Religious Scholar

Whenever I am tempted to visit a Zendo, I think of Frida Kahlo.

I envision the austere Zendo, with its peaceful atmosphere, silence, seated figures in black robes, open to Nothingness. Then I think of Frida: sulking, in pain, wearing a flouncing Mexican skirt of all the colors of the rainbow, limping, with a parrot on her shoulder and a cigarette between her painted lips.

We can enter Truth through the solitude of Sesshu, refined, precise, all black and white. But there is way to Truth which pierces the rainbow with all the sensuality and agony of the phenomenal world, and bursts out the other side.

The path is not always Green Tea.

My article, "Yoga for Episcopalians," has been published by EpiscopalLifeOnline. The URL is:

http://www.episcopalchurch.org/81840_123385_ENG_HTM.htm

My paper, 'The Sage Engaged," delivered at Tsinghua University, Beijing, in Fall 2008, is now available in Chinese in The Journal of Nanyang Normal University, Vol 5, 2010. My deepest appreciation to Professor Cheng Xiangzhan of the School of Literature and Journalism, Shandong University,Ji'nan, P.R. China, for the translation and publication of this essay.

Is there a field guide to dragonflies? They are arguably the most graceful small creatures, iridescent, with wings of gossamer, yet because they are the fast-moving neutrinos of the insect world, they seldom brush a blossom long enough for us to get a good view. Stopping the flight of a dragonfly for analysis and mechanical scrutiny would be to destroy the very essence of this pond and meadow sprite. It lives in flight and gentle alightment. It’s meaning is in its movement, like a dancer’s or the spirit of Life itself, which must contantly change, flit, or fly, or wither in the eternal stillness of Death.

 from a photo I took 7-2-10 in a New Jersey park

I visited the Ephrata Cloisters in Pennsylvania recently. A curious place, not cloisters as we typically think of them: square arrangements of columns with formal gardens and fountains in the center. Rather, the Ephrata site, part of the National Register of Historic Places, is a series of old and reconstructed barn-like buildings on a sloping green rolling down to Cocalico Creek. The site evolved out of the teachings of dissident German preacher Conrad Beissel  (1691-1768), the youngest sibling in an orphaned family who discovered an inner pathway to God after working with Pietists and other mystics outside of the established church.

We may not agree with the more severe tenets of Beissel’s teachings—celibacy,  eating one meal a day, avoiding comfort and vanity—but even these strictures have a universal ring to them.  Reformers and passionate believers of all religions, at their most extreme, follow similar lifestyles. Just look at Cambodian monks or Greek Orthodox nuns or Indian shamans.  Some individuals feel called to renounce the world in order to more fully embrace the divine. Most traditions, including the various German sects which once flourished in Pennsylvania and Ohio, also supported more realistic approaches to developing and living the spiritual life, such as the rural lifestyle of the married Householders who contributed to the Ephrata Cloisters and made possible the hard but holy life of the 80 Protestant monastics who lived there.

The monks and nuns are long gone from the Cloisters. Today, it is a charming museum that tells us much about an important time in our nation’s history, but also it reminds us that while sects may come and go, spirituality is eternal. One can sit quietly in the old timber chapel and feel the setting sun melt into one’s bones, or kneel in the herb garden and breathe in the natural fragrances of lavender, sage, and horehound. These are holy moments, too, and do not require that we sleep only a few hours at a time with a stone pillow beneath our heads nor eat a few turnips and greens and call it dinner.  Despite its “state park” aura, the Cloisters is a holy place for those who would find peace and meaning in a troubled world.

www.Ephratacloister.org