Schism Schmisum--

On hearing that the Doctrine of the Faith summons former U.S. nuncio, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, to testify on charges of schism. Vigano calls it an honor. I don’t know why you need to be so right, or maybe I just don’t understand it, but honey, you are just being a doctrinaire asshole.

Let’s talk schismatics or at least have a laugh or two.

Schism is defined as the formal separation of a Church into two Churches or the secession of some group (or an individual?) owing to doctrinal and other differences. Is this a threat?

I remember a conversation with Avery Dulles. As might be expected as the son of his famous father and a respected Catholic theologian, he served on several high-level ecumenical commissions. He told me (with his slight laugh and smile that disguised a complaint) that he often worked long hours on a paper describing doctrinal agreements and continuing points of dispute with a few modest suggestions to explore if the divide was real, imagined, or even important. And you can be sure his work was meticulous and exacting. The commission’s meeting began with a prayer petitioning the God of the doctrinal points they could agree upon and avoiding the rest. After Avery presented his paper, he was thanked and applauded. Then, the other side’s theologians presented a paper outlining their position and objections. They sat down and were politely applauded. Then they worked together on the closing statement: we can agree on X for Y reason, and we continue to disagree on Zed for Z. We were happy to have this exchange and pray for our continued growth in the Spirit, although let’s not go overboard in our expectations. Nothing changed and probably won’t--not after they appointed a woman as the presiding bishop, but let’s pass over that in silence and leak it to Kaiser or the NCR.

But all in all, this was far better than what might have happened just a few centuries earlier--one of those parties would have been burned at the stake. Depending on your side, the painful deaths of the heretics or martyrs became myths to warn succeeding generations, train them in self-sacrificial virtue, and remind them that some things can never be compromised. The Inquisitors made decisions about who needed to be celebrated, who needed to be blamed, and what lessons the survivors needed to draw. 

A bloody time. Thousands were executed. The Roman Catholics did it, as did the newly reformed English Church. The Spanish Inquisition is now the stuff of jokes, but it was a life and death matter for the Jews, the conversos, and the dissenters who were murdered. A lot has changed over a few centuries, but we can’t erase that part of history that affronts our sensibilities. Revisionists erase the parts of history that don’t conform to the current myth. But keep the threat of schism alive.

An earlier Jesuit cardinal was not so lucky. In 1599, immediately after he was appointed Cardinal, Pope Clement made Robert Bellarmine an Inquisitor, and he served as one of the judges at Giordano Bruno's trial and concurred in the decision to condemn Bruno to be burned at the stake. It was a hard, thankless task for the quiet, saintly scholar, but he had a job description. And there were schisms to the right, to the left, and particularly to the north. I mentioned that to Avery once, and he said thank God we’re past that (although he continued to make a case for capital punishment). And he made the very good point that at least we are talking to one another. 

Talking is a good thing. It's the only thing other than charitable actions and loving your mother. I say I would talk to anyone, but I really don’t think I want to be in the same room as Bishop Barron, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganó, or Archbishop Sal Cordileone. Not that I couldn’t make small talk, but why bother? They would not be much interested in talking to me unless they might try to convert me, I suppose, and I think that the Compas are aware of just how open I would be to that conversation. Besides, my dance card is pretty full. 

I loved talking with Avery. Even though we were worlds apart on most issues, he and I always tried to find where we might have an interesting conversation. That changed slightly after he was made a Cardinal, but not much. 

The context was love, respect, and taking action to keep that flame burning. I told him that I went to confession with a high-church episcopal priest when I was doing my AA 4th Step because it felt right. He was a friend, and I was out of touch with any Jesuits I might have asked. He told me that although he disapproved, it was a valid sacrament. Then I had to tell him that this priest friend worked for the Jesuits at Saint Agnes in the Haight. Once, he was at a party for Bishop Ignatius Wang. The bishop got hammered and went on and on about same-sex marriage. My friend was wearing a clerical collar, and Bishop Wang probably presumed that my friend was Roman. His husband, sitting next to him, was wearing a sweater on the cold San Francisco evening. My friend didn’t introduce his husband for obvious reasons, such as job security. 

I almost got Avery to laugh. 

Berryman

Dead poet on dead poet: a poem by W. S. Merwin (1927-2019) about John Berryman (1914-1972); from *Opening the Hand*,

Berryman

I will tell you what he told me

in the years just after the war

as we then called

the second world war

don't lose your arrogance yet he said

you can do that when you're older

lose it too soon and you may

merely replace it with vanity

just one time he suggested

changing the usual order

of the same words in a line of verse

why point out a thing twice

he suggested I pray to the Muse

get down on my knees and pray

right there in the corner and he

said he meant it literally

it was in the days before the beard

and the drink but he was deep

in tides of his own through which he sailed

chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop

he was far older than the dates allowed for

much older than I was he was in his thirties

he snapped down his nose with an accent

I think he had affected in England

as for publishing he advised me

to paper my wall with rejection slips

his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled

with the vehemence of his views about poetry

he said the great presence

that permitted everything and transmuted it

in poetry was passion

passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

I had hardly begun to read

I asked how can you ever be sure

that what you write is really

any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure

you die without knowing

whether anything you wrote was any good

if you have to be sure don't write

I Don't Want You to Chop Off Your Finger!

Dokusan goes Kung-an

Talking publicly about sex

Zen students don’t talk about private meetings with our teachers. “Dokusan” means "going alone to a respected one." These conversations have an aura. They take place in the context of meditation. We respect their privacy because they can be very intimate, shaking our world to its very foundations. 

I’m going to break that rule and talk about just such an intimate conversation I had with Issan Dorsey Roshi. I’m going public and talk openly about a private conversation about sex. In Zen these kinds of conversations are called koans, a term which comes from the Chinese characters, 公案, Kung-an, which literally means “public notice.” 

Issan has been dead for almost 30 years. In the traditional koan collections, the teachers have been dead a lot longer, and, as most of these dialogues were between celibate members of the sangha, most talk about sex is, how shall I say it, in a different context. You’ll also have to take my word that the conversation was one that shook me to the core, and helped me, as a gay man, focus my meditation. Issan can’t verify his side of the conversation, but if I’ve hit the mark, and done my job as Issan’s student, you might be able to use his teaching to untie some personal knots about meditation.

I grew up in a traditional Irish Catholic family, or at least I had a very traditional Irish mother. Her word was law. She taught us to avoid talk about sex in polite conversation which meant that it was rarely, if ever, spoken about. Drunken conversations were of course another matter. There politeness was optional. As drunken conversations, they carried less weight, but they were at least a time when you could talk about sex. Good Jamison could be counted on as the Irish un-inhibitor.

Fitting quite nicely with my preconceived notions, in Zen settings most talk about sex focuses on the prohibitory precepts, or that has been my experience. 

_____________

At one of my first sesshins, a long intense meditation period, hours upon hours with a few breaks to eat and get the blood flowing back into the legs, my mind began to play a nasty trick on me, or so I thought. I imagined myself in love with a very cute guy who was sitting about three seats to my left. Let’s call him “R.” R has been a Zen priest for many years. He also knew and practiced with Issan so I’m sure he would love being part of this koan, but I don’t know how useful it would be for the public to know the real name of R who was the object of my sexual fantasy.

My mind couldn’t do anything else but fantasize! When I got up after a period, I glanced in his direction to know that he was still there. Even if I managed to focus on my breath for a few seconds while I was sitting, It required enormous effort.

My obsession had totally hijacked my mind.  

On the third or fourth day, I went to see Issan after the first period. His bedroom doubled as his interview room, a few candles, a bell, two cushions set close to one another. After I bowed, I blurted out the whole story.

He looked at me, entirely present, and then we both began to laugh, slowly at first, but then louder and louder.

Finally he took a breath and said, “Oh, I fell in love with someone every practice period at Tassajara. They were usually straight so you can imagine how that went.”

Then he told me a story. 

“When I was tenzo at Tassajara during one practice period, I fell head over heels in love with a very handsome young man. I suppose you could say I was obsessed. It was hard enough to escape all those fantasies in meditation, but it even got to the point where it was dangerous--when I was chopping, I had to consciously pull my mind back to the vegetable, the knife, and the board to avoid mindlessly chopping off a finger. 

"When you’re actually in deep concentration, the strangest things can happen. It got to the point that it was even difficult to concentrate when I was cooking--and that was my responsibility--so I went into the Roshi and talked about it!

“And then I discovered that I could just stop it. I mean, it really stopped. I think I might have just been more able to return to my breath. Probably nothing more.”

Then he asked, “Can you stop loving R? Would that even be a good thing? I just don’t want you to chop off your finger.”

Issan & James

Zen Bland!

Originally posted December 21, 2011, revised during the Coronavirus lockdown, March 25, 2020.


In the Spring of 2011, I did an eight-day, totally silent Zen retreat at a former Catholic Convent, the Angela Center, in Santa Rosa, California. As I was unpacking my bag, I thought to myself that my “cell” was just a slightly less Spartan, more feminine version of the one where I was isolated from the outside world for two years as a Jesuit novice 45 years earlier, the same bland institutional architecture thrown up to accommodate the large numbers of men and women who were entering religious life after World War II.

In a Jesuit house of formation, we got up at 5:30 and went to bed at 9. During this retreat, my 10-hour meditation day started an hour earlier and lasted an hour later, but it seemed to re-stimulate both the ecstatic and painful memories of my novitiate, a period that was for me an extremely difficult initiation into religious life. For the first few days, I couldn’t stop a flood of memories, tastes of prayer, study, and feelings that soon included my 11 years of Jesuit indoctrination as well as the aftermath.

After breakfast on the morning of the 4th day, as I was walking back to the room, my actual perception of the building suddenly shifted. I was just walking on a linoleum floor that was just a floor, the walls of lightly plastered-over cinder block were just walls. Nothing more. No sounds but the sound of my feet, no visions but what I saw through my eyes—just pictures on a wall, just a door, just a room, just a grey carpeted floor with black cushions. There was nothing else in that moment but the moment. This was not the dramatic, flashing-bright-lights insight, no angels descended from heaven with all the answers that I was hungry for, or had told myself that I really sought. Rather bland for a mystical experience.

But then I began to notice something very powerful open up inside me—every burden that I had been carrying since my Jesuit training was gone. It was extinguished, not conceptually but actually. My past life as a Jesuit was gone, completely gone. Not that it didn’t happen, not that it had no effect on me, but I understood in a non-intellectual way that anything I carry into the present moment was for me to carry. It doesn’t drag itself along. There’s nothing there. It’s not real.

Suddenly in that moment of bland Zen, I was totally and irrevocably free—no one, no thing, no outside authority, no god, no doctrine, no experience could ever enslave me.

Three cheers for bland Zen!


Outside My Window


The light rain
clears momentarily.

Cold.

A bird's three bare notes—
infinite variations
flood over me.

Red Camilla blossoms
fall
upside down.


*The title of this reflection comes from a piece my friend Laurence Platt wrote, “Zen Bland,” which was not at all bland but very juicy. He argues that simple and unembellished language is the only authentic way to describe deeply moving, transformative experiences—living life here and now, speaking about it simply, not altering our experience trying to make it into something else!



Dedicated to Chris Wilson, head of practice at Spring sesshin, a generous, guiding spirit and friend.