Foggy Father Ed McKinnon

Originally published Monday, February 12, 2024

When I was in the Jesuit Philosophate (1968-1969/70), fulfilling a canonical requirement for Thomistic philosophy, I lived with five other young Jesuits in a small house near Boston College. After being locked down in Shadowbrook for more than two years under strict rules covering every aspect of life, every hour of the day, we were enjoying some freedom. From time to time, we’d sneak out to a well-known art house in Kenmore Square near the Boston Red Socks ballpark. I think it was called Kenmore Square, but it might have been The Fine Arts Theater. 

The reason I mention arthouse movies is a hilarious story that popped up about one of my Jesuit Philosophy teachers, Ed MacKinnon, affectionately known as Foggy MacKinnon. 

One night we went to a forbidden movie, Pasolini’s Teorema. It inspired Nick Nolte’s “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” another fantastic film. In Pasolini’s film, a mysterious character shows up at an upper-class family villa in Milan and begins by sleeping with the maid, then the son, then the mother, then the father. He was, of course, a Jesus figure. It was Pasolini, what do you expect? The film was long enough for an intermission, and when we went for popcorn, Foggy MacKinnon was standing in the lobby looking somewhat bemused. Rather than a rebuke for sneaking out, he just said, “Thank God they don’t have any pets.”

https://cinematreasures.org/theaters/6460

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teorema

Ed MacKinnon, whom we affectionately called “Foggy,” was one of the promising young philosophy professors at Weston and Boston College. After my novitiate at Shadowbrook, I went to Philosophy, and for reasons not altogether clear to me, I was also ready to pick a fight. Imagine. Ed had a Ph.D. in physics from Saint Louis University and had done several years of postdoctoral work in philosophy at Yale. He was supposed to form a bridge between science and faith. I had no idea what he was talking about. Of course, I wouldn't admit it--I was actually too busy doing art to spend enough time in class to ask a good question. So I missed that boat entirely. My loss

Once Ed went to the minister at Weston and asked for a car to drive to a conference, I think at McGill. What would be better preparation for delivering an important paper than a relaxing drive through the Catskills to Canada? He arrived, parked the car, delivered the paper, answered questions, and then left quickly, grabbed a cab to the airport, and boarded a flight back to Logan. The minister came to his room when he heard that Ed had returned to pick up the car keys. Ed said, “What car?” I may have some of the details wrong, but I think the story is basically correct. 

When I was in California, I heard that Ed had gone to another conference about resolving the conflicting claims of science and theology, or as he says, “examines an influential argument that the intelligibility of the universe requires a creator.” Why is There Something? (Philosophia 51 (2): 835-855. 2023. He is still dealing with the problem today.) The Jesuit rumor mill spelled out the story that he laid out the positions carefully and then announced that, after studying the issue for a number of years, he found the agnostic position persuasive and was going to leave the Jesuits.

I do not know if this story is correct, but it’s a great story. I did meet up with him one more time. I think it was at an event that Fred Tollini organized for New Englanders and Jesuit friends who had lived with him at Virgil Barber House near the Yale campus. Ed had just taken a new position at Cal Hayward, where he spent his entire career after BC. And he’d married. I am pretty sure I asked about his current position regarding the Church, since I had just left and publicly said I’d tossed out the whole shebang. He demurred, but offered that he was now very happy. He’d met a woman who had been a nun at a support group for former religious. He called it a “Religious Lonely Hearts Club.” I didn’t say that I had met one or two former Jesuits in gay bars, so maybe I could borrow the designation. Perhaps he was not so hung up on the conundrum between faith and science. Maybe he’d just decided that he wanted to marry. 

End of story. Retelling them is how I pass long, lonely nights in a remote Indian village.

https://philpeople.org/profiles/edward-mackinnon

Suntne Angeli?

Our good luck is to be working in a world where there is no ultimate justice and God knows there is no justice in the world. —Orson Wells

I leave my examination of the intellectual proofs or arguments for the existence of God, not convinced that there is a God. If the Scholastic proofs alone are the only validation of my knowledge, I am tending toward an atheist position. However, because I say these arguments don’t hold water, it is not to say that God does not exist. In other words, logic is not personal—my remaining unconvinced cannot be used to support a non-theistic position.

Many religious people, not just believers in the Abrahamic tradition, look to the acknowledgment of Evil as moving them closer to believing in God. I will call this exploration “stories we tell ourselves about the origin of Evil.” Believers claim that this adds the power of deep emotion, even intuition, to our stories. Their persuasiveness and coherence also depend on the cultural setting that gives rise to them, but for the moment, we can set this aside and simply say that we have experienced evil in the world. If we are theists who believe in a benevolent God, this presents a problem, but might it also be an opportunity to prove the existence of God?

This relationship between evil and the existence of God is paradoxical. After the barbaric horrors of the Second World War, many people of my generation point to the evil of the holocaust and say that this disproves the existence of a benevolent deity. The pro-deity camp points to the Garden of Eden and traces the evil and humankind’s agency as well as to a huge falling out between YHWH and some of his angelic hosts. The existence of Evil should convince us that God exists, 

This is the story that I am going to examine. The story of the fall of Lucifer went through several rewrites before the nuns at Saint Charles taught me that the evil in the world is the fault of Satan and his rebellion against the all-powerful Jehovah. In the myth, I learned that before he fell, Satan was called Lucifer, or light bearer, a name that indicates great beauty. (Baltimore Catechism #3, Lesson 4 - On Creation).2

Neither Satan nor Lucifer appears much in the Hebrew Bible, with the significant exception of the Book of Job. It was not until the early Christians began to search for some depravity of humankind’s fall horrific enough to require the sacrifice of God’s son that the character of Satan/Lucifer was fleshed out. Although mentioned in many places in the synoptic gospels and Revelations, Augustine of Hippo (Civitas Dei) put Satan at the scene of the crime in the Garden of Eden. In the story we read in the Hebrew Bible, it was just a talking snake who beguiled Eve. 

The shadow lingering from the God-in-the-sky myth is that God creates an existential problem by allowing evil—à la Job—why do the bad prosper while good people suffer? For the pious, this is a test. There is an unwritten rule or assumption: God only wants to make us better, which requires a leap of faith into the unknown. But this also, on some very real level, entails a denial of the reality of suffering. To say that suffering as a test dulls the sting. Get stoic and get through it—a survival mechanism. But is this even close to reality as it presents itself?

Reworking this story or myth even takes us out of the Biblical era and into the third century. It also has traces of the Manichean gnostic cult that Augustine belonged to for almost a decade. It was not a minor flirtation with some New Age religion; however, it is key to the Christian understanding of evil in the world. It introduces the notion of “free will” and thus responsibility and accountability. Probably, I need to look no further for why Avery was insistent that the part of belief in God is the acknowledgment that God exists. 

Elaine Pagels, in The Origin of Satan, talks about the role Satan plays in the zeitgeist of the early believers. There were people of God, the followers of Jesus, on the one hand, and those who were opposed on the other. This was problematic for Jews who were not followers of Jesus. Pagles says this myth contains the roots of the long, horrendous history of antisemitism. She says that in Mark’s gospel, Satan is identified with “the Jews.” It is no longer a myth. Real people were responsible for the execution of Jesus. The Church of James had names and addresses. It was about real issues right down here on earth. 

This also muddies the waters if I use the myth to trace some deep intuitive human intuition, some deeply felt belief in the unseen world. However, the creation of evil personified also has consequences and falls short as evidence of God’s existence. You can’t negotiate with evil. You have to kill.

My conclusion: Listen to your better angels, but that alone is not going to clear a certain path to the deity,

2 The LDS extends this odd belief to Lucifer, extending his rebellion to the Son of God himself ( Doctrine and Covenants 76:25–29).

Judge Judy and The Sanctification of Common Sense

You might have guessed that our heavenly version of the creation of evil has a more ordinary version, which I call “The Sanctification of Common Sense.” This also has its limits.

 

Do you remember that lovely Chanel cocktail dress that your friend Angelina borrowed without asking you and then ruined when she got wasted at a party that went from sedate to wild in a New York second? Then she compounded the injury by giving it to a dry cleaner who promised the world and returned an unwearable rag. That one? The one Angelina could not afford to replace? The one that carried so many precious memories of love and romance that you were going to treasure for as long as you lived? Yes, that one.

According to the Psalmist (8.5), Angelina is fashioned after the image of God, “a little less than the angels,” yet she managed to destroy Coco Chanel’s little black dress and probably a lot more. There is no justice in this world: one careless act destroyed both memories and friendship. You wanted to talk about it, but somehow, the messiness of the situation carried memory and friendship far beyond a simple conversation. 

You’ve watched Judge Judy on TV and imagined you, Angelina, and the dry cleaner standing before Her Honor, and you asked for redress. Indeed, the norms of friendship had been strained if not destroyed. Even though she's not Solomon, Judge Judy is Jewish and has a no-nonsense tone. She might set your world aright by crafting an equitable judgment. You felt personally violated by your friend Angelina. She knew how much it meant to you. You had a lot of investment in that little black dress. I will examine the story for evidence of an innate sense that Justice exists in the universe. It is perfect in so many ways.

The argument for the existence of the All-Knowing being able to right deeply-felt offenses.is designed precisely to satisfy this kind of personal vengeance. We know from experience that the verbal tongue-lashing delivered by Judge Judy, even if she assigns the maximum $5,000 fine and you can collect it, is not sufficient to satisfy the kind of deep grief and indignation that you feel, but it is something. You know that, given similar circumstances, almost everyone except the super-rich or deranged would feel the same and deserve equal justice.

What is also true is that you know that the feelings of vindication you might experience while watching TV are just that, an unraveling of feelings, and that’s just an illusion. There’s no guarantee that justice for all crimes will be satisfied, even at the tribunal of the All-Knowing at the Last Judgment. What is also true is that just by turning on the TV and watching Judge Judy, you are helping increase the sales of whoever has paid for the commercials and, let’s follow the money, help improve the wealth of conspicuous luxury brands so that the likelihood of universal justice is diminished.  

And here is what I think: There are bad people. Humans have devised the only justice in the human realm to order ourselves and create space for peaceful cooperation. It is not Divine. That we entertain divine justice is a result of assigning the governance of human affairs outside the world humans inhabit, or it could be whittling down our preconceived notions and beliefs to something very rudimentary and authentic, a fundamental and foundational understanding of the Golden Rule.

“Be Here Now” all over again.

Here is a story from my first year in India, along with a few facts about life in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains.

On our first trip to India, my former partner and I planned a weekend trip to meet his sister and her husband in Shimla. She wanted to visit because it was used as a setting in so many Bollywood movies. She was a devotee.

Early one morning, we began our journey on a treacherous mountain road, racing 225 km across northern India in a rinky-dink cab with a madcap driver — even by Indian standards. He careened and jammed, reducing the almost seven-hour trip from McLeod Ganj to under five. It was only my second long trip by car in India. This is not a myth: the roads and the driving are unlike anything in the West. Over 350 people a day die on Indian roads, which in a population of more than a billion plus seems minuscule until you figure into the calculation that fewer than 10% of the population use cars. It takes some getting used to.

The power brokers of the British Raj selected this idyllic spot for its summer headquarters when the heat of the plains became too much for their thin blood. A mile and a half above sea level, Shimla is now the capital of Himachal Pradesh. It’s a more picture-perfect hill station than our humble McLeod Ganj. There’s a pedestrian mall that you get up to via a crowded elevator, a substantial Anglican Church, a handsome stock of colonial buildings still in use as offices for the renowned Indian bureaucracy, lots of restaurants, and coffee shops. A few of the fine bungalows that the highly placed British civil officers demanded for their families and staff have been carefully preserved. 

One of the oldest small-gauge railroads in India shuttled the overlords, their families, and their extensive retinue up the steep mountain. Though still connected to the Indian Railway, it’s kept in service as a tourist attraction. You pay your fare, ride a couple of stops, get off, cross the track, and wait for an uphill train. We’re not talking about Six Flags. We’re stepping back at least 150 years into the remnants of the British Raj.

For Hindus, Shimla is also revered as one of the traditional holy sites of Lord Hanuman. Though this goes back to ancient times, a very recent addition to the landscape has been a colossal statue of the monkey god, 108 feet high up on Jakhu Hill (an anomaly in a land of the metric system, but probably something to do with the cost of concrete and getting to a mystic number. It’s very tall). 

Early in the afternoon, our little group took the toy train downhill. On the way back up, we were told about a small temple that might be worth a visit. We either walked or grabbed a quick cab from the train station to a very typical Indian temple. Inside the gate, one of the babas was chanting, breaking coconuts, and pouring their milk over the bonnet of a devotee’s car; I noticed that it was not brand new; perhaps the new owner was trying to wipe the karmic slate clean in anticipation of treacherous mountain roads. The only way I can describe it is “very Indian.” Even though I’d met several Indian teachers in California, including Swami Muktananda, who came with all the cultural guru trappings, I felt slightly uncomfortable. It was certainly not something that Father Halloran would be doing in the parking lot of Saint Catherine’s — breaking coconuts and pouring the milk over the hood of Mother's Ford station wagon, but I can hardly get that image out of my head now that it's planted.

We managed to squeeze past this elaborate ritual and came into a large hall where there was some intense chanting, surprisingly so. In most Indian temples, people line up, offer a few rupee notes, get a blessing, and leave. As a Hanuman shrine, it was overrun with hundreds of monkeys scarfing up tons of bananas set out as offerings. Monkeys are particularly nasty creatures, and living in a temple courtyard does not make them civilized, but on a Saturday outing at a temple, people were posing for selfies with the monkeys using their smartphones. The depth of the devotions was refreshing, but the whole scene still felt very foreign. There was a lot of family talk in Hindi, and after a few pictures for the folks back home, I wandered off.

The temple was built into the side of a hill. I descended to the level below the main hall, where there was another highly decorated temple in a small courtyard. I was the only person there. I wandered in and was greeted by a life-sized statue of a baba, sādhu, or monk, lots of fresh flowers, and food offerings. I’d stumbled into the samadhi shrine of the temple’s founder. I bowed, turned, and was about to leave when it hit me, really hit me! It was not that particular emotional feeling that Indians describe as bhakti. It was a deeper recognition: “I know that man.” The lifelike, life-sized, very colorful, idealized figure was definitely a person that I’d seen somewhere. I pulled out my phone and, within a few minutes, had solved the mystery. It was Neem Karoli Baba, Ram Dass’s guru. Neem Karoli was not from the plains of India. He’d spent his life wandering these hills of northern India. His main temple and ashram were further north in Uttarakhand, but perhaps we’d found a subtemple, or the temple of one of his disciples. The deity fit; his protector, not quite sure how to describe the relationship, was Lord Hanuman.

The pieces tumbled together. You’ve probably heard about Ram Das. Who hasn’t? He wrote the wildly popular New Age book called “Be Here Now” in the 70’s. It became one of the Bibles of the hippies. I met him on four or five occasions. He was always incredibly gracious and lively. Even in a large group, he seemed to be able to focus on you in a way that felt very personal. During my tenure as Director of Maitri, I asked him to come to Hartford Street to do a fundraiser. I remember that it was after Issan had died and Steve had resigned because Phil did the introduction. 

Even though the enormous death toll of HIV/AIDS had begun to decline by the mid-90s, there were still thousands of infected men facing an early death. An overflowing crowd sat zazen in our small zendo. Ram Das sat in the teacher’s seat and, as I remember clearly, his head seemed to be on a swivel, bouncing around, while all the zennies were stiff as boards, staring straight ahead.

He began his talk with a kind chuckle and said, “I am going to talk about the Self and dying. Oh, sorry, no-self, I have to remember that I am in a Buddhist crowd even if the notion entirely escapes me.” Then he began to talk about one of his visions after he first returned from India: to create a center for conscious dying. The idea was to establish a kind of ashram for people who were dying and interested in various conscious exercises, including meditation, during their dying process. He even said that he had a location picked out. Then he said that he, or the group that was working with him abandoned the idea because no one was interested. I wondered why he would throw this out into a group of gay men, the majority of whom were facing death. Was it a kind of challenge? How would they choose to spend their few precious last months, weeks, days?

Then he turned towards me and asked me about the hospice. I said that Issan had been committed to making life as normal as possible for the residents, but we had no requirement that residents had to be particularly conscious, spiritually or otherwise, during their last bit of this-life-alive time; that we were committed to allowing the individual's path to unfold. There were, however, a few residents who meditated as much as possible. He nodded and smiled. 

We collected a few hundred dollars that evening to help pay the bills, but we received a different kind of gift, not pouring coconut milk over a second hard car, but an invitation to examine what was really important about life, especially when the end is definitely in sight.

Politically correct Zen is not possible

In the early summer of 2018, there was an incident in the Zendo at Green Gulch Farm. Roshi Ed Brown, during a daylong meditation retreat, said something to offend a person who describes herself as a queer woman and a survivor of sexual violence. The incident appears to have been thoughtless, perhaps with a rough edge, but we mostly know about it through the backlash, which, frankly, seemed disproportionate. There are, or were, tapes of Ed’s talk, but I lack the patience to sift through them to hear precisely what was said. It is essential to remain impartial when assigning blame. Perhaps someone should take the blame (and apparently, Ed did try at some point), but that doesn’t interest me. 

As a person who was sexually assaulted, I was encouraged that another person had found meditation as a source of healing, but I am not surprised that Ed could not heal the wound. Zen has no silver bullet, and Ed is not a therapist. I am also saddened that the woman felt unsafe. I am sympathetic to both parties. What disappoints me is the decision of Zen worthies to ban Ed from teaching at any of the Zen Center’s Temples. He is among the oldest of Suzuki Roshi’s disciples, and his practice has demonstrated selfless dedication to the Way. 

All Zen Centers, like most religions, need to create a congregation, the crowd that will return. It is crucial. Zen is stealthy, and it may take some time to reveal itself, but most administrators of Zen Centers also have to keep an eye on the collection plate. I have been in that unenviable position. Hartford Street was set up as a neighborhood temple that shared the attitudes of its mostly gay neighbors. 

The richest, privileged liberal white clientele in California does not want to be subjected to bathroom gender brawls. The Zennist authorities felt that they had to take a stand. And thus the unenviable task of defining what is politically correct in Zen. I want to be clear. Zendos should be welcoming and safe for human beings facing any of life’s challenges. That has not always been the case, but the way that all the assembled roshis tried to smooth things over in Ed’s case destroyed the immediacy and the power of the moment. Not only did they throw the baby out with the bathwater, they murdered the helpless soul.

I can say with certainty that one of the keys to Zen practice is the student-teacher relationship. It is not an unequal relationship. In fact, the closer it is to equal, the closer to real friendship, and we touch the magic of Zen. It is a listening and response. It is not psychotherapy with the aim of getting better, better adjusted, or happier. Those things may happen, but it ain’t necessarily Zen. It has another overtone, a sacred one. It evades definition. It is not necessarily religious, even though it touches on the numinous. It also includes all of life. And that is where the danger lies.

If I were Ed, perhaps a solution might be to pass out a disclaimer to cover my ass when people entered the hall. (Of course, I have never been invited to speak at ZC, and at least one of the reasons might become clear if you make it to the end.)

“Friends, we have gathered to practice one of the most essential, perhaps the most crucial, even sacred pieces of our work together. We listen and respond, all the while realizing that the perfect dharma is imperfect in our hands. We chant occasionally and make seemingly impossible promises to dedicate our efforts to the liberation of all beings, but then comes a presentation of the dharma. Suppose the leader does his or her job; hopefully, you will be intrigued, inspired, puzzled, or even offended. If you come with a mindset that can only hear what you’d like to hear, it seems that a political rally is where you should be. I am no mind reader. I am not quite sure where my own mind will lead me, but occasionally, with any luck, it will be down a dark alley that needs light. If you’re at least willing to stay with me, sit still, and follow your own mind, you are welcome. If not, it might be appropriate to leave.

“If you are willing, your mind and mine can start to dance, like an introspective call-and-response in the Black Church, allowing us to see ourselves. I say something; you respond. There’s a mysterious formula here like treading the well-known words of "The Old Rugged Cross."

On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,

the emblem of suffering and shame;

and I love that old cross where the dearest and best

for a world of lost sinners was slain.

Following the script of most Zen Center talks I’ve heard, I might open by telling a personal story and painting a picture of the inadvertent hero of my story, stumbling along through life. Despite my sincere intention, I got distracted; I stumbled, cracked my head, stepped in shit, mindlessly crushed a frog or even a snake, heard a madperson screaming incoherent truth in the center divide on Market Street, thoughtlessly dropped the fiver that was intended for Mother Theresa in the gutter, but I use the occasion to turn my attention inward, examine myself, realize that in this fleeting instant the dharmakaya opened with unmistakable brilliance. I resolve to dive in more deeply, to apply Buddhist principles more generously, plus any number of other worthwhile ways in which I might lessen my suffering and the suffering of others in the world. I am not disparaging any of these aims or outcomes. In a word, they are lovely; it’s very genial. We smile over cookies and tea.

But now we come to the part in my talk where you ask, Why is he saying that? How dare he go there? That tone. That language. We can talk about sex and drugs and rock and roll as long as we use the prescribed politically correct language and (at least pretend) that it’s all in the past. We left those experiences as we emerged from the Summer of Love with a drug hangover that lasted a few weeks, or years if we are honest. Thank god it cleared up. 

Most talks are, at least to some degree, commentary on Buddhist Scripture, sutra, or Koan. And if it gets real, it gets real, but the chances are 50/50 that it might go astray. I recall hearing a public talk by the Dalai Lama when he attempted to bring an esoteric distinction from a Gelugpa text into a bedroom fight between a husband and wife. He was not successful, but not because of the bedroom part. He turned it into an Ozzie and Harriet squabble and avoided a serious discussion about sexuality and the inequality of power and consent. He opened the door, but then didn't walk through. He played it for the laugh. Ed Brown’s accuser would have little to complain about. 

I promise that if I am lucky enough to open a door, I will try to walk in. I certainly will not shy away due to some prudery or elevated sense of myself. That is the attitude I try to bring to the conversations I have with my teacher. 

Now, just to be clear, my mother taught me well, and I reserve profanity for private moments. I will also try to frame what I say in a way that you are at least open to listening. I certainly will not encourage you to break the precepts even if I am commenting on the “Kill the Buddha” koan, but neither will I try to explain it away or give an answer I don’t have—certainly not one that you want to believe but is just a pack of lies.

The choir invokes the image of the old rugged cross. It is imaginary. It makes no sense. In our case, the only part that does make sense is that it is an emblem of suffering. Somehow, the hymnist manages to drag love into the picture of sin and shame. I’m sorry, that is the best I can do with it without wandering into a make-believe world of elevated, sacred lies. Sometimes the dharma is like that, rudely breaking into our world with no formal introduction, not making any sense.

It seems hit or miss. Sometimes a teaching will get you to first base, and sometimes the fly ball will be caught and you’re out. But we still honor the dharma. We cannot retreat. It is in the very nature of the dharma. If you can't hear that and are going to feel affronted, please leave. Zen is not politically correct.