brewing. I use the term brewing because the stinky mess was happening in the dark. I had no inkling that anything was amiss. When I saw Todd McCarthy’s film “Spotlight” 50 years later, I wondered how I could have missed it. The priestly caste loves dark rumors, but the priestly veil of secrecy is also thick. We all missed it. Of the 2,324 priests who served in Boston during the last half of the 20th century, 162 were credibly accused of abusing more than 800 children and minors. Those numbers are staggering. I remember reading the original stories in the Boston Globe in 2002 and then Cardinal Law’s quick removal to Rome, where John Paul II promoted him to the cushy sinecure as Archpriest of the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore with a stipend of $12,000 a month, a substantial raise above his salary as the Archbishop of Boston. That seemed like a reward and left a terrible taste in the mouth of everyone incensed by his willful blindness. It inflamed those who the abuse had actually injured.

Although I was a Jesuit scholastic, I had strong connections with Boston’s regular clergy. In the summer of 1969, the final year of Cardinal Cushing’s era, I started working for a young diocesan priest. Mike Groden had started The Planning Office for Urban Affairs for the Archdiocese. This was a very unreligious designation for an official arm of the Catholic Church, because Mike set it up to do innovative work outside ordinary parish life. I liked that.

Father Mike was only a few years older than me. He was boyishly good-looking with a great Irish smile. He was very much a priest but also a social activist with the sharp political instincts of a Democratic ward boss. After the Boston race riots in the summer of 1967, he became committed to racial equality. He did Saul Alinsky’s training for community organizers.

I had finished my two years as a Jesuit novice, completed an abridged philosophy requirement at Boston College, and had just been accepted into The Graduate School of Design at Harvard for a degree in architecture and planning. My mentors at the Boston Architectural Center told me that a young priest was looking for an intern to work on a low-income housing project. I had the summer off. Several other young Jesuits and I had rented a small house on Oak Street off Inman Square. We were all grad students at Harvard. I called Mike, and he hired me immediately. This was a great match.

Every morning, I rode my bicycle from Cambridge down Massachusetts Avenue to an office in a small, older building near the Old State House. Sister Faine McMullen, a sister of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, was also a lawyer whom Mike had met during the Alinsky training, and I shared two small rooms in the back. The office administrator was the daughter of one of the wealthiest Jewish developers in Boston. A conscientious objector, Mosik Hagobian, worked under the auspices of the Office, although he spent most of his time in a young architectural office on the floor below. Our small team seemed perfect for a liberally educated anti-Vietnam War activist post-Vatican 2. It also reflected Father Mike’s instinctive ability to assemble an effective team.

I mentioned that Mike was politically well-connected. Lyndon Johnson’s HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development) was flush with cash and administered by a cohort of bright young people convinced that the change promised by the War on Poverty was possible. Mike had secured a promise for a million-dollar grant, seed money for a community development corporation with a program that Mike designed. In the 1960s, a million dollars was a lot of money. He had identified a low-income Italian community in East Boston that was fighting the encroachment of Logan International Airport into their community. I never asked and was never told how he had secured the HUD money or picked East Boston, whose leader was a fiery Sicilian priest, Monsieur Mimi Pitaro. After one dinner in the rectory of Holy Redeemer Church, I had no doubt who was in charge, but I was also very impressed by his careful listening to the needs of his community and commitment to help. I joked with Mike that Mimi seemed like a Don who cared for his folk. Mike agreed that I was not far off.

In my role as Mike’s deputy community organizer, I told Mimi that the development corporation could engage in various businesses to alleviate the impact of the airport’s rapid expansion. Mimi was insistent: Thank you very much, but we need housing. This single-mindedness was to shape the future of the East Boston Community Development Corporation as well as the Office for Urban Planning for years beyond that first summer. My job was to write the proposal for HUD. I’ve never had a more productive two or three months in real terms, dollar and sense terms. I didn’t write the founding documents for a community development organization, but my proposal secured seed money for an agency that would develop 600 units of low-income housing over the years. It also set Mike on course to develop three thousand units of low-income housing, working with parishes of the Archdiocese over the next decades.

We secured the money within weeks of submitting our proposal, and the Planning Office had an MOU with HUD to establish the agency. We immediately began looking for an Executive Director. Mike told me that if I wanted to submit my name, I would get “favorable consideration.” I loved the work, and I considered it. Briefly. This was the summer of 1968. The assassination of Martin Luther King, followed by that of Bobby Kennedy, and the disruption and protest against the War in Vietnam had radicalized me. Rather than disrupt the long course of Jesuit studies, I decided to apply to begin the last part of a Jesuit’s training before ordination.

I moved to Woodstock College in New York City for my first year of theology, then on to the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California, but I would call Mike occasionally. The work of the Planning Office was thriving; he loved being a priest, and sometime in the 1980s, he was made pastor of Saint Cecilia, a church in Boston’s Back Bay, a cavernous building whose old-time parishioners had mostly fled downtown Boston. Mike set about reviving the parish through music. Of course, he could raise funds to restore its three organs, organize choirs, and hire choirmasters, but knowing Mike, it was also an opportunity to engage a community in conversation about the things that mattered. He reached out to the LGBT community in a way that circumvented the official stance of the Church. Back Bay was one of Boston’s gay neighborhoods. Mike himself was also gay. He succeeded brilliantly.

Then came the Boston Globe's “Spotlight” investigation and calls for the resignation of Cardinal Bernard Francis Law. Of the hundreds of priests and religious in Boston, only about 70 signed the petition demanding that Law be fired for the cover-up. And Mike’s name was there, the highest-ranking priest on the list. He was on the right side of history.

Richard Gerard Lennon, Law’s auxiliary bishop and the placeholder after public pressure forced Law out of Boston, put the screws to Mike. Doing two jobs does not allow a priest to collect two salaries, even if that amounts to not much more than $40,000. Mike had not collected any salary as pastor of Saint Celia, but for two years after the church could afford to pay him, he was still compensated for his work as the director of the Planning Office. There was a barrier in Canon Law prohibiting priests from being excessively paid. In 2003, Mike resigned rather than fight. It was retribution. He moved to his family home in Scituate, Massachusetts, where he lived out the rest of his life. I have no idea how much money he had for retirement, but Cardinal Law's $144,000 per year was certainly considerably more. In 2010, I called for the last time, and we had a long conversation. I could not find a trace of resentment in the hour we spent looking over the years.

Cardinal Law died in 2017 in the embrace of one of the oldest of Rome’s churches dedicated to the memory of the Virgin Mary. Though he had been removed from the Archdiocese of Boston, people who had petitioned for his removal did not see any real progress in addressing the scandal. The Church of Benedict had shielded him. Father Mike died in 2018 on the shores of a windswept beach town south of Boston. His supporters and admirers who had protested his removal gathered in Saint Cecilia to say goodbye. They felt no satisfaction either.

If there was any regret on Mike’s part, it might have been that the church he loved and served had taken away the possibility of official ministry, but I am sure he found a way. He always did.

Mike was certainly not involved in any sexual abuse, but his life as a priest was deeply affected by it.

_______________

Mimi Pitaro became the first priest elected to the Massachusetts Assembly shortly after we set up the East Boston Community Development Corporation. https://archivesspace.library.northeastern.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/307157

Sister Faine McMullen RSCJ spent her long life working and advocating for the poor and disenfranchised. She lived to be 101 years old.
https://www.cny.org/stories/sister-faine-moira-mcmullen-rscj,13533?

East Boston Community Development
https://www.ebcdc.com/

Priest Who Spoke against Law Resigns
https://www.bishop-accountability.org/news2003_01_06/2003_05_15_Paulson_PriestWho.htm

Msgr. Michael F. Groden
https://www.thebostonpilot.com/article.php?ID=181182

Am I Magu?

The Blue Cliff Record, Case 31

Magu Circles the Chan Seat 

Magu went to Changqing* and, holding his staff, walked around his Chan seat three times. He brought his staff firmly to the floor, shaking the bells, and stood straight. 

Changqing said, “Right, right!” (Xuedou: A mistake!) 

Magu then went to Nanquan and walked around his Chan seat three times. He brought his staff firmly to the floor, shaking the bells, and stood straight. 

Nanquan said, “Not right, not right!” (Xuedou: A mistake!) 

Magu said, “Changqing said ‘Right, right!’ and you said, ‘Not right, not right!’ Why is that?” 

Nanquan said, “Changqing is right, but you are not right. Your action is the movement of the wind. In the end it will perish.”

*Chenzhou is the name of a place.

Philip asks me to find him a shakujō!

This is a real story, not a made-up story that sings its own song into the wind.

In preparation for his Mountain Seat, Philip called me to his room and pointed me to the third drawer down in a small Japanese cabinet. 

He asked, “See that funny thing with all rings? It’s meant to sit on the top of a pole. Find me a pole. It has to fit on tight so that it won’t fall off.”

I picked up an odd-looking thing, wondering what it was actually. About six rings held together by another brass ring, right at the bottom of which was a kind of oversized thimble shape. It seemed to be about 2 inches in diameter, but it was obviously Japanese, and so it would be an odd metric size. 

Off I went around the corner to Cliffs Hardware with the funny brass thimble thing in my pocket to examine what poles they had in stock. I tried them all, and finally found a broom with a handle probably 56 inches long, but the top had been carefully rounded off so that hard edges didn’t cut the hard-working hands of an overburdened housewife. It actually accepted the convex female shape of the jingle jangle thing perfectly. The broom part was detachable. It screwed off.

I paid 15 dollars and ran back to Hartford Street. I showed Phil, actually, I handed it to him so that he could examine it with his fingers, blind as a bat. He liked the way the pole met the ring that corralled the rest of the rings. Then I unscrewed the brush and handed him the pole as he stood up. He bashed it to the floor and shouted, “Too short. Taller, kid, taller. I need to hold it about here and walk in a measured pace.” He put out his arm, and I could see that the top of the pole was below his shoulder. It needed another foot.

I had kept the sales slip, so I screwed the broom back on the handle and rushed back to Cliffs. But I couldn’t find another broom with a tapered stick that was long enough. So I looked at the long poles. I would have to take a chance and have one cut. The problem was that they were either way too thick and would never accept the jingle jangle thimble or way too thin and just didn’t have the substantial feel of a walking stick. There was a deadline. I had to choose and put my money down. Cut it to 72 inches at 3 bucks a foot. I took a chance. It offended my aesthetic sense, though. A straight cut at the top of the thin pole set the jingle jangle thimble askew, but I could get some thin nails long enough to keep it from popping off.

Phil grabbed the stick and hit the ground. The rings were near enough to his ear to make the proper sound and he smiled. He draped some ribbons through the rings, and banged what was now his shakujō on each step as he descended the stairs into the zendo where inherited the Mountain Seat from Steve. 

Later though the stick did not support when it would all end. Blind as a bat he reached back for the chair that wasn’t there and fell, breaking his assbone, never to take a seat ever again. 

That is also true. The whole thing is True oh so true right to the metric size of the Jingle Jangle Rings and the Fall ass backwards which turned out Wrong oh so wrong. Right right.

The Verse

For each of us there is a place 

Wherein we will tolerate no disorder. 

We habitually clean and reorder it, 

But we allow many other surfaces and regions 

To grow dusty, rank and wild. 

So I walk as far as a clump of bay trees 

Beside the creek’s milky sunshine 

To hunt for words under the stones 

Blessing the demons also that they may be freed 

From Hell and demonic being 

As I might be a cop, “Awright, move it along, folks, 

It’s all over, now, nothing more to see, just keep 

Moving right along” 

I can move along also 

“Bring your little self and come on” 

What I wanted to see was a section of creek 

Where the west bank is a smooth basalt cliff 

Huge tilted slab sticking out of the mountain 

Rocks on the opposite side channel all the water 

Which moves fast, not more than a foot deep, 

Without sloshing or foaming. 

“The Bay Trees Were About to Bloom"

Tassajara, 11:II:79 

Philip Whalen

A Song for the Wind

Jingle Jangle

Bingle Bangle

Bingo Bango

Trimble Tangle

Tinkle Tango

Oh oh oh

No no no

Too short, too tall

Too thick, too thin

Too heavy, just right

Curmudgeon, 

Superlative Mudgeon 

Ah

Fly away

Spingle Spangle

Humpty Dumpty

Crummy Bunny

Tangle untangle

Bing Bang

Walla walla

Bang bang

Thump thud

The end

Good bye dear Phillip.

I am in tears.

Heels Outside The Door

“I gave up the heels but kept the skirt.”--Issan “Tommy” Dorsey Roshi


My friend, the Zen teacher Roshi Susan Murphy, verbally sketched the opening shot for a movie that she was thinking about doing. I titled it for her--“Issan, The Movie.” The camera focuses on the zendo porch where people have neatly, almost formally, arranged the shoes they shed before entering the meditation hall. The camera zooms in and scans the sneakers, Birkenstocks, flip-flops, and a lone pair of high heels.

I’ve always liked that visual. There’s a whole story in those few seconds. In my mind, the slippers had to be red, perhaps even some rhinestones for dual use on stage.

But there was also a reference to Michael Downing’s Shoes Outside the Door, though the title seemed to suggest, unfairly in my view, an attractive woman and a sexual tryst outside the Buddhist Precepts. The door in question was not the formal entrance to the zendo but the door of Richard Baker’s private cabin at Tassajara, where the discovery of a woman’s shoes was the beginning of the unraveling of Baker Roshi’s tenure as Abbott. Though Downing claimed to stick to an objective rendition of a major rupture in the history of an important Western Zen Temple, the story that the title references belies that it includes a bit of muckraking. It was a scandal that keeps reappearing like a bad dream in the history of the San Francisco Zen Center.

How do we exorcize or excise a nightmare? Is it even possible? Can we just forget it, or in a more Buddhist-sounding directive, lay it aside?

This question has troubled the humans who practice since Lord Buddha walked out of his father’s palace. How do we carry the past? How do we deal with the results of our actions? When I first encountered this notion in my practice, it reactivated memories of the darker aspects of my own life. In the old story, we hear that the Buddha was troubled by the sight of sick people, desperate people, and dead bodies. I think that there’s a lot of philosophical thinking involved in that presentation, as if an abstract notion of impermanence and suffering presented itself for inspection and reflection. What if Siddhartha himself had visceral emotional human responses that included all the gray shades of hesitancy, infantile and magical thinking, bargaining, even second-guessing, and mistakes? These are the kinds of human reactions that we have to deal with.

Issan, Phil Whalen, and a few other friends were at the center of the San Francisco Zen Center storm, and they were people who did not turn against Richard Baker. Issan would not have blushed at the actual or imagined nubile figure in his teacher’s life, nor did he abandon his teacher. His own life had more than its share of dark and loving moments. He did not shun, renounce, ostracize, vilify, or denounce, though I’m sure many longtime friends encouraged, perhaps even nudged him in that direction. This does not imply that he tolerated or excused whatever behaviors might have occurred. Instead, his experience of human frailty or suffering allowed him a generous and compassionate understanding that we are all human.

This history of planting Zen practice in the West is filled with stories of men and women who came to Zen after deeply troubled personal experiences. Buddhism is not a religion invented to steer sinners towards repentance, nor is it a religion that requires sainthood. Practice allows us a certain degree of freedom from being attached to the past.

Issan became Richard Baker’s first dharma heir. For me, there is no mystery or magical thinking involved.

There was a choice in the matter, but he touched as little as possible. “I gave up the heels, but I kept the skirt.”




Sweeping darkness
into a corner
only makes the room
unbearably bright.
Better for the defilements
to be left undisturbed.
Let them glow like embers
drift away like ash.


Verse by Richard von Sturmer

Did Carlos Castaneda’s don Juan actually exist?

Syncretism, Syncretic Occultism, Carlos Castaneda and the Monetization of the Occult

When asked by an interviewer if don Juan Matus actually existed (as well as straightening out some inconsistencies in his personal biography), Carlos Castaneda replied, "To ask me to verify my life by giving you my statistics ... is like using science to validate sorcery. It robs the world of its magic and makes milestones out of us all."

What I take this to mean is that the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan was a convenient fiction made up by an anthropology student with a vivid imagination and a few too many peyote buttons. But Castaneda was a compelling storyteller and we all believed it- and bought his books. It is not surprising that he and Naranjo became friends. He visited the early SAT groups, and perhaps used Naranjo’s group process to create his own Tensegrity, “the modernized version of some movements called magical passes developed by Indigenous shamans who lived in Mexico in times prior to the Spanish conquest."

One very deep root of the modern Western Enneagram teaching is the small world of Latin American esotericism and its deep, though convoluted connection with native shamanism. Naranjo’s own story is tied up with that of Ichazo who was never very clear about his sources--usually some version of the story of stopping for lunch at an ordinary wayside ristorante in Argentina and the waiter handing him a note from a group of ordinary-looking men sipping afternoon aperitifs while exchanging the latest in their research of the inner workings of the human psyche. Another partially verified story is Naranjo’s journey to Arica Chile where, after some vague initiation into a mystery cult, receiving instructions from a Bolivian esotericist named Oscar Ichazo who by the way was guided by his spiritual guide, the highest Archangel Metatron, Naranjo went out into the Atacama Desert for 40 days, the driest place on the face of the earth (drier than the place where Jesus stood down the devil in his 40 day retreat). There, he told us that he went through a rebirth experience, and that, having been trained as a medical doctor, he could recognize all the stages of the embryo being formed, the organs beginning to function, etc. I remember at the time wondering how high he was when he told that tale, something about his intonation, and phrasing.

But I did believe that Don Juan was real until the raccoon encounter.

Naranjo’s house was down on the Berkeley flatlands. I can see the house clearly in my memory and almost remember the exact address--14 hundred something Alston Way. It was not in those days all gentrified, but a modest, even run-down neighborhood of California bungalows. There was a small creek that ran at the back of the property, and Claudio had thrown up a shack, his study house, on its edge. Carlos and Claudio were doing some kind of drugs, and a raccoon came and sat by the screen door watching them in a rather intense way, or so they said. Castaneda was sure that the raccoon had been taken over by a spirit being to deliver a message.

Guys, you were high and tripping out on a raccoon looking for a yummy garbage dinner. I'm not using science to validate sorcery, but I am suspicious of the drugs.

 

Your Way, Our Way or the Highway? A Cautionary Tale.

A friend told me that he received some advice from a Daoist master. I automatically distrust some Western dude sporting an ancient Chinese title. I immediately think it’s an esoteric label to make him credible. Honestly, I can’t really say that I understand what Daoism is, and I certainly haven’t the faintest idea of what it might have meant in China in the 6th century BCE, but I’m equally sure that Master X has no secret information. The friend of course didn’t actually repeat his Taoist teacher’s advice. I’m sure that I would be required to fork over a handful of cash before I had the pleasure. We are a gullible lot. 

When I investigated my initial response, I discovered two basic questions: First, what prejudices spark my immediate response? And second, what criteria can I use to trust a teacher and what he or she teaches? These are separate questions. It is important not to discover one answer and think that it provides a solution to both investigations. It is easy to conflate the answers: Just because I have discovered that I am distrustful of X for a reason, the teacher and his or her teaching is not automatically trustworthy. Or the flipside: Because I find this or that teacher personally trustworthy, therefore my suspicions about his or her spiritual lineage must be mistaken. 

These questions are separate but interrelated: How can I recognize what I call “authentic” practice; and what makes a teacher trustworthy? They bite their own tail. Some people, even trusted teachers, have counseled me to trust my feelings. But when I honestly examine them, I find a twisted mess. I was told to just sit and they will sort themselves out. I sat. Perhaps a few of the knots disentangle, but oftentimes no clear direction emerges. Judging by the solutions that appear in real time, there are no easy answers. 

In what I see as an attempt to deal with this dilemma, sometimes in western Zen circles we practitioners get lost in a lot of talk about “our” way, the Rinzai Way, the Soto way, the Right Way and the Wrong Way. This jabber is barely distinguishable from cultish blabber. 

In 1990 when nearly 100 men were dying from AIDS in San Francisco every week, I was talking with a bright, engaging woman who came to sit zazen at Hartford Street. She asked some questions about the Hospice and Issan. I invited her to come back, perhaps become a hospice volunteer. She begged off, explaining that she was very involved in her practice at “the big Zen Center.” I remember her words exactly. “We do the real Japanese Buddhism: we bow at everything every time we turn around.” I confess to having a few judgmental thoughts. While we were cooking for dying men, and sitting with them when they took their last breaths, she was bowing in every doorway and to a statue at the top of every stairwell.

Perhaps there was something about the dying, knowing that you’re dying and the emotions that stirs up. I cannot say. Several of Issan’s close students didn’t visit him when he was dying. Some actually disappeared when he started to get sick later explaining that they couldn’t bear seeing him suffer. I met him when HiV started to ravage his body and mind so that is really the only Issan I knew. It was his gift to me, and my good luck. But on the other hand, when I listen to stories of Issan at Tassajara or at Zen Center, Green Gulch or Santa Fe. I am certain that dying Issan was the same man dedicating himself diligently and completely to the practice.

I never saw the woman again. She never met Issan. At some point she might hear stories at Zen Center about him. In my gut I feel that she missed an opportunity to experience a man who lived out the teaching until his last breath, but I also know that Issan would never have faulted her for avoiding him and bowing every time she turned around. He was so non-judgement and tolerant. I also admit to applying a little pressure on the woman--I needed help at the hospice--and I also admit to feeling slightly superior in my role running the hospice which was of course real practice. I can’t set my experience center stage for applause, but on the other hand, I need to avoid rote answers, or getting caught up in some cultural forms that I don’t understand as if they unlock some esoteric secret. 

Quick change of scene

Listening in on a recent discussion bemoaning the death of Zen in Japan--so many first-son priests escaping the lifeless tedium of administering the family's temple business, my mind went back to a morning I spent looking over the library at Hartford Street, searching for a book that might unlock the mystery of the universe. Trained as a Jesuit, I hoped to find an answer, even a coded one, recorded by someone at some time in some place that might point me in the right direction.

I picked up a volume and read about the third and final destruction of Nalanda, including its vast library, and started a conversation with Phil Whalen. I was more horrified at the loss of the sutras, mahayana texts and commentaries, including all the works, notes and who knows what else of the pivotal scholar Nāgārjuna than I was by the wanton murder of thousands of monks and teachers. I blurted out something about the horror of burning books to Phil who was sitting in his chair across from me. He just looked up, smiled and said, “Don’t worry, kid. They left us enough, just enough.”

But Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji is not alone in trying to destroy the dharma by burning books and killing monks and nuns. Beginning in 1950 Mao and the People’s Liberation Army systematically destroyed monasteries and burned as many sacred texts as they could lay their hands on in Tibet. In 1868, the Meiji Restoration began the campaign of Haibutsu kishaku (廃仏毀釈), literally "abolish Buddhism and destroy Shākyamuni," which led to the wholesale destruction of Buddhist temples and monasteries as well as sacred texts. The Taliban destroyed huge ancient Buddha statues in Bamiyan Afghanistan early 2001 which shocked the world and was soon followed by the regime’s defeat, but it did not prevent them from reasserting their hardline earlier this year.

So while I deplore book-burning and destruction of religious art, their preservation is not a necessary condition for our practice. The loss of cultural Japanese Buddhism, centuries old beauty and tradition, including bowing to everything all the time, is a real loss, but I might have to let it go.

How much remains? Just enough if they left an instruction manual or we figure out how to use it.

"The End of the Rainbow"

Over thirty years ago at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Steve Allen asked Issan, “The world is ending. Where is the great peace when we need it?” 

The setting was the formal ritual in which Issan took the high seat of a recognized Zen teacher, his mountain seat. Did Tenryu imagine that he was simply cementing his relationship with his root teacher or does the question have the ring of another truth? 

Let’s examine the question: though he used the editorial we, was it Steve who really needed to find great peace? And when he said that the world was ending, was he exaggerating, being melodramatic, or trying to make a point? Issan couldn’t solve Steve’s dilemma for him, though he might point him in some direction. He remained silent.

After the room got quiet, Issan turned the question around and asked Steve, “Where do you think we can find it?”

Steve answered, “We find it with each other.” 

In Zen circles, a student’s question has been known to bring forth a deeper understanding of his or her teacher, but the teacher might also snatch the chance and apply some pressure on his or her student to dig deep and find their own answer, a way to liberate themselves. Our connections with each other are not limited to one-way questions and rote answers.

Steve’s answer was pretty good. It was the answer that he needed. It was also one that Issan sprang from Issan's own practice. Issan really did find peace with others. But it was also an answer searching for something that Steve might have been looking for without realizing it. An answer that contained questions that he didn’t even know he had. Steve was not evading the deeper question, and I can guarantee that Steve wasn’t making up an answer to look good.

Is the guest who arrives at the door a friend or foe? We can’t know, given that for most of us our circle of friends is limited to the mother-in-law who is slightly off kilter, or the old drinking buddy who keeps mistaking a missed opportunity for a good time, “Remember the night when we had to crawl home,” forgetting the bloody cuts of scraping over broken bottles and dreams.

Isssan’s response would be to welcome the mother-in-law, the old buddy and the stranger equally with a big hug. Muhammed also welcomed all his guests, whether they were friends, family, or strangers. The Prophet entertained them himself in his house. Sometimes, a lot of guests arrived. He would give all of the food he had to them and he and his family would spend the night hungry. He would wake up at night and ask his guests if they needed anything. He and Issan were alike in this regard. However, the Prophet put a three-day limit on hospitality. If the guest overstays, it then leaps into the world of charity, which is something else. Issan couldn’t count or chose not to.

That precious flaw gave birth to Maitri Home and Hospice for People with AIDS.

The ancient ritual of the Mountain Seat required that Issan demonstrate the immutable stone face of one mountain, but his follow-up question revealed a heart of gold. When the end of the world gets in your way, follow the way that brings us together. When the storm clears, it may lead us to the end of the rainbow.

Be careful, Steve, you might get what you didn’t bargain for. None of us do if we’re lucky.

(left to right) David Bullock, Del Carlson, Angelique Farrow, Steve Allen, Issan Dorsey

"Too Many Words"

 

What I learned from Phil Whalen about writing.

It's a matter of some reassurance

That we are physically indistinguishable from other men.

When introspection shows us

That we have different degrees of intelligence

Varying capacities for knowing morality

We lose something of our complacency

    --Scenes of Life at the Capital

One morning in July of 2022, Google’s algorithm decided that I needed to hear James Dalessandro, bestselling novelist, journalist and filmmaker, tell me about ”The Beat Poets and the Summer of Love.” Or to do justice to the algorithm’s intrinsic value, I was to pay 25 dollars to listen to Mr. Dalessandro’s wise words. When I read the blurb, he told me that Lawrence and Allen and Jack would spill light on the short lived revolution. 

In 1967, more than 100,000 young people descended into the Haight-Ashbury, donned tie-dyed T-shirts or just stripped off their clothes, took lots of drugs, had lots of sex, and proclaimed a new age. The Summer of Love was also the end of Phil's sojourn in Kyoto, so it is possible that he had returned to San Francisco. But Jack had already departed the scene, renounced a lot of the Beat philosophy which he thought just gave people permission to be spiteful. I think it highly unlikely that Phil would have shared his friend Allen’s enthusiasm for a revolution. Phil’s hedonism was more restrained. Very much more, actually, but that didn’t stop him from loving Allen. 

Still I find it abhorrent that the Road Scholar Scholar didn’t include Phil; perhaps the platform insists that their experts focus on hot money makers. 25 bucks is 25 bucks.

I lived with Phil for about 4 years after he’d received dharma transmission from his teacher. I sat with him in sparse zendo, recorded his talks, got yelled at, went to sesshin, sewed a rakusu, listened to his gab, went with him to Walgreens and took lay precepts under him. I was as close to Phil as most of zen friends, except for the very few he really allowed into his life, Allen for one, and I know that he was in love with Lew Welsh, but aside from that, Phil was a lone wolf. We could be friends, but when I got to a place where real intimacy might have been possible, he ended it abruptly. I know others who had the same experience. He wrote “When introspection shows us/ That we have different degrees of intelligence,” and he thought of himself on the high end of that scale.

And despite his remarkable intelligence and way with words, Buddhist Phil could be incredibly dull. He once taught a class on the Heart Sutra and my head didn’t burst with the astounding insight into the interplay of form and no-form, full and empty, thinking and the end of thinking. I had to fight off sleep. Phil preferred his Buddhism boring. He could be as doctrinaire as any squawking human being, and then some. Today, however, as the clouds drift down from the mountains, and internally I begin to count between the thunder and the faint flash to locate where it has struck, I am reading his verse with joy and gratitude. He was a genius. 

Morning is fading and the clouds have covered Moon Peak. I can only see as far as my closest neighbor, a small Indian hotel called “Heaven’s View,” 25 meters to the East. Monsoon is closing in. When I knew Phil and was his student, his eyesight had failed to the point where, if I can weigh his words and match it with what I can recall of his gait and gaze, he could only see vague cloud-like formations, and that had to be enough. Misdiagnosed glaucoma would take away the joy of seeing words dance on the page. He was not resentful, or if he was, he didn’t show it. The more immediate concern was how words, which had been the center of his life, the real source of his joy, would continue to nourish a voracious appetite for clarity. It was also an inventive appetite, so we experimented. I was enlisted into a small army of amanuenses. 

We would read to him. I could see him concentration latch onto a passage and hang there. Sometimes there would be a request to return to the beginning of a passage. We could not stop until instructed or we heard the han for zazen. 

Once in while there would be a request from some recondite journal which Phil could never turn down. It usually meant reworking an older prose piece. There would be no more poems. He would find a short piece that came from years back--one that I remember was about dancing around a bonfire on the beach near Bolinas. I read it once. Phil had me shift the order a few clauses, then I read it again. We put some back into their original order. I read the passage again. And then again. Finally in what sounded almost like a sigh, “Too many words. Too many words.” That was the point where work began in earnest. 

 

Issan’s Drinking Buddies Find all 108 Beads of his Mala

There are 108 beads on a Buddhist mala. Count them, all of them

There was a small bar just around the corner from the Hartford Street Zen Center on 18th, close to Castro. It was next to a laundromat and had sawdust on the floor. A real neighborhood watering hole called “Uncle’s.” 

 

Issan loved his Friday night cocktail ritual. That is why Hartford Street did the usual Saturday sitting and lecture on Sundays. Between 9 and 10 on Friday nights, Issan would put on his pressed t-shirt, zennie fatigues and head out to Uncle's, usually alone. He liked to talk with the regulars, ordinary gay men who lived in the neighborhood. Despite his blue Japanese costume, he was also considered a regular. He told me that the bartender there made a fabulous Gin martini, not the new fashionable vodka kind that they drank in the cruising bars, but real Bombay Sapphire Gin with the blue label and just the right amount of vermouth. He would limit himself, try to be home for bed in time to sleep, and get up early for zazen.

One night, he was chatting away, playing with his mala. It broke and all the beads slipped off the string and scattered into the sawdust, under all the stools and between turned-over barrels along the walls. Everyone stopped, the music was shut off, and everyone began picking up beads. They found all 108 of them, not a one missing. I’m sure that Issan counted them several times.

He was one of the crowd on Friday nights; they knew who he was, just an ordinary guy who dressed up, and he knew them. It was love.

No more, no less.

“Love is shown more in deeds than in words.” Saint Ignatius of Loyola