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.
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.
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 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.
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