Intimacy in the Temple Courtyard

Last night, my friend Kumar asked me to share what I understood about “intimacy.” I immediately understood him to be talking about more than just a concept, a feeling, the interrelationship of the lines and colors in a design, or even an attribute of human love. One might be able to base the concept of intimacy on feelings, relationships, or even the elements of design and still miss the point.

I love Kumar deeply and know he is going through a creative crisis as he formulates the final project for his degree at a prestigious design college. My immediate instinct is to help him in any way I can, but I know all too well that he is the creative genius and source of his own inspiration. Trying to be helpful might block him. I can point in a direction or share my own experience, but I cannot cancel the dilemma.

I mumbled something about my experience of intimacy being connected to my meditation practice. “Yes,” he said, “I’ve heard that meditation is connected. Can you tell me more?” He’s a young man with different sleep needs, so I begged off and said good night.

When I woke up, I found my mind flooded with memories of that period when I was trying to solve my first zen koan in the meditation hall. I can’t count the times that Aitken Roshi would try to soften the blow of my frustration and disappointment of a failed response with his gentle pointer: “Not intimate enough.” It became my mantra that I would carry back to the meditation hall. If I tried to forge an “est” business-like plan to achieve deeper intimacy, of course, that didn’t help, but it didn’t stop me. When I tried to figure out what “Intimacy” really meant linguistically, that was not much help either. Recalling instances of deep intimacy, usually sexual, leads into a deep thicket of regret and failed relationships. A feeling of intimacy, or a memory of that feeling, was not the key I needed.

I've spent long hours in the meditation hall. Oftentimes, it’s felt like a long, tough haul with very few rewards. But somehow, I was able to keep sitting. When I learned that sometimes, or often, or perhaps all the time, seeking the rewards of discovery actually stands in the way of practice, it helped enormously. The reinforcement of an opening is usually such a surprise; it is so rare and hard-won it’s almost like an archeological excavation on Mars digging for the lost continent of Atlantis. If handled well, such as Doris Lessing's writing about the Representative of Planet 8, it might bear fruit. But this is not for mere mortals. We have to deal with what we’re given, and eventually, I did have a profound insight into what I have been given, which I will perhaps talk about at more length another time.

But it’s the exploration of intimacy, with no agenda, that I want to pursue.

Sometimes, actually often, these few words, “Not intimate enough,” kept coming back, a deep refrain in all my meditation. And they still do.


I’ll turn to another koan (Case 37, Mumonkan): “The Chestnut tree in the Temple Courtyard,” “庭前柏樹子.”
A monk asked: "Compared to what was the intent of the ancestral founder coming from the west?”
Joshu (Zhou) said, "In front of the hall, a cypress tree.”

I was at the Angela Center in Santa Rosa for a long sesshin. I can’t recall if I was having an easy time or experiencing a lot of pain in my meditation; that really doesn’t matter, but I do remember exactly where my seat was, back in the far northeast corner of the hall, far from the offering table with the Buddha’s statue but right next to the main door. I had gone into Tarrant Roshi’s room twice a day, and my response became clearer and clearer. I will not speak of any “correct answer” or give away something about time-honored practice, but after I responded, he just nodded and asked if I was ready to move on. Something inside said no that there was more there for me to experience. A koan can keep lots of mysteries locked up inside.

So I went back to my seat. After dinner on the third or fourth night, we sat for another long period of meditation and then the usual closing ritual. In that moment, my mind was having a lot of difficulty staying tightly focused, something that I usually enjoy during long periods; I thought, well, it’s the end of the day, why don’t I give myself a wide open field?

Suddenly I was back at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor attending the opening of an exhibit that honored a gift of a wonderful collection of illustrated books to the Museum’s collection by Reva and David Logan, parents of my friend Jon Logan. I was wandering through a series of small rooms, every now and then edging my way through to the front of the crowd to catch a glimpse of a wonderful illustration. The collection was rich. A sampling: Joan Miró’s À toute épreuve by Paul Éluard, Pablo Picasso’s Le Chant des morts by Pierre Reverdy, El Lissitzky’s Dlia Golosa by Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Umbra Vitae by Georg Heym. But the attention required to make out intricate designs on relatively small book pages induced a kind of narrow, tight focus.

I rounded a corner and had to look down to pay attention to the few short steps into the main hall, but when I looked up, in front of me, an entire wall of Matisse’s paper cutouts. The onslaught of bright color and form took my breath away. These were not framed posters you bought at Ikea, not the lavish prints that I’d treated myself years ago at MOMA in New York. These were the actual shapes that Matisse himself cut out and arranged on larger pieces of paper when his hands could no longer hold his brushes steadily enough to paint. There he was, an old man, holding his pencil taped on the end of a long stick to etch the lines of leaves, slowly, carefully, but freely, with the skill and care of a practice that traced back hundreds and hundreds of years. I traced their roots back to that legendary tree in the temple courtyard.




It was of course a kind of illusion, what zen meditators call makyō, and usually something to be handled with caution, like dreams. John was just leaving the hall after the service, and I reached out and touched his shoulder. He grabbed my hand, and we returned to his interview room. He asked me what had happened, and I blurted out a bunch of words. Then he asked me to show him the chestnut tree in the temple courtyard, and yes, really, there it was.

Thank you, M. Henri Matisse, for getting so intimate with your colored paper, your pencil, and your scissors. Thank you, David and Reva Logan, for your generosity. Thank you, Bob Aitken, for just pointing to where I might find intimacy, Joshu, for pointing to the chestnut tree, and John Tarrant for grabbing my hand as I was about to wander off. And thank you, Kumar Abhishek, for asking me about intimacy and then letting me fall asleep in your arms. May you shape your design faithfully, lightly, and freely.

Words cannot describe everything.
The heart's message cannot be delivered in words.







at February 22, 2021

Raksha Bandhan

Tradition bids me tie a ribbon on your wrist 

To say that you and I are related,

And it will always be

No matter what

What husband, what wife, 

what daughter, what son,

What lover, what friend,

May kisses, caresses

Abound.

May wounds be few.

No matter,

There will be love.

What prizes and honors won, 

Include the ones you lost,

What joy, what laughter, 

what grief, what loss,

What trouble, what pain, 

what fear, what tear, what discovery, 

Embrace it freely.

In this moment

You are my world.

We are blood and yet so different

It makes no difference

What barrier, what fence

What wall, what boundary.

Cross, venture, explore,

A postcard now and then might be nice.

Calls are also cheap these days,

But neither is required.

I know there are only so many 

Seconds, minutes, years granted to us.

Use them as best you can.

As best we can.

I will try.

Make mistakes,

I will join you.

We are forgiven in advance.

You are encouraged to make as many as possible 

Unharmed or even injured.

Try to stay safe.

Continue please. 

You encourage me.

Forgive me if I have hurt you.

It was not intentional.

I know that I can be blind and careless.

You are also forgiven.

The world as we find it

Is a blessing.

You are part of my world.

Sounds trite

But it’s true.

Reflections on the Feast of the Assumption

Mary, Mother of Jesus, Mother of God, pray for me, a sinner.

The traditional vow days in the Jesuits are feasts of the Virgin Mary, today, August 15th, and September 8th, her birthday. I took my simple religious vows on September 8th, 1968. It was common for most young Jesuits to take Mary as their “vow’” name. So I might have said, “I, Kenneth Maria Ireland, vow to your divine Majesty, before the most holy Virgin Mary and the entire heavenly court, perpetual chastity, poverty, and obedience in the Society of Jesus.” I asked to keep my given name, and it was granted. 

As far as my Marian faith goes, I am a pretty stripped-down basic gospel kind of guy. Some of this can be traced back to my Calvinist heritage; my father was a Yankee free thinker, and there was some rebellion against the rigid Irish nuns who taught the Baltimore Catechism by rote. I have zero desire to make a pilgrimage to Fatima or Lourdes. Apparitions are far too spooky for my rational mindset. I’ve always held that Mary's “Dormition” is far more palatable than her bodily transportation to the Gates of Heaven. I prefer myth when it comes to such matters. The infallible pronouncement of Pius 12 happened when I was 8 years old; even then, I wondered how something this momentous could be hidden and unrecognized for such a long period of time. I said the rosary every day when I was in a Jesuit house of formation. We all did. I liked the repetition of the words of a simple prayer and the contemplation of the mysteries I took to be more like visualizations of scenes from the stories told in Matthew, Mark, and Luke (John is a bit too gnostic). 

By Erik Cleves Kristensen - House of the Virgin Mary

When Ashish and I visited Ephesus, after tromping through the amazing Roman ruins, we took a small jitney several kilometers high up into the bluffs overlooking the ancient harbor to what is known as Mother Mary’s House. According to legend, Saint John, the gnostic one, took Mary to the small community that Paul had founded in that Roman colony after the death of Jesus. She was to spend the rest of her days protected from the turmoil of James’s Jerusalem Church. Of course, her presence also legitimized the ascent of the Jesus congregations of Greeks and Romans who were not observant of Jewish law and customs, but I will leave that side for polemicists to hash out.

When I got on that small, rickety bus, it had been more than 35 years since I left the Jesuits and 30 years of practicing Buddhist meditation. I’m just giving some background about the mindset of the guy who headed up Mt. Koressos (Turkish: Bülbüldağı, "Mount Nightingale") to the place that Saint Anne Catherine Emmerich had seen in visions as Mary the Virgin's last earthly abode.

It fit the parameters of a place that I could envision for the house of Mother Mary. Being there was wonderful and peaceful, with a genuine feeling of the Transcendent. No throngs of the faithful seeking miracles, no massive basilicas commemorating a Saint’s vision, no sellers of Marian trinkets and memorabilia. There were perhaps a dozen religious women, maybe less, quietly tending simple gardens and very austere shrines. We wandered wherever we wanted and stopped when we felt the urge. No one exhorted us, telling us what to believe or how to pray. There were few votary candle boxes like the ones I remember from the Irish parishes of my youth in front of Saint Mary’s statues. There was only one donation box near the exit.

I felt a real sense of freedom when I boarded that rickety little bus for the scary ride back down to Selçuk. I had been in the presence of the Virgin, and my mind was allowed the space to take whatever tack was appropriate for the time and place.

Eucharistic Flop, a lifeless, bloodless sacrilege

Why the Eucharistic Congress was not just a costly, meaningless show but a sacrilege: many of my ex-Jesuit friends fault it for being an anachronistic diversion from the nuts and bolts, tedious work of Tikkun, repairing our torn and frayed world with poverty, migrants, homeless people, misfits, fundamentalist racists, children murdered in Gaza and Ukraine, conscripted soldiers slaughtered, terrorists assassinated by high tech missiles that can find your bedroom window. The list seems endless. Worse for the activists is the fact that it seemed to be orchestrated by an increasingly right-wing leadership in the American Church as a counter punch for what they see as the activist agenda of the liberal Jesuit Pope. 

All those cogent reasons are, well, very cogent and appropriately political. What better way to shore up the memory of our forgotten religious life, where the priest was god's representative, and we faithful cowered in pews on the designated night and sang “Tantum ergo Sacramentum,” not having a clue that Thomas wrote those words after he had the experience of seeing all the hundreds of thousand words of very cogent theology disappear like so much straw and less idea of what any of it meant. I loved singing genitori genitoque, especially when we got to procedenti ab utroque, meaning that any meaning came from somewhere else, and I had no idea where although that was bad translation. But in general, now that my Latin is better than before a Jesuit education, I find the whole affair poorly conceived from somewhere else.

I was saddened by the silly parades, with thousands of altar boys in black and white, priests in white and gold, and bishops in lots of gold and big hats, stumbling along with no sense of what a religious procession might look like. They might have been trying to be regal and dignified, but actually, the volunteer fire department does a better job marching behind their red trucks on the 4th of July than these school boys could muster behind the crudely decorated trailers that were being dragged by the best trucks that the diocese could borrow from the Knight of Columbus who had a concrete company. Firefighters have a purpose. A New Orleans funeral marching band has a purpose. These jokers were doing something that they had been ordered to do. That seemed to be their only purpose.

The problem for me, however, goes beyond the aesthetics of mounting a religious festival with the obvious political agenda of lending support to an anachronistic, monarchial church of yesteryear. It is in the trivialization and even commercialization of God’s Presence. If I can be bold, even Thomas missed this. We are not worshipping a thing, a piece of flat, tasteless bread that has been magically changed by uttering magic words. When I bow before the Great Sacrament, I bow to the Presence of God. It is present, it is immediate, it is transformative. Instead of a flat, lifeless speck of white carbohydrate, it is love, intimacy, and mystery. All that got lost, not just lost in the sense that there was a piece missing and we knew that something was missing. It was lost in the sense that the ceremony didn’t even point to that Great Presence that is with us but invisible to our ordinary senses. Maybe Thomas, you did get it--Sensuum defectui..

And how much money did this farce cost?