In the Spring of 2011, I did a Zen retreat at a former catholic convent, the Angela Center. As I was unpacking my bag, I noticed that my “cell” was just a slightly less Spartan, more feminine version of the one where I was isolated from the outside world for two years as a Jesuit novice 45 years earlier, the same bland institutional architecture thrown up to accommodate the flood of men and women entering religious life after the Second World War.
In the Jesuit house of formation, we got up at 5:30 and went to bed at 9. Now my concentration started an hour earlier and lasted an hour later, but it seemed to re-stimulate both the ecstatic and painful memories of my novitiate, for me an extremely difficult initiation into religious life. I couldn’t stop a flood of memories, tastes of prayer, study, and feelings that soon included my 11 years of Jesuit indoctrination as well as the aftermath.
After breakfast on the morning of the 4th day, as I was walking back to the room, my actual perception of the building suddenly shifted. I was just walking on a linoleum floor that was just a floor, the walls of lightly plastered-over cinder block were just walls. Nothing more. No sounds but the sound of my feet, no visions but what I saw through my eyes—just pictures on a wall, just a door, just a room, just a grey carpeted floor with black cushions. It was not a dramatic, flashing-bright-lights insight, no angels descended from heaven with all the answers that I was hungry for, or had told myself that I really sought. Rather bland for a mystical experience.
But then I began to notice something very powerful open up inside me—every burden that I had been carrying since my Jesuit training was gone. It was extinguished, not conceptually but actually. My past life as a Jesuit was gone, completely gone. Not that it didn’t happen, not that it had no effect on me, but I understood in a non-intellectual way that anything I carry into the present moment was for me to carry. It doesn’t drag itself along. Actually there’s nothing there. It’s not real.
Suddenly in that moment of bland Zen, I was totally and irrevocably free—no one, no thing, no outside authority, no god, no doctrine, no experience could ever enslave me.
Three cheers for bland Zen!
Ken’s verse
In the Cave of Sister Mary Kevin, Ursuline
She might have even been as Spartan as Father Ignatius
if her taste had not run to plastered walls, a few modest chintz prints
and poignant photos of helpless children.
You could have fed a child in Haiti for that price, Sister.
Alok asked me about priest-craft—
appeasing hungry ghosts with big bellies,
tight mouths, and one might presume assholes,
not to mention pussies. Forgive me, Sister.
The antidote contains no eyes, no ears, no tongue,
no body, no mind, no assholes
no thought, no perception, no old age, no ending of old age and death
—and no sex. You know that practice, Sister.
I knew, or at least said, more than I ought.
Phil told me that the rite was no more than sleight of hand:
chocolate, cardamom tea, ripe kiwis,
none of it really satisfying or nourishing.
Hungry ghosts think it’s dinner.
Anything looks like dinner when you’re starving.
Big bellies and big ears arise simultaneously –
evidence, your pictures of starving children in Sudan.
Trick them. Stuff them with dharma.
No bellies. I know about greed first hand.
If you’d had just a little more imagination, Sister,
I might have discovered a unicorn in your garden,
a mythical beast. But no. It had to be a nasty tigress.
Her bad breath nearly killed me.
But right then and there
I stuck my head into her mouth,
to fulfill the requirement for courage,
no fear, no lipstick, no kisses.
Then I heard a small voice demanding attention –
Don’t be an asshole. Don’t arm your daemons.
No Crusades, no swords,
No preaching, no stones, no death.
And we were saved.
Thank you Sister.
1 November 2011
Originally posted December 21, 2011, revised during the Coronavirus lockdown, March 25, 2020.
*The title of this reflection comes from a piece my friend Laurence Platt wrote, “Zen Bland,” which was not at all bland but very juicy. He argues that simple and unembellished language is the only authentic way to describe deeply moving, transformative experiences—living life here and now, speaking about it simply, not altering our experience trying to make it into something else!
Dedicated to Chris Wilson, head of practice at Spring sesshin, a generous, guiding spirit and friend.
