Well, the last thing I'm going to read
is some selections from the last essay
that I did for Harper's Magazine and that
is the heart of the non-fiction book that I'm working on now.
And this book is, I think of it as weave
of three strands of personal reportage of time
that I have spent in Buddhist and Christian
monasteries, of scholarship, of the evolution
of the contemplative tradition from its origins in the East
and Buddhism through Christianity to the present.
And finally, a personal essay about this virtue called faith.
And I guess a word about how I got interested in that
in the first place.
I mean, I could tell the stories, the funny stories
about monks hiking over the hills come and rope me
into this process that involved the Dalai Lama, and whatever.
But really, the origin of the story
was because I grew up in a large family.
There were many women in the family.
There was a lot of suffering in the family.
As anybody who grew up on a farm knows,
farming is the most dangerous occupation.
And there was a lot of injury and death.
There was alcoholism, all of the usual travails
that befall a large rural family.
And I asked the women and the older women in my family,
how did you get through?
What sustained you?
And the word that they would invariably respond was faith.
Not Jesus, not going to church, but faith.
And at some point, I started thinking what does this mean?
What does it mean to me as a-- certainly, I
thought of myself-- think of myself
as a skeptic in a way, certainly a liberal humanist.
What is the word faith mean?
And that started a journey that turned
into this Harper's essay.
So I read from that before I plunge into it
just a last word of--
since I'm writing about faith, about fate and destiny as well.
It's pretty amazing to be here with Jim.
And I can tell you that everybody in San Francisco
attributes it to the flight of talent and energy,
a creative energy from the city that is happening now.
And they see Jim and I being here, they point to that.
Someone wrote a column in the Bay Guardian
in which they mentioned Jim and I
as the examples of the departure of creative energy
from San Francisco.
So I won't speak about that.
But I just wanted to say before reading this last bit how great
it is to be here with Jim.
And again, thanks to the university for making
that happen.
This essay got an enormous amount of response.
It was pretty amazing.
I think Harper's was--
I was certainly amazed.
But all you need to know, I guess, it's self-explanatory,
except that it started out with a convocation of Buddhist
and Christian monks, which I attended.
And it evolved into this book project.
There are some parts of it that are deep.
But I will read slowly.
Geography is destiny.
European and Asian ways of being first mingled in the aptly
named Middle East, which served as incubator of the West
great spiritual traditions.
Judaism and its children, Christianity and Islam,
all three influenced by Asian philosophies.
Zoroastrianism, Buddhism transported along
with silk and spices over the great trade routes.
That's a long sentence.
But there's a contention in it that is self-evident when
you start looking into this.
The refusal of the West to acknowledge its roots
in the East.
Contemplative life, monasticism came from India.
There's no question in my mind that
is where this whole contemplative
tradition originated.
It's possible to argue the several authoritative people
that I know have argued that Plato
and the origins of Greek philosophy
have their origins in principles of Buddhism.
And certainly, you see in Plato many, many senses
that could be lifted word for word out of Buddha's
early Buddhist texts.
And when you think about the fact
that there were everything else was going back
and forth along those trade routes,
why were not ideas being exchanged as well?
And yet, the West steadfastly will not
acknowledge that interconnectedness.
Now, in America, the circle is almost circled
to quote Walt Whitman and the two
great ways of being meet again.
The westward migrating Judeo-Christian rooted
Democratic idealism of 18th century Europe
is encountering the eastward migrating ways of Buddhism.
The religion of the word is encountering
the philosophy of silence.
I am brought to ask if the encounter in America
of these Western and Eastern disciplines
may hold the key to a legitimately American faith.
Faith, not at all the same as belief.
Zen philosopher Alan Watts explains the difference.
Belief is the insistence that truth is
what one would wish it to be.
Faith is the unreserved opening of the mind to the truth,
whatever it may turn out to be.
Faith has no preconceptions.
It is a plunge into the unknown.
Belief clings, but faith lets go.
Faith is the essential virtue of science and likewise
of any religion that is not self-deception.
My travels among American monasteries
have brought me to write not about belief, but about faith,
not about doctrine, the virgin birth, the infallible Pope
reincarnation, but about the subsuming of the self
to the greater order.
Watts contends that belief in God
contradicts faith because God conceived as omnipotent power,
necessarily stands between ourselves
and complete letting go.
To argue as much as to ignore the role of belief as a means
to the end of faith, usually expressed
in metaphor, the burning bush, the resurrected Christ,
the reincarnated essence of being.
Belief challenges us to imagine and embrace a universe larger
than what we immediately perceive.
It engages a community in a collective imaginative act.
One of the most powerful ways of binding people into a shared
identity, which is where the trouble begins when communities
use belief not as an aid to faith,
but as a means to establish identity.
Sooner or later, the guns appear.
Catholic, Jew, Protestant, Sikh, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim,
these are powerful labels, easily
used to identify and take up arms against the other.
This is the challenge facing institutionalized religions
if they are to be vehicles for peace.
The teaching of belief is the outer garment
of faith, a means to the end, but not to be mistaken for
and finally not essential to the real thing.
But what is the real thing?
The question is central, the path of this journey.
For skeptical Americans, children
of a nation born of the union of religious idealists
and enlightenment rationalists, what
does it mean to have faith?
And so I return to the monks, the keepers of faith.
After eight children, my parents ran out of ideas for names.
So they gave me over for naming to the Trappist monks
at the Abbey of Gethsemani, a crow's mile
across the Kentucky hills.
In the 1950s, the Trappist more rigidly
observed the rules of silence and mortification of the flesh.
They spoke only at prayer or in emergency.
They slept on straw pallets and unheated rooms.
They fasted on not much more than bread and water
throughout lent and on all Fridays.
My father, a maintenance worker at a local distillery,
delivered to the monastery the bourbon
the monks used in the fruitcakes they
baked and sold to raise money.
The monks appreciated my father's study casualness
and counting the bottles.
For his part, my father preferred their company
to the responsibilities of parenting his sprawling brood.
Within months of their acquaintance
some of those monks became regulars at our dining table.
Through various subterfuges, they slipped from the Abbey
to make their way to our house, managing
to arrive just before supper.
They got pork chops.
We got fried baloney.
But still as children, we adored their company.
For the most part, they were educated men.
Yankees from impossibly exotic places,
Cleveland, Buffalo, who stayed late into the evening,
drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, watching football
on television, and talking, talking, talking.
One brother was fond of a grass skirt someone
had sent my mother from Hawaii.
When the moon was right in the whiskey flowing,
he donned the skirt and some hot pink plastic leis
then hoisted my mother to the tabletop
and climbed up after her.
There she sang Hard Hearted Hannah, The Vamp Of Savannah GA
while her partner swayed his hips
and waved his hands in mock hula.
Later, he launched into broadway tunes,
warbling in falsetto with his arms thrown around one or more
of his brethren.
Brother Fenton, my namesake, was a baker
who made elaborate cakes for each of my birthdays
until I was five.
Then he left the monastery and disappeared from our lives
for reasons I would not learn for many years.
And there's much intervening history, and analysis,
and scholarship, and reportage.
Shortly after I turned 16, my namesake brother Fenton
returned to visit my family and his old friends at Gethsemani.
We received him and his handsome companion
with the usual hospitality and food and drink.
Monks came over.
There was dancing on the table.
We trotted out the grass skirt and plastic leis
for my mother's dancing partner now in need of a stool
to climb to the tabletop, but otherwise,
a sinuous and campy as ever.
Afterward I listened for the customary post-party gossip.
Had Fenton arrived with a woman, the household
would have been abuzz.
Who is she?
Might they get married?
Had he brought him your friend there
would have been idle chatter.
Nice, man.
Needs a haircut.
But nothing.
My namesake and his companion might never
have sat at our table.
In my small town, among garrulous Southerners,
only one subject invoked to silence so vast and deliberate.
That night I went to bed understanding
that Fenton and his companion were lovers, which
meant that I was perhaps not the freak of nature
I had believed myself to be.
I was not alone.
Each of us must find for himself or herself.
the wellspring of faith, to judge from their devotion
to the Virgin Mary.
Many women find that place through their gender.
For me, it resides in the source of my otherness,
my homosexuality.
It is interesting that I think the reason
why Timothy the abbot at Gethsemani acceded to this.
I have to ask him in our interviews, which
now extend over 3 and 1/2 years, get more and more frank,
which is what--
it's the longest time I've worked to get.
But I think what he will say when I ask him in the last time
that we talked, he's retiring, why he was so free at asking
me to come back is partly because he's
a liberal Catholic.
And I think he is angry at what's happening in the church.
And he thought that--
and in institutionalized religion across the board
and he thought that this was some way
to do something about it.
But I guess if faith is maybe the theme of the evening,
I think he also recognized what he [AUDIO OUT] I, know
you know?
He was a man of faith.
And he felt that even if it produced difficult knowledge
for him to have to deal with that,
this person had been brought there and he had to say yes.
And I was very touched by that, needless to say.
Now, we get to the deep and interesting part.
Several months after the Gethsemani convocation.
I talked with Norman Fischer, co-abbot of the San Francisco
Zen Center.
A fully developed imagination enables
us to live in a world that's ennobling without dwelling
in some fantasy land.
He said, "A fully developed imagination
enables us to live in a world that's
ennobling without dwelling in some fantasy land."
That's really-- that's wisdom.
He said, "For a Buddhist, enlightenment
is the development of the faculty of imaginative vision
that enables us to see the world in a transfigured way."
"For a Buddhist, enlightenment is the development
of the faculty of imaginative vision
that enables us to see the world in a transfigured way."
He looked up from his black zen robes.
That's what a Catholic mass is about, right?
And when he said that to me, it was
one of those moments when you interviewed somebody
and I thought, oh, I get it.
I understand.
Well, it was a really wonderful moment.
And of course, I have it all in my notes.
And I go back and talk to Norman.
He says, I don't remember saying that at all.
So fortunately, it's in my- Take good notes is the--
He looks up from his black zen robes,
that's what a Catholic mass is about, right?
The mass.
You enter the Gethsemani Abbey church,
high and long and narrow whitewashed brick
plain as an empty hand, whose lines direct your eyes forward
to the dais on which sit two vertical blocks
of black granite, topped by a horizontal slab lit
from above by a spotlight.
Behind this altar stands the starkest
of thrones, six flat plains, a back, a seat, two arms,
two armrests of polished oak to either side
ranks of monks robed and cowed.
You have entered the theater of faith.
The setting prepares you for blood sacrifice.
What you get is art.
It is 1,998 years into the Christian era, 6,000 years
into the era of self-consciousness.
And we are here to bear witness to the triumph
of the imagination, the great human achievement, the acting
out of mystery and metaphor instead of in fact.
Transubstantiation, the bread becomes flesh,
the wine becomes blood.
We eat the flesh and drink the blood,
and so re-enact the violent heart of the mystery of being.
To teach literal transubstantiation
as the focal point of this genuine miracle
is to take the narrowest view on the greatest
work of ongoing performance art Western civilization
has conceived.
It is to collude with secularism in assigning the miraculous
to the past when in fact the spark of the divine
resides in the present imagination.
And the leap of faith required to conceive and achieve
science, art, the Catholic mass.
It is that facility and faculty of imagination
that is the genuine and continuing miracle that
organized religion so often Gethsemani
as antithetical to the ends of institutionalized power.
I take an imaginative leap here to see consciousness
as evolving from those first hermit monks of India
through Plato, who understood unity
with the whole of being as the soul's aspiration and goal.
We move from the era of prophets who
ascribe the mystery of being to external agents, gods
and demons, to prophets, Buddha, Jesus,
who direct us to the sacred place within
We moved from an era when the acknowledgment of mystery
demanded blood sacrifice.
Less than 500 years ago, the Aztecs
built a brilliant civilization around it
to an era in which we are clever enough
to substitute bread and wine and understand it
as the real thing.
The quality we draw upon to accomplish
this imaginative leap.
This act of confidence in our human right and responsibility,
to shape the terms of our encounter with the divine,
as well as confidence in the greater order in which
our search takes place.
We give the name of faith.
The quality we draw upon to accomplish
this imaginative leap, this act of confidence
in our human right and responsibility
to shape the terms of our encounter with the divine
as well as confidence in the greater
order in which our search takes place,
we give the name of faith.
Must rationalism obviate faith.
Science without religion is lame, wrote Einstein.
Relation without science is blind.
Contemporary physics is rediscovering the revelation
that mystical often monastic writers repeatedly
present as the culminating fact of the contemplative life.
The understanding that science and art lead to mystery.
Finally, we can only glimpse the great unity
with an understanding increasingly supported
by scientific evidence, but sustained by a leap of faith.
Immersed in and part of this great river of energy.
We live every instant the precise analog
of the moment of transubstantiation
in the Catholic mass in which the transcendent order is
at once revealed and concealed.
Seen in this slide, faith does not divide,
but unifies body and spirit, perception and miracle, science
and spirituality,
Faith is first among the cardinal virtues
because everything proceeds from it, including
and especially love.
Faith is the leap into the unknown, the entering
into an action or a person knowing
only that you will emerge changed with no preconception
of what that change will be.
It's antonym is fear.
In the prosperous [? 1990s ?] America is a fearful society,
consider our obsession with national security,
financial security, emotional security.
Because we are a faceless society, without faith,
without that willingness to embrace life, including
its uncertainty and pain, and mortality, and mystery the soul
becomes stagnant.
Possibly the only aspect of the universe that can resist change
and in resisting change possibly the only aspect
of the universe that can really die.
Faith accepts that we cannot know everything, and control,
and can control only a little.
If we can bring that acceptance to science,
if we can recognize science as existing
on a continuum with art, if we can embrace
both not as a means, the accumulation
of money, sex, and power, but is done
for the sake of the love for the sake of the love of knowledge
which is to say the love of beauty, which
is to say the love of truth.
We will have reason to hope
Paling darkness, the shuso, it's the woman who wakes you up
in the morning.
Makes her circuit through the Tassajara Canyon,
ringing the wake up bell with the self-satisfaction
of a young woman awake and given the pleasure
of rousing everyone else.
In silence, your neighbors struggle
into their black robes.
Outside, a waning moon sets over the dark ragged line
of the mountain's, egg into nest.
The moonlight knits shadows of branches on a glistening
carpet of wet leaves.
The black robed monks hurry to the meditation hall,
where later you will join them.
But on this particular morning, you
walk past the hall and up the canyon beyond the kerosene
lamps.
You follow your nose past sage and under California bay
laurel to the sulfur spring, heated
in the bowels of the Earth.
You drop your clothes and step in.
An early sprouting big leaf maple
drips napkins into the chill.
A middle aged man, pudgy at the waist, thinning at the crown,
rises from the pool.
He arches a hand over his head, first to the right,
then to the left.
Then he bends at the waist then straightens,
stacking his vertebra one at a time
until his head lulls back to one side than another.
He raises his arms and you see stiffness
rising from his ruddy steaming skin,
crepuscular light passes through the curling steam.
And it's as if an angel has stepped
from the cold rushing stream below through the heated waters
and into the brightening dazzling light
and for a moment you're given to understand that you are that
angel that man above the rushing water, that here and now,
you are made in the image of the divine
that paradise is a mirror in which you see yourself
that what we have to become is what we already are.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]