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.