A sad, brave testimony to one dark side of monasticism, from Kalu Rinpoche:
Confessions of Kalu Rinpoche
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Category Archives: Mirror for Society
Thomas Merton: “Contemplation cannot construct a new world by itself”
Thomas Merton, in the introduction to the Spanish language edition to his complete works:
Contemplation cannot construct a new world by itself. Contemplation does not feed the hungry; it does not clothe the naked… and it does not return the sinner to peace, truth, and union with God. But without contemplation we cannot see what we do… Without contemplation we cannot understand the significance of the world in which we must act. Without contemplation we remain small, limited, divided, partial; we adhere to the insufficient, permanently united to our narrow group and its interests, losing sight of justice and charity, seized by the passions of the moments… Without contemplation, without the intimate, silent, secret pursuit of truth through love, our action loses itself in the world and becomes dangerous.
“the simple way” » 12 Marks of New Monasticism
Through a google alert pointing me to this article, I just stumbled on The Simple Way, “a community in inner-city Philadelphia that has helped birth and connect radical faith communities around the world.”
I am looking forward to exploring more. But first, I love this clear exposition of their values (how many elements of monasticism can you count?):
- Relocation to the abandoned places of Empire.
- Sharing economic resources with fellow community members and the needy among us.
- Hospitality to the stranger
- Lament for racial divisions within the church and our communities combined with the active pursuit of a just reconciliation.
- Humble submission to Christ’s body, the church.
- Intentional formation in the way of Christ and the rule of the community along the lines of the old novitiate.
- Nurturing common life among members of intentional community.
- Support for celibate singles alongside monogamous married couples and their children.
- Geographical proximity to community members who share a common rule of life.
- Care for the plot of God’s earth given to us along with support of our local economies.
- Peacemaking in the midst of violence and conflict resolution within communities along the lines of Matthew 18.
- Commitment to a disciplined contemplative life.
via about the simple way » 12 Marks of New Monasticism.
NY man sues Minn. monastery, alleging clergy abuse – WSJ.com
ST. PAUL, Minn. — A New York man filed a lawsuit Tuesday alleging that he was sexually abused at a Bronx church in the 1960s by a priest who went on to become abbot of a Minnesota monastery and helped found an institute to deal with the problem of clergy sexual abuse.
via NY man sues Minn. monastery, alleging clergy abuse – WSJ.com.
Immanence
I’m heading off the grid for a week, but I really look forward to giving this more attention when I get back: ”artmonks: children of Thoreau & Whitehead,” a post by Adrian Ivakhiv.
If Thoreau’s quest to “live deliberately [...] and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” were cross-bred with A. N. Whitehead’s insight that creativity is the driving core of all things in the universe, the “universal of universals,” then today’s “artmonks” are children not of Marx and Coca-Cola (as Godard once labeled the activists of the 1960s and Xiaoping Lin more recently called the Chinese artistic avant-garde), but children of Thoreau and Whitehead.
The monastic ideal has always been about living deliberately. And in a world that is rapidly outgrowing the secular-religious divide — becoming simultaneously post-secular, for those outgrowing the constraints of secularism, and post-religious, or at least post-traditional, for those no longer in obeisance to inherited religion — monasticism today is reinventing itself in interesting and creative ways. “Artmonks” are those who bring a mindful deliberation and dedication to the creative process, following it wherever it leads them. They are the monks of immanence, post-traditional devotees synthesizing the vita contemplativa with the vita activa in an age of Burning Man and the internet.
Ivakhiv lists a handful of outstanding artmonks:
Some others who’ve pursued their creative visions down whatever spiritual rabbitholes they led them include Joseph Beuys, Yves Klein, Marina Abramović, Stan Brakhage, Genesis P. Orridge, David Tibet, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Andrei Tarkovsky, Derek Jarman, Carolee Schneemann, John Cage, Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, Richard Long, Betsy Damon, Mary Beth Edelson, Vito Acconci, outsider artists like Henry Darger and Ferdinand Cheval, and on and on and on.
Tibetan Who Set Himself Afire Dies
Creating an Art Monastery
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Living in intentional community is not for everyone—the idea triggers an autoimmune response in some people, for whom it might signify the sacrifice of personal autonomy and individuality—but once you develop a taste for the stuff, it doesn’t fade. I unabashedly love it.
Since I began this blog-inquiry into monasticism just six months ago, dissecting Taoism, Vedanta, Eastern and Western Christianity, as well as the various vehicles of Buddhism into what I have called the elements of monasticism, community is an element I haven’t written about directly much at all. Yet it figures in my mind as an important piece of what all monasticisms are aiming at. For those individuals who dwell in abbeys, ashrams, friaries, priories, sketes, lavras, mathas, mandirs, koils, gompas, lamaseries, wats, viharas, community is a powerful spiritual practice.
So we’re making a monastery.
No, it’s not the one pictured above—the famous Cluny Abbey, founded in 910 by William the First of Aquitaine—which I include in this post because, although it grew into something massive (such a symbol of opulence that it was destroyed during the French Revolution), it started out modestly enough. William donated his Burgundy hunting preserve and an abbey was born.
Starting out even more modestly, we are making an Art Monastery in the San Francisco Bay Area.
I met Art Monastery Project co-founders Betsy McCall and Christopher Fülling in April of 2008, a few months after they had moved to Italy to start the pilot Art Monastery, and a couple months before I received an MBA in Sustainable Community Economic Development from BGI. I volunteered for the Art Monastery Project in Italy for 17 months out of the next two years.
Last October, I moved to the Bay Area to be with my fiancée, Phoebe, and to start a new Art Monastery here. Since then, between the 8-night Artmonk Retreat and four chapter meetings in Berkeley and San Francisco, after conversations with Phoebe, Joel, Michelle, Tom, Nancy, Annette, Derek, David, Lesley, Eden, and a dozen others, I have a rough idea for how to make it happen.
As I learned in Italy, birthing a self-sustaining community of monastically-inspired artists is an almost unbearably hard and tortuous process. Yet, as far as I and a few others are concerned, there’s nothing more valuable, nothing worthier of our time and our steady effort (aside from, perhaps, practices of contemplation and art-making).
Economies of Merit
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In many monastic and religious traditions, ethical and spiritual “merit” gets traded like a commodity.1
Nuns and monks agree to live a certain way, abiding by a certain kind of behavior (which their society has deemed the most virtuous or ethical), and in exchange they don’t have to earn their own money to stay alive, but can focus on loftier or more personally pressing matters. What the monastics bring to the bartering table is merit—a substance, not much more abstract than money, that your good deeds earn you and which earns you future spiritual favor (a trip to heaven, a better rebirth, decreased negative karma, etc.). How a monk or nun lives effectively earns them points, which, for their purposes, will be directly or indirectly useful in attaining whatever it is they are seeking. When monastics follow the rules and earn a surplus of merit, which they agree to share with each other, with laypeople (alive and dead), and other beings, they earn their worldly keep.
This merit benefits the surrounding society in a number of ways. Directly, lay folk ask the merit-rich monks, nuns and priests to pray for them and for their (living or dead) relatives, and to perform rites and ceremonies for them. Indirectly, the knowledge that the monks you give alms to exist as exemplars of (your definition of) purity and holiness, encapsulated in special buildings more beautiful than any, is a gift.
On a broader level, monasteries themselves agree to uphold and enforce merit-earning behavior, and are given land, buildings, and special rights. Monasteries are merit-engines.
So which came first in monastic traditions around the world: morality, merit, or money?
- For example, the 15th and 16th century papacy’s practice of selling spiritual indulgences: “the Church drew from the the treasury of merits accumulated by the good works of the saints, and in return the recipient made a contribution to the Church. A voluntary and popular arrangement, the practice allowed the Church to raise money for financing crusades and building cathedrals and hospitals. At first applied only to penalties imposed by the Church in this life, by Luther’s time indulgences were being granted to remit penalties imposed by God in the afterlife, including immediate release from purgatory. With indulgences effecting even the remission of sins, the sacrament of penance itself was seemingly compromised.” (Richard Tarnas, in Passion of the Western Mind) ↩
Disrobing “Big Mind”
I don’t know what kind of monk Genpo Roshi actually intended to be, but his recent disrobing brings up some good issues around a few of the elements of monasticism I’ve been writing about.
- Celibacy & Sexuality (can monks be sexually active? how ’bout unfaithfully so? polyamorous?)
- Vows (where do marriage vows and monastic vows overlap?)
- Hierarchy (what happens when unfaithful sex is with your intended successor?)
- Renunciation (as Brad Warner points out below, poverty clearly wasn’t one of Genpo Roshi’s vows. Can/should monks make money? Can/should they charge lots and lots of money for their spiritual services?).
Brad Warner, author of “Sex, Sin, and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between“ writes at Elephant Journal (via @duffmcduffee):
Look. I am not insisting all Zen monks take a vow of absolute poverty and live on just what they can carry in a knapsack slung over their backs like the monks in ancient China did. I know we’re living in a completely different society than they were. I own three bass guitars, a used PT Cruiser, and a ten-speed bike. I wouldn’t want to have to stuff those in a knapsack. But three houses? For the love of God, who needs three houses? I don’t even have one!
To weigh in on the matter: I’ve tried out Hal and Sidra Stone’s ”voice dialogue” technique, which forms the basis of Genpo Roshi’s (now Genpo Merzel’s) Big Mind Big Heart process, and have found it genuinely interesting and psychologically revealling, especially in a community setting. I look forward to exploring voice dialogue further, on its own (therapeutic) terms. I have a hard time with Genpo’s claims that the process can lead to genuine experiences of enlightenment in a few hours, but I don’t rule out the possibility that people are having subjectively very powerful spiritual experiences.
In the end, though, there is something deeply disturbing about the fact that Genpo has been able to charge as much as he does (allegedly $50,000 a session, at one point) for his process. With that kind of price tag, it starts to smell like people’s desperate spiritual cravings are being taken advantage of.
Insofar as what happened was a sexual tryst, I agree with Warner (see Elephant article linked to above) that it really is “between him, his wife, and his lover.” Insofar as what happened broke his personal monastic vow, it’s between him and… himself. But insofar as it violated his responsibility to his successor (e.g. to not contaminate a professional power dynamic with sexual energy) and thereby his community, it is problematic.
Warner points out one of the greatest benefits to being a part of a community: accountability.
By leaving the Buddhist community, Genpo has now put himself beyond the reach of the only people who could legitimately criticize Big Mind®. I expect to see Big Mind® get even bigger and cause more destruction. Even absent the Big Mind® nonsense, remaining in the Buddhist order would have been the best way to address the other matters.
If the community’s way of holding Genpo accountable for his actions is to remove him from the community, to whom will he now be accountable? His customers?
Rohan Gunatillake on the Social Life of Meditation
I just came across this video on the “Social life of Meditation” from Rohan Gunatillake of 21awake.com and the Here & Now Project. After wrapping up a series of posts on monastic separateness and engagement a few days ago, it’s great to see these issues confronted from a different perspective. Rohan identifies “four major ways in which meditation is social—the positive effect the practice can have on people around us, how it can radically re-orientate the relationship of self to other, the value of a community to support one’s practice and lastly, the enabling of new practice modes through social media.”
Continue on to Buddhist Geeks to read on about the role of social media in meditation, and Rohan’s peer-to-peer meditation experiment.