Thanksgiving

I didn't bang pots and pans around this year. I think Buddhism had something to do with it.

How come I can leap from the a table in someone else's house to offer to help clear and clean the dishes, how come I can put my head down and simply do what's in front of me on a retreat at the Zen Center or the Hsi Lai Temple and even get pleasure from mopping a floor or scraping an old label off a window with a monk yet, in my house, the very thought of any item on my to do list gets a heavy sigh? What is it that makes the make the ordinary stuff of life feel like such an intrusion on my life? Just thinking about organizing my finances, doing the dishes, cleaning out the cabinets, the car, the flower beds is definitely something I can identify as suffering...that is, until real suffering comes along. Today I finally got it that it's all in my head and that's because I had a truly lovely Thanksgiving and I changed nothing about it except what was inside that head.

Karen Armstrong's quote is really coming home to me. Maybe religion isn't just about believing things; it's also about doing things that change your life. In these small but profound ways, this is definitely changing my life.

Okay...this post gives me an excuse to underscore that, as I am scurrying to get this blog up to date with where I am, putting up what I've been doing for the past eighteen months or so, I am currently working on Buddhism and beginning to figure out how and where to do Daosim which is coming next whether or not that was my plan. When I told Professor Amir Hussain I thought it might be time to start figuring out what came next and how to do it and it was either Confucianism or Daoism, he sent me to Robin Wang, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Asian and Pacific Studies at Loyola Marymount University. (Note: she's in the philiosophy department, not the religious studies department which is the very first thing I have to deal with: why does Huston Smith call Confuciansim and Daoism religions? Are they? And are either even "practiced" here in the United States? And is it spelled Daoism or Taoism? )

Anyway, Professor Wang said, "Oh you have to start with Daoism! Much more interesting. You have to deal with the body!"

Great. I decided to do this to get beyond the body but, no matter what I do, my body keeps getting dragged back into it.

Sorry to confuse the heck out of you with the past present and future all going on at once in this post. I hope to be thoroughly contemporaneous as soon as possible. When I catch up, I'll republish this post in its proper chronological place. In the meantime, please email me to let me know you're out there, to give me some sense of who's listening and what you're thinking about all of this. I'd like to know.

Right now I'm grateful I live in a home with people who don't mind my crazy ideas, who have supported me even as I act on them.

Searching for Huston Smith

Professor Hussain answered my email; Huston Smith had been on panels and at various meetings with him but Professor Hussain didn’t know where to find him and neither did Professor Chapple. I'm not quite sure what to try next but I'm not giving up.


(30 September 2006)

A bit about why and how...

In my limited contacts with religious faith over the course of my life, I’ve been hobbled by my own judgments, looking for what was wrong, inconsistent, false, hoping to find nothing wrong, nothing inconsistent, nothing false in any single religious institution. I wanted to walk in skeptical-- No. It's really more accurate to say “walk by skeptical” -- only to be lured in by the siren song of the obviously spiritual, true, and good into a specific faith and practice that would simply feel right. I wanted to be mugged by faith. After decades of waiting, hoping, it's time to try something, anything, different.

So you won't find me reporting on what doesn't resonate with me but what does. I've spent a lifetime - both personally and as a journalist - looking for the mistakes, the flaws, the inconsistencies. This is an attempt to balance that out. (If you need or want those pointed out, there are plenty of recent books doing a fine job of cataloguing inconsistencies and flaws in various beliefs anyway.)

Using the chapter structure of Huston Smith's book The World's Religions, I'm going through the conversion training for the seven major religious traditions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Confuscianism, Taoism, Christianity, Judaism and Islam. I've stayed in the United States - I am a mom after all - but I’m going where there are a lot of people are practicing that faith. (For instance, I've started with Hinduism as it's the oldest of the major religions currently practiced and I’ve started in southern California as it has a huge concentration of practicing Hindus with more diversity of sects than most any place in the country.)

When it became clear this idea wasn’t going away, that I was considering actually leaving my lifetime career and taking the leap, I started asking for advice. I wanted to make sure there was some chance, no matter how small, that someone who knew a lot more than I did thought this effort might be worthwhile. I went back to the professors who taught the courses I took – Professor Rick Talbott of California State University at Northridge and Professor Amir Hussain at Loyola Marymount University – and to new ones like Professor Christopher Chapple, who’s also at Loyola Marymount and an expert on Hinduism and Buddhism. After many questions and several words of caution, they each have agreed to advise me. Professor Chapple also gave me a tutorial on the history of Hinduism in the United States and its various denominations and spiritual leaders. I spent a lot of time asking, “Now, how do you spell that again?”

“A-n-a-n-d-a. A lot of the names end with ‘ananda.’ It means bliss.”

Afterward, when I asked him which temple I should go to first and who he thought might make the best Hinduism guide for me, the best guide for Buddhism. He said I should just start showing up in various temples and "the right teachers will appear."

Great. I was looking for direction and I got Yoda.

So, that's what I'm doing. The search for that "right teacher" allows me to get me some sense of the diversity of belief within a religious tradition while spending time with the "right teacher" gives me a much more specific understanding of the faith itself. And I’m confining my search to a faith’s more popular branches so that I’ll come away with a stronger sense of each tradition’s core beliefs.