Custody of the Eyes

A journal entry written while on retreat at New Camaldoli Hermitage, Big Sur

In loving memory of Kathleen Flowers (1964 - 2009), 

whose presence still remains in our circle of writers

I came to the hermitage with the intention, the hope, the need to shed every garment and sit in naked awareness of my heart, and to notice the countless ways I permit my spirit to be tugged away from the place I love most--the place where You and I live and move and have our being.

"Contemplation," Ivan Mestrovic

      This need, this hope, to bring myself back again and again to the heart is the reason I have cast my eyes down to the ground, choosing not to look up to see who is walking toward me or standing next to me in the kitchen. At such times, I notice a need--a compulsion even--to engage the other's eyes and give a smile of acknowledgment. But even this seemingly benign, polite, courteous gesture feels burdensome to my spirit.
      I have come to see that I have spent most of my life trying to take care of others' feelings--to make sure they do not feel hurt, spurned, ignored by anything I say or do or feel. In the name of goodness and "Christian" love, I have torn my spirit away from its source and handed it over to those to whom it does not belong. When this happens--this unwitting handing over--I feel my life draining out from the center and dissipating in a thousand directions. I experience it as a rending of the most deadly kind. I lose ground. I become terrified. I topple over. I struggle to gather myself up into one still point: my heart, where my own truth dwells.
      And so I have chosen, like Kathleen, to keep custody of the eyes, and to experience the habitual, conditioned urge to look up, be nice, to take care, to control, in some measure, how the other fashions her story about me, as if that story were the truth and only she and a thousand others could tell me who I really am.
      No. This time God demands that I gather up my faculties and turn them wholly inward, so that I might know who I am in God and experience the peace and stability that come from living in that center.

How Buddhism Made Me a Better Catholic, Part I: A Nativity

I always tell my Western friends that it is best to keep your own tradition. Changing religion is not easy and sometimes causes confusion. You must value your tradition and honor your own religion.

-His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso

About ten or so years after my dad died, I attended a poetry reading/event sponsored by the Zen Hospice Project (ZHP) in San Francisco. The featured readers were Frank Ostaseski, ZHP founder, and Norman Fisher, poet and Zen priest. I came to know about Norman through a graduate program in creative writing I was attending, and I'm pretty sure that's how I ended up at Fort Mason that night with a couple of my classmates.

Nativity Scene: A Thangka--sacred Buddhist wall hanging--
given by H.H. the Dalai Lama to Fr. Laurence Freeman 
and the World Community for Christian Meditation in 
December, 1998. Image by Robert Jonas.

It proved to be an auspicious evening. By the end of the night, I had picked up an application to become a volunteer caregiver at ZHP, and within a few months, I was immersed in its intensive (and intense!) 40-hour training, then assigned to care for terminally ill residents at a nearby inpatient hospice unit. Thus began my journey back to the Church through the rich practices of the Zen Buddhist tradition and its approach to caring for the dying.

The story of my return is, as you might imagine, quite involved and lengthy, so I won't unravel it all here. But for now, I can tell you that . . .

. . .at the time I began my hospice volunteering, I was not exactly a fallen away Catholic. I was more of a disaffected one. I had been living in San Francisco for several years after graduating from college (where the Newman Center had provided a great community) and I hadn't yet found a parish in which I felt connected. Most of the churches I hopped in and out of seemed, well, dead: sparsely attended, especially by those my age. (And, to be honest, I wasn't really trying that hard.)

I was also still wrestling with the spiritual crisis sparked by my father's death and by all the life and lifestyles I had encountered in my college and young adult years. I became, perhaps, a bit like Pilate, not in his nasty, brutish aspect, but in his question: "What is truth?" I no longer believed many things, and yet my spirit was still searching and yearning for this seemingly elusive "truth."

And so I attended mass every so often and checked out the many "alternative spiritualities" that the Bay Area has to offer. (Nothing too weird, mind you; I've got a healthy dose of the traditionalist in me…) Mostly, I explored yoga and Zen Buddhism and had begun practicing meditation as it was taught at the San Francisco Zen Center. Both the yoga studio and the zendo were always packed to capacity, especially with my peers, and I began to wonder what was happening there that wasn't happening at mass.

I began to wonder what was happening in me.

To be continued.

The Chaplain's Dress: Good Reasons for Old Habits

A couple years ago, a friend and I lamented the seeming problem of a woman's appearance. We both enjoy dressing nicely--professionally, prettily, stylishly but not overly so and certainly not revealingly. We are, as they say, "appropriate," and yet we can never really escape objectification. Often, it is subtle and insidious, such as when people (often other women) comment incessantly on how we look. Other times, it's classically salacious and overt: "How's my favorite chaplain today?," ogled the young doctor. "You look like a lilac!!"

For a woman in ministry (or for me, anyway), this matter of dress and appearance is especially thorny. On the one hand, as a woman, I am expected to be attractive--to meet the societal standard of beauty; on the other hand, as a chaplain, I am expected to be a bit dowdy and plain--or a man or a nun. It's hard for people to place me: "Women can be chaplains?!" "But you're so young!" "You're so pretty!"Are you a nun?" "Are you married?" "Are you allowed to marry?" "Have kids?" "Have sex?" "I love your shawl! Did you knit it yourself?"

After a while, this line of perplexed questioning becomes intrusive--and I wish I had a blanket or a burka to throw over myself. Which is what my friend and I ended up talking about and how we ended up thinking in a rather odd and unexpected away about burkas and other "coverings" such as hijabs and nun's habits.

As modern, "liberated" women, it's easy to view these "veiling" practices as signs of women's oppression and a denigration of our sexuality. And there may be a lot of truth to that. (Let's just say this issue is far more complex than I wish to plunge into here, and I can hear my beloved feminist friends screeching! For a more in-depth account and analysis of this issue of the woman minister and her clothing, read chapter 7 of Sarah Sentiles's book A Church of Her Own: What Happens When A Woman Takes the Pulpit.) But I think there may be another side to it as well--a liberating quality.

Now, I know less than nothing about how Muslim women experience or give meaning to wearing a burka or hijab. But I wonder if some of them who choose to wear it feel a kind of freedom from ogling and harassment, enslavement to fashion and consumerism, and a sense of personal autonomy and privacy: The woman reveals herself only to those closest to and most trusted and loved by her--i.e., her family, her husband.

As for the habited nun, I begin to see the practicality, if not the virtue, of it. In the context of ministry, perhaps the habit (or the collar or cassock for priests) can facilitate a more spiritually focused dialog. It is certainly a clear marker of identity and role. But it can also have the opposite effect: erecting a major barrier, especially if the patient whose room you're walking into has negative associations with Catholicism or religion in general. My priest colleagues encounter this sometimes: Patients who refuse to talk to them will talk to me, in part because I don't look like a nun (or a priest) or any kind of "religious person." More often than not, people think I'm the dietician or the social worker. (Ha! Gotcha!)

So, a good habit (if not a burka) would certainly solve some problems: It might fend off some cads and throw them onto the path of other hapless women; it might diminish the magpie effect of wearing a tasteful outfit; it might deter certain inappropriate questions (but undoubtedly tempt other ones); it would definitely save money and might even collapse certain class distinctions.

For all these reasons, I've come to see the habit as eminently practical rather than exalted or superior or supremely obedient. And yet, I doubt I will be donning one anytime soon. Forgive me, but I like clothes. Time to polish up the mary-jane pumps, wrap myself in a resplendent red scarf and go billowing down the hallway.