From the Monastery to the Marketplace

During the 1970’s, my parents and their friends used to sit around the living room of our house...

The Mother’s Kiss, 1900, Engagement to Wedding stereograph collection. Courtesy of Boston Public Library.

During the 1970’s, my parents and their friends used to sit around the living room of our house in the high desert of the American Southwest, and generate titles for books they never intended to write. Lulled by homegrown marijuana and a lifestyle of voluntary simplicity, it was enough for them simply to encapsulate their idealistic views in a list of singular phrases. I pilfered the title of this piece, From the Monastery to the Marketplace, from my mother. Mom felt strongly that it was time to transcend the elitist doctrines of personal salvation, and incorporate the values of peaceful introspection into acts of social justice.

My mother has made of herself a living example of this ideal ever since, applying self-realization to solving the problems of the world, one human being at a time. My father, who died of cancer in 1993, left behind a thousand fragments of quirky wisdom scribbled on scraps of paper, cocktail napkins, the backs of overdue bills. I have taken it upon myself to pull together their legacy and try and put it into words for the benefit of all beings.

It is clear to me that I did not invent myself. I know many people who have. Born into families in which they stood out as ugly ducklings, they always secretly suspected they were swans, and it was up to them to fulfill their beautiful destiny. They were right. When they came of age, they unfolded their wings, bowed to the mother and father who raised them, and flew toward who they were meant to be, never to return to the alien land they came from. In most cases, theirs was an arduous and lonesome journey.

I am not such a bird. Whatever I may be, I have become because of my family of origin, not in spite of them. It is true that my parents were iconoclasts, who vocally rejected organized religion, while I have been inexorably drawn to every spiritual tradition I have encountered. But, as a result of my upbringing, I am incapable of blind faith.

“I think Christ is great,” my secular Jewish father used to say. “It’s Christians I have trouble with.” What he had trouble with was hypocrisy, in any form, within every religion. If a believer did not back up his religious convictions with righteous action, my father was not interested in hearing about his credo.

* * * * *

I engaged in my first act of civil disobedience when I was in fourth grade. My parents were active in the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era. My older brother, Matty, who died of a brain tumor when he was ten, spent the final year of his life memorizing Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech. My mother was a folk singer who regularly hosted hootenannies at our suburban Long Island home, where amateur musicians would gather to sing protest songs.

I remember one such night when my mother proclaimed that the National Anthem was a travesty, nothing but a testament to the glory of war, and that war was nothing but an atrocity, perpetrated by a more powerful nation against a powerless one. “And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof to the night that our flag was still there.” When she put it that way, I saw her point. I could never again bring myself to hold my hand to my heart and sing The Star Spangled Banner after that.

Around this same time, my parents suggested that I might consider sitting out the Pledge of Allegiance at school, since they personally found it impossible to affirm their support for a country that was causing such devastation in the lives of innocent people far away, not to mention plucking young Americans out of their youth and dropping them into a war zone created by their own government, resulting in thousands upon thousands of pointless deaths.

I was still buzzing with excitement from contact with the three children who had recently spent the night on my bedroom floor because their parents were spending the night in jail for having set fire to the American flag on the lawn of their split level home. It was my turn to save America!

I waited for the most public opportunity to launch my debut peace action. Every Friday there was an assembly at Forest Lake Elementary, when all the classes would gather in the auditorium and the principal would address the student body as a whole, encouraging positive study habits and good citizenship. It was an opportunity for announcements about upcoming book fairs, Spelling Bees, and Glee Club recitals. The Lunch Lady would list the menu choices for the upcoming week, and the school nurse would take a moment to encourage us to wash our hands thoroughly after using the restroom. That was generally about as exciting as things got at Forest Lake Elementary on Friday mornings.

The event always began, of course, with the Pledge. That day, when everybody rose and faced the flag, I remained seated, with my hands in my lap. Heads began to turn in my direction, apparently horrified that I would dare defy such a holy rite. I momentarily feared that I might be struck by lightning, but I held my seat.

When my teacher, Mrs. Kazarsky, glared at me, I looked away. A relatively shy girl, I was not comfortable with the attention, but I knew in my heart that Richard Nixon was a liar and that his war was wicked. When I glanced at Mrs. K out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a small smile flutter across her lips as she stared at me, her own hand held at her heart.

After lunch, I was called into the principal’s office.

“Why didn’t you stand for the Pledge?” Mr. Lichtenstein asked me as I sat trembling in the chair across from his desk.

I shrugged.

“It’s a school rule,” he prompted.

“I know,” I said.

“Aren’t you afraid of getting in trouble?”

I nodded, my face hot.

“I’m going to have to call your parents.”

What a relief! My parents would be able to explain everything.

The following week, my mother and father went in for a conference with the principal. Soon after that, Mr. Lichtenstein invited our whole family to spend the weekend with him and his wife and children at their cabin in Woodstock.

We visited the Lichtensteins several times over the next couple of years before we left New York. At their cabin in the woods, we called my principal “Al.” Al wore blue jeans and flannel shirts, listened to Country Joe and the Fish, and read Ferlinghetti poems out loud before dinner. At school he dressed in a suit and tie, and I had to call him Mr. Lichtenstein again.

The school community grew accustomed to my remaining seated when everyone else rose to salute the Flag. Over time, other children copied me. And the war on Vietnam went on and on.

* * * * *

It was my parents who instilled my spiritual inclinations, too, though it took me a long time to recognize this. I mistook their repudiation of the patriarchal abuses committed by the Judeo-Christian hierarchy as evidence of atheism. I believed that I stood alone in my fascination with the Great Mystery. Looking back, I see their spirituality shining from behind everything they ever did. They just didn’t make a religion of it.

My father was something of a local holy man in the small town of Taos, New Mexico, where we moved after leaving New York when I was eleven. Dad read cards. Not Tarot cards, but playing cards – an ancient esoteric system developed to encode the Tarot during the early years of the Roman Catholic Empire. Dad, a Life Master in Bridge, had transferred his love of the game to a devotion to the secret wisdom teachings hidden in the dance between clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades. He dedicated himself to unraveling the complexities of sacred mathematics, unveiling the relationships between birthdays and planetary influences, and conveying these insights to the community at large.

In his one-room adobe, beside a pinon fire in the kiva fireplace, a jelly jar of Tokay wine on the table beside him, Dad would receive pilgrims. After cracking his knuckles, he would take their hands in his, close his eyes for a moment while he “tuned,” and then spread out the cards and read the seeker’s soul.

I never saw my mother meditate, but she often spoke of Zen philosophy, and she tended her houseplants and weeded her vegetables with as much reverence as a rabbi handles the Torah. Mom strives to see the goodness in every soul she encounters, and she treats her children as if we were all Avatars, no matter how unskillfully we may sometimes manage our lives here on earth.

Recently, my mother mentioned in passing that every night before she goes to sleep, she pictures a gentle rain of light falling on anyone anywhere in the world who is in pain, emotional or physical. Safe and warm in her bed, she wishes her comfort and ease on everyone everywhere who does not have a place to sleep, or who is lying awake to the sounds of gunfire exploding around them.

“It’s selfish,” she admitted when I expressed my awe and admiration for her vast generosity of spirit. “If I don’t take the time to do this, I can’t rest. The suffering in this world is more than I can bear.”

I aspire to this level of selfishness.

* * * * *

Five hundred years ago, Teresa of Avila, a cloistered Spanish nun, offered a teaching as relevant today as ever: not only must we balance our activism with contemplative stillness, we need to engage the fruits of contemplation in active service to the world. Our personal relationship with the Divine is meaningless unless we take it to the streets and see the face of our Beloved in the face of everyone we encounter.

Teresa makes a distinction between “active and contemplative personalities,” and advocates that we be true to our own nature. We are not all meant to organize rallies, pour our drawn blood on Pentagon documents, travel to underdeveloped countries and volunteer to inoculate children. Holding the suffering of humanity in our hearts in prayer every day can be as powerful a service as finding shelter for the homeless. Cultivating and abiding in inner peace makes a significant contribution to peace on earth. Working on our personal spiritual path raises the level of consciousness of the whole.

Yet, not everyone is a natural contemplative, either. For some, sitting in silent meditation feels artificial, even wasteful. When they close their eyes, they do not sense the presence of the Divine; rather, they experience an overpowering urge to get up and go do something. They may be right to follow this impulse.

Teresa uses the Gospel story of Mary and Martha to highlight this distinction. Mary was an ecstatic. She was all about devotion and rapture. She would fling herself at the feet of Jesus whenever he came by for a meal and she would remain there until he left. Meanwhile, Martha was stuck in the kitchen, grumbling about being left with all the work, elevating herself to a state of false martyrdom.

“Remember,” says the ever-practical Teresa, in an effort to console those who are naturally more active. “Someone must cook the food! …Think of yourselves as favored by being allowed to serve with Martha.”

The important thing, Teresa reminds us, is that by serving one another, we are serving the Holy One, who is continuously dropping in for a visit. “If contemplation, silent and vocal prayer, nursing the sick, cleaning the house, and the most menial labor, all serve the Guest who comes to eat and drink and converse with us, “ Teresa asks, “why would we choose to tend him in one way rather than another?”

As busy citizens of the developed world, we need to fight against the temptation to abandon any hope of practicing meditation. We can try making our daily lives a treasure hunt for free moments between activities. Tucking these jewels into the folds of our robes, we may sit quietly for five minutes at the foot of the bed first thing in the morning, or on the park bench after lunch, and let our worldly concerns fall away. Eyes unfocused, breath gentle and even, we can drop down into the stillness, as if we had nowhere to go and nothing to worry about. Only this moment. The rain on the window. The song of a bird rising above the roar of traffic. Our tongue curved lightly against the roof of our mouth.

Into this quietude, a certain truth may come streaming: there is only one of us. The loss I grieve has been grieved by mothers for millennia; mothers everywhere are grieving at the exact same moment as I am; it is inevitable that mothers will share this grief indefinitely. We are each part of a living web, a glorious pattern of interconnectedness. The Buddha called this “dependent co-arising.” From this awareness, we cannot help but have compassion for all beings. There is no actual distinction between me and the sister of a suicide bomber. The suicide bomber and I are one. The prisoner enduring torture is inextricably entwined with the judge who condemns him and the reformer who struggles to emancipate him. Separation is an illusion. Compassion for others is compassion for ourselves.

* * * * *

I once had the good fortune of spending a few days at Jonah House, a Catholic peace and justice community in Baltimore, where I went to visit my friend Elizabeth McAllister, legendary anti-war activist and widow of the great peacemaker, Phillip Berrigan. Two of the Jonah House residents, both middle-aged nuns, had recently been released from prison where they had been locked up for yet another “plowshares action,” invoking the Prophet Isaiah by banging on missile silos with household hammers, symbolically “beating swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks,” as Isaiah exhorted us to do.

After lunch one afternoon, we sat around the community living room and the nuns pulled out their knitting. It was difficult to imagine these two grandmotherly women as Enemies of the State. As we chatted, they began praising me for my latest translation of Teresa of Avila’s autobiography, which I had brought as a gift. I couldn’t resist confiding in them. “I feel like a fraud,” I said. “Here I am, reflecting on the esoteric teachings of the Early Renaissance, while people like you are willing to go to jail for your convictions about nuclear disarmament.”

The sisters put down their knitting needles and spent the next hour trying to convince me that by speaking and writing about the teachings of the mystics, I am contributing just as much to peace on earth as any act of civil disobedience in which they engage. These radical Catholics insisted that, through my words, I open hearts and minds, and allow people to look with clear eyes on the suffering of the world, thereby moving them to act with love and compassion.

It was hard to believe them, but I tried. Their words helped to alleviate a secret burden of guilt I had been carrying ever since my first book came out, a translation of Dark Night of the Soul, by Teresa of Avila’s spiritual companion, John of the Cross, which happened to coincide with the launching of America’s invasion of Iraq.

I am trying to find comfort in the notion that we each have our own way of loving God by loving each other. Mine happens to require solitude and silence. For others, it’s more about engaging in prison reform, making calls to the House and the Senate to vocalize their opposition to American Imperialism, raising funds to keep our rivers clean.

Yet this cannot be my excuse to gloss over the fact that the conscious participation of every citizen of this planet is required if we hope to sustain a just world. To protect our own civil rights and the rights of the most vulnerable members of society, we contemplatives need to stretch ourselves beyond our comfort zone and demand that those in power act with integrity and commit themselves to social justice and world peace. We cannot do this is we never get up off our cushion and make our voices heard.

Activists, for their part, need to sit down sometimes and let themselves grow quiet inside, engaging in fearless self-inquiry to discern between righteousness and self-righteousness, moral outrage and hostility. By dipping into the wellspring of simple unknowing, the lines between good guys and bad guys begin to soften. From within that stillness, they may recognize all the players on the political stage as members of the vast human family, a single tribe connected by their common bonds of suffering and love.

Out of the natural compassion that arises from this practice, they can return to the picket lines with a measure of equanimity to mitigate the anger, a deepening level of acceptance to heal the divisions caused by hate. Their actions might be more effective as a result of some time spent in emptiness.

The wisdom teachers of every tradition seem to agree that action and contemplation are interdependent. If every act is offered as an act of love, we all become activists. If the root of all our action is contemplation, then our whole lives become a prayer.

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