August 17 Stuff

Well the 26th Aniversary of my ordination as a Roman catholic priest on August 14, 1984 has come and gone! What a lot has gone on since that date. A remarkable 21 years in USA where ther was a vast enrichment of my life and ministry largely from the wonderfulk people that I encountered there and worked with. The members of the Monos Community deserve a special mention and its wonderful that after I handed over the leadership to Regina Decker it has gone from strength to strength. Osage Monastery also played a big part in it too by bringing me into contact with Bede Griffiths and through him to the Camalodese Benedictines at Big Sur where I am still an oblate. My 6 week hermitage experience under the guidance of Fr Bruno was really rather special and of course O+M also introduced me to Ruben Habito my first Zen teacher. In fact it was during last week that I went back to Ruben's book "Healing Breath" last week in my search to come to terms with all my feelings concerning the terrible human disasters occuring in our world at this time. It was of great help; so much so that my dharma talk to my Zen Sangha here in Cirencester used some thoughts I found there to enable me to give voice to my struggle as a Zen practitioner. Here are some notes from it:
Zen Master Hakuin's Song of Zazen ends with "This very body, the body of the Buddha" expresses powerfully the massge of Zen that "we need not look outside ourselves, what we seek is right here" "this is my Body" is used as a term in Christianity as well so we reognise that "This very body includes all that is in the entire universe!" The dropping off of Body and Mind called for by Master Dogen callls for a direct awareness that breaks through the Subject?object barrer created by the illusion arising from our ego- centred consciousness that makes a sharp distinction between all that is in this "skin-bag" and that which is outside. This is particlarly reeinforced by our Western culture stemming from Descartes and so many others. In the Christian tradition the whole 19th century suggestion that the natural world was there for humans to dominate also has produced an ego centricism that has clearly been extremely destructive. The findings aod modern science has undermined all of this of course and points us in the same direction of Hakuin's "This very body" A ancient Zen story recounts how we do not see a flower as it really is but only as it appears as an object. As Anais Nin wrote we only see things as WE are not as THEY are . The Zen meaning of compassion is as the word says "to suffer with" To recognise that we are ALL one body and that what happens in the universe is not seperate from us but it happens to us as well. We are to awaken from the unreality fo a dream world of the illusion that we are not all One in this very body of the great wide universe.