Priesthood

I was talking with a friend the day before yesterday about religion and spirituality and church and priesthood. He is thinking about starting a church for folks who don't fit into and don't want to fit into any religious box. A place for folks to come together and then drift away again after having a place in which to reconnect to source. I wished him always great invisibility, and that no one would make of him the charismatic center of the center. I've seen how that ruins people. Who said that?- absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Another friend has recently ordained and it took me several days or maybe weeks to write to him because my own past was too much in front of my eyes and heavy on my heart to be able to write a limpid "congratulations, how wonderful" and leave it at that.

Here is an excerpt from my email to him:

I did not write, but I thought of you on the day you ordained... for my own person, i am at a place in my life where it is clear to me that it does not serve for me to be a priest in a traditional way, and I did not know how to write to you of these things on that day, when your own ordination was so fresh and new and beautiful and strong within you. I wanted you to have that time without writing something that would seem, on the surface, to contradict what you have just undergone. Which i do not, actually, contradict, it is only that I now have a more trickster, backwards, underworld approach to it all.

I
 no longer put on my robes or shave my head or sit zazen, but that does not mean i do not live my vows every day. It is just that there is absolutely no recognizable form. My life has its own form and shape and container in which i try to express beauty and share my gifts. i strive to be patient (a life long process of learning), gentle, kind, wild, powerful, strong, creative, and respectful of all life. This is what i wish for you as well. No matter what form it takes- and it may take this zen form for the rest of this lifetime and it may not-i wish for you that you always live beyond the form, bigger than it, not beholden to any dogma but only to the urgings and wisdom and calling of your own wild soul. I hope that you are a priest always in the temple of your own heart… i wish for you that you do not lose the myriad facets and jewel-like beauty of your you-ness in all that black cloth, but that you become even more you, more brightly alive in your you-ness with each passing day… honor the teacher within you, always, he will never steer you wrong.

 So, congratulations on passing through this threshold, this next initiation in your life. I am proud of you, you are still "doin' it", opening up your life to the depths of source.

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The truth of the matter is, I think the time for priests is over. I cannot now put on my robes and fill that role, because I do not see any meaning it. I see no reason to uphold the tradition of Zen, which comes at the expense of women, through a male Japanese lineage. Culturally beautiful though it is, it doesn't have anything to do with my life here, in Germany. And though there was great and immense and deep value in my having undergone the training I did, there is at this time not a reason for me to continue to carry the dogma of the tradition around. Whether or not I will return to the teachings of the Buddha as a practitioner and student remains yet to be seen. I do not know where my spiritual path will lead. But I do know that I have been cured of wanting to be someone's priest. That role seems doomed to failure- both socially, spiritually, and societally. I do not see a reason for it as a meaningful way for the development of my own path and for the releasing of habits, fears, infantilisms, wounds, and hierarchies within my own or anyone else's mind.

My deep and abiding vow has been and always will be to love all beings. Said another way, to be always in love with life and her myriad expressions. To see the holy in all things and to offer beauty to feed that which feeds me, namely the divine. I seek now only, as the write Herman Hesse wrote, to listen to the whisperings of my blood. Here is a portion of the prologue from the book Demian, a book which deeply affected me as a teenager, which expresses well that which I have attempted to express. (Read Hesse's word "man" as gender neutral for person/human being.)

...I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?

…Yet, what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at anytime before, and men—each one of whom represents an unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature—are therefore shot wholesale nowadays. If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each one of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, storytelling would lose all purpose. But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and re-markable point at which the world's phenomena intersect,only once in this way and never again. That is why everyman's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why everyman, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration.

…I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. 1 have been and still am a seeker, hut I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me.

…Each man's life represents a road toward himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path. No man has ever been entirely and completely himself. Yet each one strives to become that—one in an awkward, the other in a more intelligent way, each as best he can. Each man carries the vestiges of his birth—the slime and eggshells of his primeval past—with him to the end of his days. Some never become human, remaining frog, lizard, ant. Some are human above the waist, fish below. Each represents a gamble on the part of nature in creation of the human. We all share the same origin, our mothers; all of us come in at the same door. But each of us—experiments of the depths—strives toward his own destiny. We can understand one another; but each of us is able to interpret himself to himself alone.
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Enough said. Until next time.