I’d just parked my car on Thayer street and got out to walk into the coffee shop. Thayer is Providence’s equivalent of that street in so many college towns lined with various businesses that cater to the college crowd. A lively street with much going on most of the year.
Just as I stepped onto the sidewalk, a young man walks past me. He has a shaved head (its been decades since I assumed seeing someone with a shaved head means they’re some kind of Dharma person), and wearing blue samue. That’s a different story. Don’t see a lot of that on streets. Now samue are historically peasant work clothes in Japan, but have come to be the walk around clothing for Zen and other Japanese derived Buddhist clergy in the West. They look like martial arts gi. The color and the fit made the young man look more cleric than martial artist. He had the conventional backback of a student. And, while it is getting increasingly difficult for me to distinguish between a nineteen year old and a thirty year old, I’m pretty confident he was of college age.
His eyes were cast to the ground a few feet in front of him. And he walked with his right hand on his breast in that posture that looks like what many American civilians do when the Star Spangled Banner is being performed, or how many Sufis greet one another.
That’s it.
Nothing more.
But, a story quickly formed for me. He was some sort of practitioner, maybe even clergy affiliated formally with some spiritual group, probably a Buddhist group, probably of Japanese descent.
And he was doing some form of spiritual practice as he walked down Thayer street on a lovely Wednesday morning.
I found myself spinning a web of thoughts about our spiritual disciplines and how we sometimes make them special things. My first thought wasn’t the best. I thought of that line attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.”
But, also, a pause. As I know making our practices special in some way are often the best way to make ’em happen. Sit (as we in the Zen traditions say) at the same time of day, in the same place. Make that place special in some sense, maybe with an altar, however simple. These are simple strategies that help one sustain a discipline, along with going to a center and practicing with others whenever possible.
But there’s that secret place of the heart thing, too.
And where and how we find it.
If its all about show, well, it still might work. There’s another great line from the Zen tradition about how sitting even once clears up much bad karma. Sitting even once can open the heart mind as wide as the sky. Consciously putting one’s hand to one’s heart, who knows what mystery might be revealed? And even trying to do it for show, one never knows what will happen. Never. Unintended consequences are not all bad…
Of course in this specific case, who knows? Maybe he was counting heart beats because his trainer suggested it a good health thing. Maybe his arm was sore from pitching that baseball game on Sunday. Who knows?
But, for us, I think, maybe a small story of how we need to balance our spiritual disciplines.
We need the externals. They help a lot.
And, we need to find the secret heart.
And that’s the real deal.
For me the call is to attend, and then attend, and then attend.
Notice the cracks.
And then let the cracks widen. If they wish.
And then the whole hidden thing is mysteriously revealed.
And if not this time. Perhaps the next.
The spirit lists where it will…
But it will list, it will rest, it will find us…
All so cool…
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