The Clang Birds

I was once the model for a rather unsympathetic character in a satirical novel. Most of the details have faded into distant memories before the Summer of Love, before Stonewall, and they will for the most part lie untrampled in the graveyard of failed friendships. However there are a few details that come to haunt me from time to time when I am feeling vulnerable or when I want to examine the way gay people were treated in religious life before Vatican 2, before the sexual revolution..

The novel was by John L’Heureux. I went looking for the opening passage. Here is the description of a Clang Bird. 

"The Clang Bird is a rare creature that flies in ever decreasing circles at ever increasing speeds until with a terrible clang it disappears up its own ass. It is only because of the will of God that the Clang Bird is not yet extinct.

— St. Gomer, O.S.T., Founder,

Order of St. Thomas, Novissima Verba, 1717”

This was John L’Heureux’s world. The absurd image of a bird flying up its own ass as recorded in the “newest words” of a totally fake 18th century Saint in a fictional religious order named after the disciple of Jesus who had some serious doubts. It was very clever, or pretended to be, toying with the imponderables of extinction and the will of the Force That Cannot Be Named. If it were clever enough to get a laugh, that somehow justified any cruelty. 

It was published in 1972, the year that John left the Jesuits. He’d left the Ph.D. program at Harvard and was working as an editor at the Atlantic. He had to have been writing “The Clang Birds” when we were both in graduate school at Harvard, he at John LaFarge House close to The Yard while I was living with six other Jesuits in a small house near Inman Square. Our address was 57 Oak Street. His fictional collection of “over-educated priest candidates” lived at 75 Oak Lane. 

This much was not made up. We were all to some degree involved in the Catholic resistance to the War in Vietnam as were his fictional seminarians. The most senior member of the collective was a young priest, John Galvani, who had been part of the recently closed Jesuit mission in Baghdad. He was involved in planning an anti-war action in Boston following the model of Philip and Dan Berrigan’s action in Catonsville. When the solemnly dressed men from the FBI really did knock on our door, I answered, and had been prepped what to say--nothing.  

Another scholastic, perhaps the one who’d already been selected for advancement in the Jesuit hierarchy, a bright handsome Irish kid from Queens was in the Harvard Med School. He had fallen in love with a very attractive African American nurse. There were endless conversations between his family, his New York superiors and our small living room which made for lots of real life drama. 

Another member of the group was a man from Maryland who was at the Divinity School and sang in the choir at Saint Paul’s. For some reason that was never made clear, his ordination had been postponed. Although I saw nothing overtly sexual at the time, he had a fascination about some of the adolescent boys in the choir school, and I am quite sure that his name later appeared on the list of Jesuits who have been credibly accused of sexual abuse. 

A wonderful, first generation Hungarian whose family had fled Budapest in the Uprising of 1956 was the author of the “As Per Duck Cookbook.” When he told his dad that he was going to be cooking for several other Jesuits, the dad dictated some Hungarian homemade recipes, “The first thing you do is chop some onions, garlic, celery, carrot and gently saute them, then you brown the duck skin all over. For the goulash you start the same way as you did for the duck. For meatballs, you begin the same way as you did for the duck.” And in the young academic Jesuit’s notebook at the top of each recipe read “As per duck.”

I forget my character’s name--he didn’t play an important role in L’Heureux’s plot, but people who read it recognized me. I didn’t have to be told though I did have to be reminded it was satire. It was published by Macmillan, at that point still a publishing powerhouse, so it was not a fly by night hit job. Purporting to be about some of the most controversial aspects of the post Vatican 2 religious renewal, it was also in my view so unflattering I was happy when it was widely panned. Few people got the joke, and, given the situation, I certainly thought it unfair. I found nothing to like in the way I was portrayed so needless to say, I thought it was also cruel. Needless to say,, I also got on a high horse silently telling L’Heureux in the comfy Jesuit residence on Sumner Street to go fuck himself. He found it so easy to create satire using Jesuits who were actually putting themselves in danger of following Dan Berrigan to jail while he wrote his three page daily quota. It was abusive.

The young religious me was a rather inept caricature of a homosexual who was trying to live a celibate life. L’Heureux’s disdain for the man was palpable. Up until “The Clang Birds” I had considered myself his friend, not very close, but certainly a man whom I respected and admired and as Jesuits, assumed that we shared some common goals. 

In my Junior year at Fairfield Prep, L’Heureux had been my Latin, English, French and Religion teacher. I loved studying and working with him and, for the most part, excelled. He was creative and seemed very open-minded. He was certainly brilliant. I was star struck, even falling in love in the strained way that adolescent gays do as they discover and explore their attraction to men, but it was never returned. Thank god for that, but it was a factor in my deciding to become a Jesuit.

He attracted a following. He even gave a name to the clique, the BYP, the Bright Young People which was an actual group of blue blooded high flying hipsters who emerged in London’s Mayfair after the First War. Evelyn Waugh, one of John’s literary inspirations, wrote about them in Vile Bodies, which of course was assigned reading. 

There were some perks to identifying with the BYP and supporting them in the election for our class officers. L’Heureux organized Saturday excursions to New York City. I remember Tom Baker, Jan Wojcik and perhaps Jeff Connell were part of the group. And I was included until I wasn’t. I remember how much I loved those Saturdays. I grabbed the train in Bridgeport which was further east on the New York, New Haven and Hartford than the rest of the group joined. I remember seeing Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin the Sun, Camelot and Bye Bye Birdie as well as the beefcake magazines in Times Square. 

Now the painful memory. I am standing alone in the entrance to McAuliffe Hall on North Benson Road waiting for my mother to pick me up. My mind is a blur and I can barely keep from crying. I have just seen L’Heureux in his room. He told me that I would no longer be invited to join the New York group. Perhaps there was some attempt at using the occasion for helping me “grow” in some way, but if there were, it didn’t ease the pain. I could not understand why I had been singled out. Looking back it might have been that I was just too gay, but that is hard to pinpoint amid the raging hormones of puberty and being rejected by my first crush. He probably just said that I just didn’t fit in with the group. Of course what he would not admit is that he, L’Heureux, was a conflicted bisexual. 

I had three meetings with John after The Clang Birds. I remember two extremely well or at least certain parts of our conversation, or my version of it, has stuck in my mind. Once Tom B and I visited him in his apartment in Boston’s Back Bay when he was working as an editor at the Atlantic. It was on one the blocks closest to the Boston Commons on either Marlboro or Newberry Streets. It was also the cruising block of a growing gay neighborhood. A stream of cars would slowly circle the block pretending to be searching out a parking space while lots of sexily dressed young men would be walking their dogs or just hanging out by fire hydrants or inspecting the parking meters. Eventually a driver and street walker got lucky, and an empty parking spot opened up for a connection. When John looked out the window and saw right below a connection happening, he kind of chanted, “dance away you little queer, somebody’s going to love you.” I may not have the words exactly, but I know that I have caught their exact feeling and can still feel the chill.

Much later, probably in the late 1980’s, when I had a business making custom furniture, we got a contract to supply some furniture for a new Alumni Relations building on the Stanford campus. During the installation I called L’Heureux to see if he had time to meet. He held the prestigious position as director of the Stegner Creative Writing program. He was very cordial, even friendly. He showed me a spacious office in a very beautiful Stanford building. We talked a bit about the AIDS epidemic and he admitted to a friendship with a person with AIDS. Obliquely, he was also admitting to having sex with men. I say oblique because although there was never an outright admission, his words and gestures pointed to the pain of losing a lover, and for a brief second we entered the level field of being completely honest.

As I followed his work throughout his long and productive career, I began to suspect that it was his own bi-sexuality, or totally closeted gayness that short circuited all our attempts at friendship. Of course when he was a Jesuit, all discussion of sexuality was out of bounds, and I just might not have been his type. I do know that he had sex with one man who happened to be my friend.

“The glorious thing about literature,” L’Heureux told The Stanford Daily, “is that it allows you, as a reader, to experience vicariously what you never fortunately have to undergo in real life. The same is true with a writer. It allows you to purge yourself of all the worst kind of bedeviling thoughts or ideas or even temptations without ever having to go through with them.” John, darling, this is at least to some degree wishful thinking. I know that you wrote about a man arrested for sex abuse in front of his class, but I never read the book. One of your last stories in the New Yorker, “The Long Black Line,” was about a Jesuit novice who left Shadowbrook under a cloud and committed suicide shortly after. You were there in the novitiate in 1954 and you died in 2019. That is perhaps 65 years of experiencing vicariously. It was only 63 years ago that you excluded me from a nice group of creative young men and it still stings. Perhaps I am just not as good a writer as you were. I pray that you did find some relief from living a lie. If it helps at all, I forgive you and I pledge that I will never allow my sexuality to block another person’s creativity or happiness. 

How a blind monk might respond to my piece

After reading my last post “It is Universal" Doug McFerran posed some great questions about the language of "Enlightenment.” He closed by saying, “What I would really like to hear is how a blind monk would respond to your piece.”

I would too. His name was Zenshin Philip Whalen (October 20, 1923 – June 26, 2002). He gave me lay ordination 33 years ago. I lived and sat with him in the zendo at Hartford Street for more than 6 years. Though I loved Issan and learned from living with him as he was dying, I was formally Phil’s student. Phil was the Beat poet who was known as the poets’ poet. He read at the Six Gallery the same night that Ginsberg read Howl. He was obviously upstaged. 

Phil was legally blind when I met him. He had figured out how to get around. As with other blind people I’ve known, his sense of hearing and touch had recalibrated to some degree to make up for his loss of sight. He could go up and down the stairs to the zendo and find his seat and bowing mat. He loved to eat so he certainly could locate food on the table and in the refrigerator, though he often needed help. Vague shadows were the only information that his eyes delivered. He had glaucoma which had been misdiagnosed 20 years earlier. Being perpetually broke, I imagine that he’d gone to the cut rate optometrist who had dropped out of medical school but hung out a shingle in the Tenderloin. 

I assume that Phil had a photographic memory. If I asked a question while we were sitting in his library office, he would say, “Check out old Yampolsky, page 54, third paragraph from the top of the page. You’ll find the book in the middle cabinet, third shelf, about three in from the right.” And god dammit, it would be there. He was the most well read man I have ever met. He loved books and words. He could quote pages and pages of poetry. People were always a challenge for Phil, but he tried his level best. I suppose that I had as close a relationship with him as he had with anyone, and I learned an enormous amount, but we both had to work at it.

When I write about Buddhism and search for an appropriate English word, I often ask my memory what Phil might say. This is not reliable, and perhaps as hopeless as consulting a fake optometrist so I exercise caution. Phil distrusted Plato and would always hedge his use of any philosophical language with words of caution. When it came to Buddhist terminology in English, he would usually begin with the technical Japanese word from the Soto dictionary, then he would foray into the antecedents in Ch’an, or Chinese Zen, and then finally refer to the Sanskrit terms that were developed by the early Mahayanists. 

So yes, enlightenment is just the normal way that Western Buddhists have described the the experience of Kenshō (見性), a Japanese term from the Zen tradition. Ken means "seeing", shō means "nature, essence". It is usually translated as "seeing one's (true) nature", that is, the Buddha-nature or nature of mind. Kenshō is an initial insight or awakening, not full Buddhahood. Then Phil would have directed me to the Heart Sutra, the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya where the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara  directs Śariputra,one of the Buddha’s disciples to examine form and emptiness, and then tells him that there are no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, etc. We are off into.an examination of emptiness (śūnyatā): all phenomena, known through the five aggregates of human existence (skandhas): form (rūpa), feeling (vedanā), volitions (saṅkhāra), perceptions (saṃjñā), and consciousness (vijñāna) are empty. Bad translations and advanced philosophical study aside, in Zen temples, the 100 line version of the Heart Sutra is usually chanted, sometimes in phonetic Sinojapanese, after a meditation period. 

When I finished the last piece. “It’s Universal,” I asked myself what was missing. I had tried to lay out some of the areas and things that might be perceived differently when we have some experience of kensho, or enlightenment, but that is not a definition. Then my mind went in several directions. First I remembered the many times I had a complaint about sitting and not getting something. Phil would most often get to be the strict Zen teacher. He’d say, “You’re not sitting enough.” Or if we were sitting in his library he would say look at what old Dogen says in his Shōbōgenzō: “You should therefore cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following after speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inward to illuminate yourself. Body and mind will drop away of themselves, and your original face will manifest itself. If you wish to attain suchness, you should practice suchness without delay.”

Rather than try to parse 12th century practice instructions from the monk’s hall, I will tell an old Irish joke that illuminates old Dogen. A hapless American tourist is lost in Dublin. He is looking for the Cathedral and just can’t find it. He sees a pub. Surely these guys will be able to give some direction. He stands at the end of the bar and asks “How do you get to Saint Patrick’s? The answer comes back, “You can’t get there from here.”

So we are looking for some experience in meditation. That is all the Zen means--Meditation Buddhism, but that language won’t sell soap, body oil or relaxing massage.

My friend Rob Lee lived at the Page Street Zen Center for many years. The zendo is in the basement. There are windows on the Laguna Street and Lily Alley sides and from some of the seats in the zendo, a clear view of what used to be pre Loma Prieta Earthquake the Fell Street Off Ramp. When a newcomer came for meditation instruction in the late afternoon, some bad bad zen students who were instructing them would sit them in one of those seats. At just about 5:30 cars coming off the freeway unto Fell would catch the last bit of sun disappearing over the hill and it would reflect off the windscreen. The new meditator was treated to a flash of enlightenment the first time they sat on the cushion.

Language about the experience of meditation also plays tricks. 

I will end with a memory of that Blind Monk. One morning coming up from the zendo, Phil got to the top of the stairs and a bird started chirping in the backyard. He sang out, 

The year's at the spring

And day's at the morn;

Morning's at seven;

The hill-side's dew-pearled;

The lark's on the wing;

The snail's on the thorn:

God's in his heaven—

All's right with the world!

It is Universal

Some rumblings from my Bangkok hermitage.

27 January 2024.

This is not an argument for or a defense of the thesis that there is a universal creed under all the vagaries of the religious expressions of humankind. That's an old theosophical trope. I refuse to engage its tired argument or bask in its self-justifying cliches though I’d like to make a joke if I could. I always hope that the right words will coalesce at an opportune moment but my jokes are usually pretty lame. Regardless, all day yesterday and this morning I have been tossing around odd impressions and telltale fragments from three conversations that have cleared the horizon of my recent thinking.

The first thread of this conversation is Joan Didion, a woman writer whose creativity and imagination and skill we have rarely seen on our American continent. I was watching a documentary about her on Netflix. She said that in the 50’s when she got her first job out of college and moved to New York from California to take the coveted position as a staff writer at Vogue, she could easily identify the women executives who made the decisions at the magazine. They all wore hats and gloves. The “girls” who did the work, the staff writers, secretaries, stylists, copy editors, and mailroom clerks did not wear hats except when the weather dictated. Having just researched Saint Charles Borromeo for another piece, and seen his gold mitre and stole, I thought there might be a universal dress code embedded in human nature: you know who’s in charge by their hats.

The second thread of conversation has to do with the theological term transubstantiation. Perhaps it has been elevated to the level of doctrine, but it’s certainly not a term that would even have been recognized among early Christian believers, not even the Grecophile Paul. My twisted mind flashed to Og Mandino’s characterization of Paul as “The Greatest Salesman in the World,” without whom, according to the Think and Grow Rich crowd, the gospel would have languished in the backwaters of Judea. But I think that the credit has been misappropriated: the honor belongs to Aristotle who, mixed in with a few Neo-Platonists, really deserves credit for promoting the Jesus sayings, stories and beliefs in the predominant culture. A simple test proves my point. Would you say that in the seminary curriculum post Reformation and certainly in the Jesuit Ratio, was Thomistic theology given equal weight with textual study of the gospel texts? Clearly more. We learned more, or spent more time studying Aristotle's notion of substance than we did about the possible early forms of liturgy. This is a snapshot of Aristotle’s chokehold on our thinking, locking in definite notions about the nature of God, the divine characteristics of the Lord Jesus as Son of God as well as the continued presence of the Lord in our midst. Q.E.D Maybe Jesus and Aristotle deserve equal doses, but actually, Aristotle gets the upper hand because he allowed for science and logic to sneak in the backdoor..

And the third strand of this thread comes from a conversation that I had with my Zen teacher Ed Oberholtzer a few weeks ago. He said that he felt that our thinking about theological matters is hedged in by imagined people, places, times and events. We think that without the Lord Buddha sneaking out of his father’s castle on or about 563 B.C.E., we would not have the possibility of being enlightened. Then he said it is entirely possible, even probable that some group besides Buddhists would hit on the right conditions to produce that insight that is liberating, “maybe even that group of former Jesuits you talk about.” It is probable that this insight is reproducible, and given the realm of human possibilities, that it has already been replicated. We just haven’t heard about it. Do I nominate Bob Kaiser, Bob Brophy, Pope Francis, or Marko Ivan Rupnik for Zen Master?

Bad jokes aside, where does this lead and what are the conditions that make this experience of enlightenment or liberation possible?

The first condition has to do with those hats. It’s not that an examination of past decisions is not interesting, important or even valuable to our exploration, but let’s not be distracted by fancy hats. They are just culturally conditioned fashion. The colorful signs of power were among the first things that the Reformers cut when their movement gained traction about 500 years ago, but it was not too long before a new style was in vogue and captured the imagination of the people they wanted to win over. So in any case beware hats. Don’t hesitate to wear a rainhat in monsoon or a toque when your ears might freeze. And give the drag queens a lot of leeway. They keep us honest, but recognize that the texts that made it to the inked pages were put there by the women who wore the hats.

The second condition has to do with the limitations of human thinking. It’s always difficult to thread the needle isn’t it? It’s more difficult when you’re wearing a straight jacket but think it’s a Roman toga. So much of what I currently “think about thinking” or even “non-thinking” has to do with my work with the concepts derived from the Nagarjuna School of Buddhism that I feel a bit tongue tied. I often think that I don’t have enough time left to fully appreciate the contribution that this revolutionary thinker made in the development of the Mahayana, and that makes me feel like I’m probably missing something important. Still the lessons that I’ve learned by trying to understand the thinking of the Mahayanist, and especially the Zen guys I spend most of my time with, changed my life. I did the most difficult training, the one that I undertook in a rigorous way that young people usually do when they first start to ask the hard questions about life in a system that pretended to be open when in reality it was designed to answer objections rather than explore. That in itself allowed me to see its limitations. Following a line of thought is just that. It doesn’t lead to the discovery of truth with the big “T.” 

I also really appreciate that this use of the brain is groupthink, and I don’t mean the usual negative connotation of the phrase, but rather thinking together in a group of men and women to really get it. This makes me appreciate the many parts of managing an open conversation with lots of people contributing.

And the third condition is the one that Ed alluded to. It was in the context of some koan work that we've been doing for several years, but his point was that even if all the great Masters of the non-dual way were extinguished and their writings disappeared, it would not be forever before some other humans discovered this unique and powerful way of looking at our world, ourselves, and our interactions. Although not immediately recognized or available, It is not divinely revealed, and its discovery is not confined to a particular time and place. Given that there are hundreds, perhaps even thousands of men and women, possibly including some Jesuits, who have demonstrated that they are themselves Buddhas, well you get my point. 

The joy and promise of this fact about Buddhism is often hidden or disguised. It is very hopeful. The implications of it are revolutionary: we only have this moment and this place in these particular circumstances to work with which is why the day that I have fretted over writing this and making it sound rational and cogent and persuasive might have been a waste of time, but I had some fun which is not a forbidden pleasure,

Will the Palace of Westminster go up in flames?

Bangkok, Thailand

March 30th 2023

Will the Palace of Westminster go the way of Notre Dame, and post Brexit, will there be a way to pay for its rebuilding? 

There is a ton of evidence of the danger and appropriate concern for the dire situation. Fires and plans, debates and more plans and politics. Ah, yes how could the home and symbol of the British Parliamentary system be destroyed without a lot of very civil shouting? There was an attempt to sift out the political warfare and get on with rebuilding, The oversight committee released An Independent Options Appraisal Report (8 September 2014) detailing the projected costs, timetables and other pertinent materials. That was almost 10 years ago. But the Tories have been in charge and Brexit took the wind out of the political sails as well as money out of the coffers. The projected cost was far too much for the likes of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, and Rees-Mogg could hardly do without the proper backdrop for his mumbled theatrics.

So they decided to throw the entire deliberation back into play. A political football. When I heard that the clown Rees-Mogg was involved, I knew that all sanity had been thrown to the wind in a plethora of incomprehensible high brow language and a penury of common sense. Let’s hope that they can get the project underway before something far more destructive than the fire of 1834 brings Westminster down once again. We know that post-Brexit there will be no money to replace the building. Rees will have to hold forth in a thrown-up Parliament of concrete blocks.