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.

“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 three dismissed from the priesthood and one who stood on the right side of history but whose ministry nonetheless ended.

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 whom the abuse had 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 Archdiocese's Planning Office for Urban Affairs. 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 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. It 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 the way that he had secured the HUD money or picked East Boston, whose leader was a fiery Sicilian priest, Monsieur Mimi Pitaro, but after one dinner in the rectory of Holy Redeemer Church, I had no doubt who was in charge. I was also very impressed by his careful listening to the needs of his community and his commitment to help. I joked with Mike that Mimi seemed like a Mafia Don who took care of his folk. Mike agreed that I was not far off. 

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 and 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 2 or 3 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 archdiocese parishes over the following decades.

We secured the money within weeks of submitting the 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, and rather than disrupt the long course of Jesuit studies, I decided that I would 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. I would call Mike from time to time. 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 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 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 on Mike. Doing two jobs does not allow priests to collect two salaries that are 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. He was just 63. It was retribution. He moved to his family home in Scituate, Massachusetts, where he lived for the rest of his life. I have no idea how much money he had for retirement, but certainly, Cardinal Law’s $144,000 per year was 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 Mike regretted anything, it might have been that the church he loved and served had prevented him from pursuing official ministry, but I am sure that 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

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