Spiritual path

First, the quick general overview of my spiritual path: I grew up in Buffalo, NY in a very Catholic family. My uncle was a priest, I got baptized and confirmed and went to church every Sunday until high school when I began to have problems with the Catholics for all the usual reasons. Sexism and homophobia, etc., etc.

Because I was big into martial arts in college, I started to meditate and eventually began spending time at a Zen Buddhist monastery in the Catskill Mountains outside of NYC. More about that later. Eventually, I stumbled into a UU church in Boston where I discovered two things: these folks are really nice and this theology is awesome. I stayed, I served on the board, I ran the pledge drive, and I started to think about ministry.

Finding the Journey + the “A-ha!” moment

I want to stop there and tell a few specific stories. First, let’s go back to the Zen Buddhist monastery. I was doing a week-long sit there. It was winter in the mountains, and the snow and the clouds and the cold contributed to the general sense of Zen austerity. The color pallet in this monastery ran the gamut from black to grey.  But I loved the meditation, and I loved the kind of groove I could get in when I was sitting several times a day for days in a row.

At the end of the week, the participants in the sit get to have an “interview” with the Abbott, who at the time was the late, great John Daido Lorri. Lovely man. He was unpretentious during the week, easily accessible, always to be found smoking a cigarette outside after a meal. A down to earth person. But for the interview, this was high formality. We waited silently in line for our ten minutes with the big guy. When I was finally shown into the interview room by the second in command, I found the Abbott kneeling on a cushion in full abbott regalia. Elaborate robe, very weird hat, and a look on his face that conveyed his full authority. At his side is a hand bell that he would use to begin and end the interview. He rang the bell.

The interview opened with a ritual of bows and statements of commitment and intention. Finally, after a week of sitting in silent meditation, I got to ask the Abbott a question. And I told him how I was tormented by indecision about what to do with my life. I wasn’t satisfied with where I was at, but sometimes some paths looked good, then I’d consider another. Should I go to cooking school? Go back to managing a homeless shelter? Can I live overseas? I explained to the abbott that I just couldn’t get to a decision. Could he help me with that? I fell silent.

The Abbott paused, and gave me a compassionate look. And then he said “The decision takes only a moment to make. Everything else that you are doing, that’s not making a decision. That’s something else.” For a moment, I was kind of stunned. Then I started to ask a dozen follow up questions. But as the first question left my mouth, he snatched the bell and rang it. End of interview.

It took me a little while to understand what the Abbott meant but I came to believe that he was telling me that I shouldn’t confuse making a decision with the process of discernment. He was telling me to chill out. He didn’t give me the easy answer that I wanted, which of course was to tell me what I should do with my life. But he did give me some good advice about making life choices. The lesson for me was don’t confuse a lack of clarity about the future with a lack of ambition or direction. Don’t get anxious about having a lack of clarity. It’s OK to not know. Not knowing is normal. That’s been a comfort to me as I get older.

this human experience

Here’s another story. I’ll warn you, it’s sad. My mom died of brain tumors in 2001. Her decline was slow for a few years, then very fast. The whole process felt like it lasted forever and it ground me down to a wisp. I was living in Boston during her final year and working for an internet service provider making the most money I ever made in my life and absolutely hating it. I was close to my mom and it was painful to watch her decline and I just did not have the resilience to deal with it. And so I dealt with it in a terrible, predictable way: I numbed myself. I drank, and I smoked. My girlfriend at the time would give me her painkillers which I found went particularly well with red wine. And I just suffered inside that turtle shell of intoxication.

One day late in the process, I got back to Boston after visiting my mother in the ICU. I wondered if I would ever see her again. My girlfriend, to whom I owe an enormous debt, had bought tickets to see Ram Dass screen his new documentary and speak a little. Ram Dass is a person from the United States who went to India in the 60’s and had his perspective radically changed. He changed his name, came back and wrote a great book called Be Here Now and committed himself to teaching mindfulness practices. He was and is enormously influential.

The documentary was called Fierce Grace and it was about people coming to terms with enormous losses in their life. It wasn’t painful for me to watch; it was cathartic. Watching these regular folks grapple with loss touched me inside and I wept hard through the whole movie. I can only imagine what the people around me were thinking: what’s up with this big hairy weeping guy?

I want to take a moment here to make a suggestion to the folks who identify as male in the room. Guys, I highly recommend weeping in public. I mean it. If the urge comes, let it rip. It’s so great. It’s healthy for you, and it sends a great message to other men that weeping is sometimes OK. Let it go man. Have a good cry. You’ll be better for it.

OK, my public service announcement is over. After the screening, Ram Dass came out on stage. He had suffered a stroke in the last year and he used a wheelchair. And he struggled to speak. He suffered from aphasia, just like my mother did and it was brutal to watch. After he spoke there was a VIP reception which my girlfriend had sprung for. Folks were lining up to have a word with Ram Dass. I headed for the free champagne. When the line died down, I figured I’d get my girlfriend’s money’s worth and go talk to the guy. I knelt down beside his chair and explained how I just came from seeing my mother in the ICU and how painful it all was.

I’m pretty suspicious of famous people, especially famous gurus, but in that moment Ram Dass was 100% focused on me and I could feel the waves of authentic compassion coming off him. It flustered me. He said “Your mom is dying. What are you getting out of this experience?” That question shocked me. I said “What am I getting out of this experience? I’m getting my ass kicked, that’s what I’m getting out of this experience.” He very patiently and lovingly said back “Yes, you’re getting your ass kicked, but how are you growing? What are you learning?”

I had no idea what to say. I mumbled something back and thanked him and walked away. But over the next couple of days, something moved in me. I began to see that this experience didn’t have to be pure suffering that I alternatively ignored or endured. I realized that what was going on was a sacred, important time in my human experience. That the pain would still be there but I could also grow from this. And the way I dealt with my mom’s dying changed profoundly. I slowed way down on the drinking. I stopped isolating myself from my family. And I let myself grieve. It made all the difference.

Now I don’t want to tell folks that there’s always something to be gained from a hard time in one’s life. I don’t want to minimize the pain that people feel from a loss. That’s real. And there are some things that we can never make right. But I do hold out the possibility that in many situations, there’s an avenue towards growth, towards being the best person we can be. And I keep that in mind as I go down life’s path.

The Journey

I have one more story. It’s about how I finally decided to go to seminary. In the summer of 2012, with very short notice, I was offered the chance to go to Afghanistan as a civilian contractor. I was between jobs, my marriage was on the rocks and it seemed like something to do. I told my then wife that I would only go if she agreed. We both knew we were struggling and she said yes, maybe it would help clarify what we should do about our marriage. Well she was right, we clarified that we shouldn’t be married, but that’s another story. And by the way, she’s still one of my best friends.

Anyway, I went. Every little base over there has x-ray scanners at the gates that check people and vehicles for bombs. My job was installing and maintaining these scanners. It was kind of intense. People get very anxious when their bomb scanner is broken. I’d get the call and grab my tool bag and a backpack and get on a helicopter or into a convoy and hustle over the base to fix the machine.

Life on these US bases was horrible. Ugly and the constant rocket attacks and so boring. After four months in Kabul I was transferred down south to Kandahar to manage the company for the southern half of of the country. On one of my first days, I was walking around Kandahar trying to figure the place out and out of the blue I saw a flier on a bulletin board that had a chalice on it. And I looked closely and it was advertising a weekly Unitarian Universalist worship service. You could have knocked me over with a feather. It even had a rainbow on it! My people!

It turned out that the one UU Army chaplain in Afghanistan was on this base, a guy named Rev. Chris Antal. He’s now a chaplain at the VA in Philidelphia and he gave the sermon at my ordination. I had been a UU since the early 90’s and of course I went to the services. And I learned something that I hadn’t realized before. The other places where I practiced my UU faith were Boston and Washington DC. And these are places where the culture and values on the street are a lot like the culture and values in the sanctuary. And it was easy to take Unitarian Universalism for granted in those places inside the NPR bubble.

Most the people around me emphatically did not share our UU values. And the feeling of that little congregation as an oasis, as the one place where I knew I could be my full self made me love our faith so much. And I understood the value of our congregations in places like Tampa Bay and Tulsa and yes, Salt Lake City.

On Veterans Day 2012 Chaplain Antal gave a sermon about how America loves war but treats its veterans terribly. And everyone in the room, active duty and veteran alike said yeah, that’s our experience. But his higher ups, who had a problem with his unstinting support of troops who were queer, sent him home. And before they sent him home, he took me aside and asked me to be the lay leader of our little congregation. And I said no, and he said yes, you’re doing it. And when your chaplain in Afghanistan says you’re doing it, you’re doing it.

So I did it and I was terrible at it. Oh man, I feel bad for the folks who sat through those awful sermons and fumbled rituals. But I loved it regardless and I applied to Meadville Lombard Theological School from Afghanistan. Two months after I got back I was in Chicago, on my way.

But I never forgot how that little plywood shack congregation in Kandahar made me feel safe. Just like this church makes people feel safe. Let’s always remember that this church saves lives by offering sanctuary. Let’s take that seriously.

I’m gonna stop there. We really are our stories. I have more stories to tell, and I want to hear your stories too. My prayer for us is that we can tell our collective stories, and the story of this church, and we can use these stories to imagine our way to a future that celebrates and shares and builds our Unitarian Universalist values. May it be so.