Summer Services Talk
July 7, 2019
First Parish Brookline MA
My first brush with religion came when I was five. My older brother, who was ten, for some inexplicable reason attended what I remember to be a Baptist Sunday school. I think this was probably my mom’s attempt to give the first of her three boys, aged ten, five and two, the rudiments of a proper religious upbringing. Perhaps there weren’t any Episcopal churches in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1955, I have no idea. My father, whose religious preferences I know not, and my mother were fighting a lot at that time, so maybe there were other forces at work.
My older brother would come home and gather his two brothers in front of a painters’ easel, where he would lecture us. I remember his quick diagrams of rocks blocking the way to heaven, and arrows pointing the way down below and maybe some flames too, but the overall message was that if I didn’t “straighten up and fly right”— a favorite expression of my father’s — well I was gonna suffer punishments as yet undeclared. At the time I was less concerned about myself and more in awe that something could so enthrall my older brother. I doubt if my younger brother, at age two, picked up the finer points of hell and damnation.
The next religious experience I had was when my mom, now a divorcee, for the term “single parent” hadn’t been invented yet, tried to take her three rowdy boys to an Easter service. She had moved us back to her home town in Pennsylvania and was trying to make a go of it alone. How she got the three of us, now aged 14, 9 and 6 dressed in little jackets and ties is one of the great mysteries of my childhood.
She parked our Hillman Husky and walked us up to the church doors and there was the minister. I remember her expression of surprise and pleasure that the minister himself should be waiting to greet us, until he informed her that he was standing there to give care and concern to the parishioners as they left the service, which had started an hour before. Daylight savings time had begun and mom had forgotten to change the clocks. I think she was too ashamed to ever go back.
Consequently two important religious lessons I learned in my childhood was first: that here was a subject somebody could really get wiggy about – a kind of grotesque lecturing of inevitable damnation. A version of this conversation, about slightly different topics, that my brother and I, even though we love each other very much, share to this very day. And second, that I liked getting dressed up to go somewhere on a Sunday morning. Mom’s heroic determination of that Easter when I was nine has stayed with me.
Jumping ahead, January 1978, aged 27, I worked as a L.P.N. at Children’s Hospital here in Boston. I think of that experience as a personal alternative civilian service, since my family were very much pro-military, my older brother having served in Vietnam. At that time in 1978, he was suffering symptoms from PTSD before that affliction had been given a formal name. I was working the 11 to 7 shift when Martha called me to tell me something had happened to my Mom. I called my younger brother, who was living with Mom at the time, and my girlfriend and I drove down to Connecticut arriving at Mom’s house at about 4 AM. There, a couple of detectives questioned me and my brother about the circumstances of her death and finally decided that my mother had committed suicide. Meanwhile her body had been taken to a morgue in downtown New Haven, which is where I said my last goodbyes to her.
It was a difficult and dark time for me, as well as my brothers, and we bear the emotional scars to this day.
With the sudden passing of my mom, the intensity of working at Children’s took its toll and I left to try to work full time as a musician. In the spring of 1980 I started doing retreats at the Cambridge Zen Center on Oxford Street, adjacent to Central Square, Cambridge. Up at 4:30 AM, 108 bows, sitting forty minutes, walking meditation for twenty, then back to sitting – heady stuff. It was the Kwan-Seum School of Korean Zen. You sat facing the wall, the room was whatever the outside temperature was, so you dressed accordingly. The monk leading the sit would administer a hearty smack on the back with a wide slapper, sort of a cross between a ping-pong paddle and a cricket bat, but very light and made from bamboo. I loved it. I got to wear a cool monk’s robe, and then get hit on back for my efforts, sort of a combination of the lessons I had learned as a child.
Zen Master Seung Sahn was a very hard-nosed guy, born in 1927, having joined the resistance against the Japanese in WWII. “Only don’t know!” and slap the ground, these were his teachings to bring wayward westerners into the present moment. He also had spies and was accused of sleeping with students, which proved to be endemic with a number of important Zen masters during the 1980’s. But with all his flaws, during one retreat I had an interview with him, and he was for real, one scary dude, and I make no apology for his actions, but to be alone in his presence was something palpable and undeniable, and I am glad to have survived.
I came to First Parish, in 1996, ostensively to provide a religious experience for my son Gabriel, so that he would be protected against cults like the Moonies; and/or because the person with whom I’ve made a life was a lifelong Unitarian. Those reasons are kinda true, but what’s truer is that I was hooked from the beginning. I could walk here, the building was stone, and damp, and had a big old organ and tower both on the verge of collapse, and an African-American choir director who was as irascible and opinionated as he was brilliant. And, of course, I got to dress up on Sunday morning, but since the culture was more about wearing whatever you happen to have on, I hid my embarrassing desire by joining the choir, where the dress code was then, white and black.
A name I began hearing about was Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen Master, who embodied a very different Buddhist practice. A meditation group was started here at FP, inspired by his teachings. I joined the group and there was a meditation practice for a number of years. I wasn’t interested in going deeply into another Zen master’s practice, been there done that, but meditation, not study, had always been my chief concern.
This all changed for me during the years 2010-11, when I experienced what I came to believe was a Jungian crisis of identity. That our son left for college in 2008 I think had something to do with it – for I had decided that when he was born, he was not going to be burdened with the crises imposed on me by the meltdown of my own family. Well, I came to believe that the burden I had placed on myself, to keep whatever that was away from my son, took its toll, and with him not in the house, I couldn’t sustain the pretense any longer. Not sure if I can explain that time any better, for my weekly schedule was – be a music and video teacher to about seventy middle and high school students in a small private day school Monday through Friday – collapse on Saturday, go to church on Sunday, repeat.
I would wake in the middle of night, literally terrified with an undefinable anxiety. It was during this time I began keeping a journal in earnest, writing every morning. I had two rules. I must use a pen, and I must not cross anything out. Just write whatever came next. I saw a counselor, and she was very helpful. It was at Harvard Vanguard and of course, there had to be documentation of the visit along with a prescription. One of my favorites she wrote down for me was “forgive yourself.”
Buddhism was always in the background during this time, and, in the darkest part of the darkest night, I discovered a very simple thing. If I sat up, leaned against the backboard, without doing anything else, not chanting or trying to meditate in some special position or whatever, my runaway thoughts and emotions shifted. And so for months when the anxiety returned, I would sit up, lean my head back and try and remain upright as long as I could before sleep finally returned. I began to count breaths, up to 108, and if I lost track I had to start over again. I took to reading the Dhammapada, a collection of Buddhist sayings. It was very satisfying to read unadorned scripture, in the sense that it freed Buddhism from teachers for me. I began to create my own sayings to carry with me during work. Paraphrases of the Dhammapada. I’ll share one: “Pay attention to your imaginary conversations, they are a fertile source of unintended insight.” I have no idea where that was going! Or “imagining past and future, breathe into the present.” My dear wife gave me a present one year of three books by Thich Nhat Han explaining the Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra. So I studied and wrote in my journal about those.
What was happening was that I was healing myself, at little bit at a time. So imperceptibly that I didn’t notice. I have kept up this practice, on journal book number 12 I think, and expanded the range of my reading to include the Episcopal Lectionary, daily Bible readings, finding out for myself what that great and terrifying book is all about, every reading revealing another small moment of insight.
Which brings me full circle to that time when my older brother lectured me about rocks put in the way of my path to heaven with hell lingering alongside the road pointing me straight to sin. I still haven’t come upon that story yet, but there sure are a lot of other good ones.
from The Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore
“Day by day thou art making me worthy of the simple, great gifts that thou gavest to me unasked—this sky and the light, this body and the life and the mind…
I am here to sing thee songs. In this hall of thine I have a corner seat.”
HinjNoiz 