I feel like my hands are tied and I’ve been gagged.

We are watching incredible carnage, forced to watch what is presented on the TV. No matter what channel I choose, MSNBC or Al Jazerra, it is horrific. I want to say something. I have to say something. I can’t stand on the silent side of history like the Germans, Spaniards and Italians, including the Pope, who thought that Hitler was going to win the war he started. They played it safe to save their skin which cost millions of lives. They chose the wrong side of history. It’s easy to see in hindsight. Many of them have tried to defend themselves by saying that they didn’t have accurate information. There might have been a suspicion that the Final Solution was underway but only later was the true horror of the Holocaust revealed. Their self-justification follows something along this line of reasoning: the Germans had been crushed in the first world conflict and the sanctions imposed at Versailles had also crushed any possible recovery. Hitler’s fascism was a perfect fit for a wound that wouldn’t heal. The harsh vindictiveness of Wilson, Lloyd, Clermenceau and Orlando did not include a Marshall Plan.

I’m horrified to see Jews murdered at music events, kibbutznik driven from their homes. I can’t watch grandmothers and children taken hostage. I have many Jewish friends and I sense the pain and frustration of not being heard or misunderstood as they defend Israel’s military response. But neither can I stand by and watch hospitals cut off from electricity and medicine while babies die and innocent civilians caught in the crossfire are not able to receive the life saving care they need.

I ask myself why I feel helpless and tongue tied? Who has tied my hands and gagged my mouth? I feel loyalty to my Jewish friends, but I also have numerous Muslim friends, mostly in India, who feel marginalized and excluded. Bibi Netanyahu didn’t sell me his justification for invasion. I’ve never believed one word out of his mouth. I don’t buy into Hamas’s propaganda either, but something in me is screaming that no amount of past harm justifies barbarism in the present. This seems to apply equally to both sides. 

Why am I feeling pressure to take sides? I know that I could just lie low, not offend anyone and see what happens. Why does anyone think that he or she can really know what’s going on in Gaza? Did we learn anything from the American involvement in the War in Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers? Did we imagine that once we’d uncovered massive criminal lying on the part of any state, it would magically disappear? I just listened to a podcast by Edward Snowden. He highlighted that the sheer amount and complexity of the information that governments now collect and analyze make it even harder to detect the gross distortion of information. He contends that it is going on, and not in plain sight. I have no confidence that I have all the facts. That is really the only certainty that I have. My inability to trust reporting slanted by either side ironically strengthens my inner resolve to speak up. 

Having said all that one might think that I’ve left myself very little room to solve my own dilemma. Both sides have tried to take me as their prisoner. However, I am going break free--just sticking to what can be said with any certainty, Hamas committed a grave offense with their unprovoked attack. That alone justifies Israel’s right to self-defense. I condemn Hamas but not the Palestinian people. I support Israel's right to defend themselves but cannot not extend that to justify the continuing settlement of occupied territories nor their almost messianic drive to expand their footprint. Hamas may have provoked Israel to incite worldwide condemnation of the expected massive attack. There can hardly be another possible motive, but as Israel’s far superior IDF or Tzahal swings into action, I hope they act with restraint that wins the world’s approval. That would be a difficult task even for King David’s armies. Nevertheless that is my prayer, or just as in the past, there will be no winner.

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 some very 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 Alsinky 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 and then onto 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 a church in Boston’s Back Bay, Saint Cecilia, a cavernous building whose old-time parishioners had mostly feld 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 investigation of the Boston Globe's “Spotlight” 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 coverup. 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 some 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. About 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 otf.

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