Not a Part-Time Priest

In January I ordained as a novice Zen priest with the Hollow Bones Rinzai Zen Order.

It was a beautiful ceremony, with more than thirty members of our sangha present, and I was especially moved that my family made the day trip from the city to be part of it.

I had been on silent retreat at Sonoma Mountain Zen Center for five days already, and the rain had been almost constant.  It felt like a true blessing after five years of California drought.  

Each day we sat for hours listening to the heavy drops on the steel roof of the hundred year old barn that had been repurposed in the seventies as a Japanese styled zendo .

We listened to barn owls in the dark early mornings hooting to each other outside in the trees, then an insistent rooster who crowed all day, and closed the night with the frogs chittering noisily down in the pond.

I felt a peace and sense of calm in my spirit that was as refreshing and invigorating as it was healing and soothing.

My choice to ordain as a priest was based on experiences such as these: those crystal clear breaths when time recedes in favor of the eternal now-moment that is outside of time, free of the past and future, free of stories and judgments, free of the nagging sense that I should really be doing something else.

During the ceremony I sat in seiza in front of my teacher, our abbot Jun Po Denis Kelly, the 83rd Patriarch of Rinzai Zen.  He is an amazing man, with a presence and an ability to connect in a clear way that is both uncanny and inspiring.

During each evening’s service, we would honor and recite all of his deceased predecessors in an unbroken line from Japan, to China, and back to India and the Buddha himself.  

With my vows, I was joining myself to this ancient lineage, and promising to tread this same path of wisdom, compassion, and skillful means with all of my clarity of mind, heart, and integrity.

As I made my public commitment to do only good and never evil, to adhere to the Buddha’s precepts, and to show up at all times as best I can with open heart and settled mind,  I felt both tremendous freedom and a distinct sense of responsibility.  I also felt a slight bit of concern in the form of a question.

Now what do I do?

Novice priest is truly a beginner position, which is saying something in a religion where beginner’s mind is prized above all.

There aren’t really any manuals or instruction books on what it means to be a priest in the modern world.  I imagine that in some ways it was easier in the old days when things were simpler and slower, yet I also know that this must be a conceit, since the heart of zen surely beats at the exact rate as it always has, no matter the external conditions.

Yet when I arrived home from the retreat, and re-entered my intense and fast-paced life, I quickly found myself challenged, and even triggered, by the world.  

First there came the death of Antonin Scalia.  

When I heard the news at a pizza party following my daughter’s soccer game, I couldn’t help but blurt out an exultant YES with a fist pump.  I had despised this man for decades, projecting onto him the most extreme forms of intolerance, dishonesty, and cruelty, and judging him to be a small and malevolent man.

When the mom sitting across from me laughed, and said “well, I tend agree with you but it’s not the most polite reaction” I felt a moment of shame and embarrassment, but then settled quickly back into my self-righteous anger. It was the tribal energy of winning a battle.

Around the same time, Donald Trump’s campaign seemed to launch into another gear and began to appear that he really had a shot at the nomination.  I found myself writing agitated posts on facebook, and comparing him to Hitler and Mussolini.  

I got in the middle of the Clinton/Sanders race too, and found myself getting mad at people I truly respect, and judging others for their disinterest.

All this coincided with some controversial changes at work which left me questioning my role as a career public defender in the criminal justice system. This was an experience that I knew from past experience as the beginnings of burnout:  that dreaded experience of compassion fatigue, helplessness to effect real change, and intense frustration with the unfairness and oppression of the system.

In short, I was in deep shit.  

As despair and depression set in, my heart began to contract and harden. My temper became short.  My normal resilience turned brittle.  The delicious feelings of peace and calm that I had felt on the retreat seemed like a distant memory.

I was caught in the spell of separation, and it was extremely painful.

Thankfully, I received strong and loving support from my family and community, including my zen sangha siblings and my men’s group brothers.

I also stayed true to my Buddhist practice, meditating every day for forty to sixty minutes, while also maintaining my commitment to take care of my body, read the sutras, and do my best to care for the environment.

Though at times I felt truly hopeless and lost, thanks to this practice, I could always hear the pinging homing beacon of love and connection which always surrounds me.  Even as I felt lonely and afraid, I knew that in reality I was perfectly safe... so long as I managed to last out the storm.

As I wrote in my last post, I did a process to touch into my deep sadness, and found great relief.  

My elder mentor and dear friend Jan Hutchins gave me some powerful advice, urging me to stop trying to fix everything, and to stop owning all the sorrow and dysfunction of the world, whether the in politics, or in the justice system. 

I also read a wonderful piece by Jonathan Fields, “Before You Blow up Your Life, Read This”, in which he wrote:  

What if, before burning down our so-called malignant existences, we first hit pause and took the time to look inside. To wake up. To embrace the thrash. To own our contribution to the status quo we so feverishly yearn to leave behind. Along with the grace, the blessings, the gifts and resources we bring to the task of “righting our own ships?”

Then, what if we stayed put? Did the work needed, no matter how beleaguered, to reshape our best possible reality in the container that already defines the inner seeds of our humanity and outer seeds of our daily lives? Not when we get to that magical place where everything is as it should be, but here and now...

I did not want to hear this, as I am by nature a fixer and a do-er.

My ego is well trained in playing roles, and he really doesn’t like sitting still. Ego was telling me:  you’ve got to figure this out, you have to solve it:  THINK HARDER!!!!”

But the more I thought and spun in the Rube Goldbergian machinery of my mind, the more confused I became, and the more stuck and hopeless I felt.

I kept returning to meditation as a way to slow down the thinking and attempt to regain some of that peace and stillness from the retreat.  Eventually, it began to take hold.

I started to disengage from story and my whirring mind, and gained a bit of perspective on my harsh reactions to the worldview represented by Scalia and Trump.  

I saw that my vehement rejection of their intolerance was really a reflection and judgment of my OWN intolerance. They were my mirrors.  I realized that the discomfort that I was experiencing was in fact a message from within that I was out of integrity with my own values.

I had lost my way, and deep inside, my heart was telling me this.

Was I not the one who had publicly taken vows to do only good, to speak well of others, and to show up in the world with wisdom, compassion, and skillful means?  Was I not the one to promise to relieve suffering in the world, and to strive not to add to it? Was I not the one who promised to do better?

I realized that I had been acting as a part-time priest:  dedicated, humble and sincere in my practice, but volatile, judgmental, and reactive in my daily life. I was acting out in a violently angry reaction because of my underlying sadness and fear.

If my commitment to seeing the interdependence and interconnection of all beings is to be sincere, then I must make room for the Trumps and the Scalias as well.  There is no such thing as partial love, or partial one-ness, or conditional compassion.

The shame of this realization was crushing, and it became clear that this was the core feeling of the contraction that had gripped me: shame. 

Once the spell lifted enough that I could see it and name it, the shame began to lose its grip and I began to smile again. The light in the world seemed to turn up three notches, and suddenly I regained my humor and started to shed my grave and serious manner.  I began to regain my interest in my work, finding renewed connection to my clients and to the practice of law.  

I even found a way to stop hating Donald Trump.  

Before my morning meditation I started dedicating my practice to him.  “May Donald Trump be happy, may he be loved and well fed, may he awaken to find his way.”  

After a few weeks of this I began to smile when I saw Trump’s leering face, and to have compassion for his supporters, who are so clearly entranced by the same sort of fear, judgment, and separation that I had been experiencing.

Now I have to admit that I am still having a harder time with Scalia.  Old habits do die hard. But I have stretched to read some articles about his unlikely friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and others, which has helped a lot to see him as just another person.

I am very grateful to those friends of mine who disagreed with me in my exultation at his death and who challenged me to let go of my disdain in order to recognize that he was a human being who made mistakes like the rest of us. 

So here I am, once again feeling humility and relief, along with tremendous gratitude for my pain. Or more accurately put, I am grateful for the opportunity that the pain presented me, and grateful that I had an internal infrastructure built on practice and community support strong enough to help me to see it, and to maintain me so that I might find a way through.

It has occurred to me that I should have called this blog “The Gift of Pain” rather than Breathe.Burn.Bee. Indeed, three of my blog essays bear that very title.

Yet the name still serves.  I have now been through enough of these contractions of my heart and soul to know now that this is just the way it works in my life and my process.

For long periods, I will breathe easy and joyfully, reveling in the glory and wonder of being alive;

Then the wind will shift, and I will burn in the fire of intense circumstance, consumed by reaction, story, and shadow beliefs.

Only to re-emerge again into new understanding, new growth, and a new state of beeing.

I am like the caterpillar who enshrouds itself in the dark, suffocating, yet oddly safe cocoon, in order to undergo a dramatic and disorienting transformation. 

Then born again, I am blessed to enjoy moments of newfound flight, effortless unfoldings of peace and calm in the summer breeze.  

All the while knowing that though death will certainly arrive someday, in the meantime there will be time for more cocoons, more fires, more evolution, and more flying.

The cool is that my process is getting faster.  Getting stuck in a big ditch like this one used to be more common for me, but with a lot of practice and effort, I catch things quicker, and often choose to respond rather than react. There is an opportunity for this choice in every moment, in every breath. Truly, when flying in the now, the sky is the limit.

Although I made my vows and ordained as a novice priest three months ago, this winter of discontent has allowed me the opportunity to start anew: to accept and forgive my missteps and detours, to open my heart wider, and to unreservedly embrace my path as a Full-TIme Priest.  

I am Rev. Yoshin Eka Dave Klaus, and I am here to serve.