Crabbiness, Faith, and Lotus Roots

Report the following images as offensive. Confirm CancelThank you for the feedback.

I’m crabby this morning. I’m going to a conference of Zen teachers in couple weeks and now I’m concerned that organizational issues may dominate the conversation. I’m not interested in a lot of talk about long-range plans, mission statements, volunteer burnout and the like. Helpful and important discussions, I suppose, depending on what trips your trigger. They just don’t trip mine these days. I’m all tripped out on organizational Zen and am experimenting with other models rather than the standard “Zen Center” approach that tries to meet everybody’s needs and look as much like a Christian church as possible for people who don’t wear shoes.

Like I said, I’m crabby.

Anyway, this post is about faith. And faith has something to do with being crabby. I’ll get to that in a moment.

Today’s Writer’s Almanac has a really moving poem, especially if you have “father issues,” by George Bilgere about learning to ride a bike with his drunk dad:

…And I was scared, unable to disbelieve
In gravity and believe in him…

Belief. What’s that got to do with it?

Once when I was in a similar crabby mood, I went to dokusan and expressed my fear to Katagiri-roshi that I couldn’t really do Zen, was sick of it anyway and didn’t know if I really wanted too.

He didn’t get all mushy or therapeutic but said, “Your problem is your faith is not strong.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, “what can I do about it that I’m not already doing?”

“Often you aren’t doing it. You think faith is an idea. Faith is doing. You are not doing faith. You are doing ‘my faith is not strong enough.’ Strong faith simply cuts through delusion like only the sharpest knife cuts through the lotus root.”

It took a while to sort out what he was saying because Roshi never really mastered the “r” “l” thing in English. So “rotus loot” had me confused for a while. I looked it up though and found that lotus roots are really stringy and hard to cut. So like he said, it takes a really sharp knife and a steady hand.

Then in the late 90’s I heard a county western song by Clint Black that sung it up well:

We started with a simple vow
There’s so much to look back on now
Still it feels brand-new
We’re on a road that has no end
And each day we begin again
Love’s not just something that we’re in
It’s something that we do

That’s what I’ve got to give this morning. Regarding my issue with the conference, faith is showing up and doing the conference.

Maybe someone will brandish the knife that cuts through all of our trips with one swipe. Maybe not. Maybe it’s always going like that but you have to be really faithful to see it.