John Donne was born in London on the 22nd of January, 1573 and died on this day, the 31st of March, in 1631. His family were recusant Roman Catholics. He studied at Cambridge but was not awarded a degree as he could not take the oath of supremacy, which included acknowledging the sovereign as head of the church. Donne then read the law, and was admitted to the bar. Rather than take up a practice he traveled through Europe giving... Read more
Okay, not really. What I am thinking about is that perennial desire among some, including friends that Jesus married somebody. Mary Magdalene is my personal favorite among the various candidates, in case you were wondering. And, there’s more, there is also a deep wish that together with this spouse the holy couple had descendants. The good people at Wikipedia have traced how this narrative has evolved over the years. What follows is my summary of how this took place together... Read more
Spirituality is difficult for us to touch because it flows to and from the invisible, from love and the mystery of death. It comes out of the “meltdown” that we know as love and compassion and the surrender that we know as death. It flows from the ground of our relationship, not only between human beings, but also between all beings, including mountains and rivers. It is often born from suffering, and it evokes within us compassion, which allows us... Read more
Teresa Sanchez de Cepeda y Ahumada was born on this day, the 28th of March, 1515. We know her as Teresa of Avila. She is one of only four women to be named a “Doctor” of the Roman Catholic Church, and to my mind one of the greatest of Catholic theologians. She is one of my favorite believers in the Christian religion. And a glorious example of its potential for leading people into lives of depth and authenticity. Teresa and... Read more
I was at a retreat with my teacher John Tarrant, one of many held at St Dorothy’s Rest, a somewhat run down Episcopalian retreat facility in Camp Meeker, up in the redwoods of Sonoma county. We were in the interview room each sitting on pillows in the interview room, knee to knee. It was a period after I’d “clicked” with koans. And, I was responding to his questions, one after another. Like the old line “two arrows meeting in mid-air.”... Read more
It was on this day in 1957 that US Customs seized a shipment of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems. The title poem Howl was purportedly largely written at the Caffe Mediterranean in Berkeley. A coffee house of some importance to me, the Mediterranean. In my teen years it offered me my first latte. and later when I worked across the street at Moe’s Books, it was a comfortable place for a break and a cuppa and some very interesting... Read more
Until I’d discovered Ramakrishna through the writings of Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood and their associates, my idea of what gods looked like was informed by my conservative Baptist upbringing modified by my father’s bare and no doubt reductionist atheism. Anyway, Ramakrishna prayed constantly for a vision of his goddess, Kali, the Divine Mother. He wanted to know her as she was, desperately. I personally understood this prayer. It was my own longing from some aching place in the pit... Read more
The Universe is not a place where evolution happens, it is the evolution. It is not a stage on which dramas unfold, it is the unfolding drama itself. Loyal Rue, in Everybody’s Story If the universe is not something that is evolving but is the evolutionary process itself, then another word to describe that development, in all its cosmological, biological, and cultural aspects, is creativity. Are the cosmic formation of galaxies, the biological ramification of spectating life forms, and the... Read more
It was 1969. I threw my lot in with the English Zen priest Houn Jiyu Kennett, who’d just arrived in the San Francisco Bay area and after a brief stay at the Zen Center in San Francisco opened a small “temple” in a flat on Potrero Hill. That was when I first became aware of an earlier generation of convert Buddhists. There is almost nothing written about these people, and I think its a shame they seem to be passing... Read more
The Christian theologian Karl Barth said that one needs to preach holding the Bible in one hand, and a newspaper in the other. That reminds me of a recent flurry of thoughts and comments on various contemporary Buddhisms in the West, increasingly called Buddhist modernism. The knock on this contemporary and mostly, although certainly not exclusively Western Buddhism, what was at one time called a Protestant Buddhism, is that it claims to offer a stripped down and spare form of... Read more
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