when the monks didn’t make sense, she made her own

When the monks didn’t make sense, she made her own. (Mk. 8.31-35)
Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church

February 25, 2024

The gymnasium had been fashioned into a makeshift meditation hall. Lines of zafu cushions near the front, sturdy, comfortable chairs in the back. The pilgrims had come from all over for a week with the revered teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh. Their license plates showed the distances they had traveled. Hundreds of shed sandals marked the entrance to the hall.

They sat in silent meditation before the talk. The quiet washed over them all. The shared breathing. The collective energy of those seeking peace in themselves and the world. And no one seemed that surprised when Nhat Hanh did not deliver the first talk. Someone else, someone most of them did not know, sat at the front of hall, bowed to them, and began to speak.

Sister Chan Khong first met Thich Nhat Hanh in 1959. She was Nhat Hanh’s most senior student, yet, again, most of those gathered had never heard of her. Soon they were smiling with the recognition that she was an uncommonly wise teacher. Nhat Hanh had once said of her that she was “among the foremost of [his own] teachers.” He called her a “true bodhisattva,” by which he meant a venerated one who remains to help others or show them the path. Sister Chan Khong herself might not have said that. She was more modest in religious terms and more skeptical of its trappings. Her interest was in putting good teachings into practice in a way that made a difference to those who were suffering in the here and now.

She had always been like that. From an early age, Sister Chan Khong had questions. She was deeply curious about the world around her, but she also saw her country torn apart by war. As a teenager, her father encouraged her to talk with a few esteemed monks who were visiting Saigon. She did, but they were dismissive of her questions. Sister Chan Khong wanted to know why Buddhists didn’t do more to feed the hungry and shelter those without homes, as she had seen the Catholic orders do. One of the monks tried to explain that to the enlightened person, things like suffering were illusory. Sister Chan Khong didn’t buy it. Later, she wrote of the monk’s unsatisfactory answer: “For me, life was not an illusion—the injustices and suffering of life in the slums were very real, and I wanted to learn how to cope with these realities, not deny them.” As she continued to study Buddhism, she learned that the Buddha had not taught that life was an illusion, but rather that our perceptions were faulty; we could not always see things clearly. Through meditation, we could learn to look more deeply, in the hope of connecting with the world as it truly is, not as we imagine or wish it to be.

Sister Chan Khong’s dialogue with the monks continued, but it also continued to frustrate her. There wasn’t much place for women in Vietnamese Buddhist circles at that time. Monks actually told her that if she practiced well enough, then she might be reborn in the next life as a man. She rejected their view as, in her words, “irrelevant and discriminatory.” Yet rather than leaving her practice of Buddhism, she began to refine it and make for herself a home in it as a woman. “I did not want to become a man,” she wrote, “I did not even want to become a buddha. I just wanted to help the children whose suffering was so real.”

Later, when Sister Chan Khong met Thich Nhat Hanh, who had gained a reputation for his practice of leaving the monastery to engage with real people and social problems, it was a powerful match. They pioneered a new school of thought and called it “engaged Buddhism.” What they meant to do was put their religion into practice in the world, every day. Religion was not meant as a vehicle for detached, individual enlightenment, they thought. No, their religious practice was meant to benefit all beings, here and now, in substantial material ways.

Their ideas were radically different than anything that had come before. They took the tradition into which they had been born and turned it upside down in an attempt to meet the world and its suffering head on. They founded the Order of Interbeing, which began with six practioners, three of whom were women. Listen to a few lines from the precepts they adopted:

Do not be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even Buddhist ones. Buddhist systems of thought are guiding means; they are not absolute truth.  

Do not think the knowledge you presently possess is changeless. . .Avoid being narrow-minded and bound to present views. Learn to practice nonattachment from views in order to be open to receive others’ viewpoints. . .

Do not force others, including children, by any means whatsoever, to adopt your views, whether by authority, threat, money, propaganda, or even education. However, through compassionate dialogue, help others renounce fanaticism and narrowness.

Do not avoid contact with suffering or close your eyes before suffering. Do not lose awareness of suffering in the life of the world. Find ways to be with those who are suffering. . .By such means, awaken yourself and others. . .

The precepts continue at length, but they each insist that our practice be open-minded, compassionate, and deeply connected with others and the suffering in the world. It’s a beautiful refashioning of Buddhism to meet the needs of the moment in which they found themselves. When the monks didn’t make sense, Sister Chan Khong made her own sense. And she found a kindred spirit in the work. Together they spent more than half a century helping others connect their meditation practice to the needs of real life. Which is what she was doing in that gymnasium full of pilgrims that hadn’t come to hear her, but found themselves grateful for the wisdom in her teaching.

Buddhist thought doesn’t line up neatly with readings from our Bibles. Yet in our morning text, we might still hear a bit of Sister Chan Khong’s story. In the Gospel of Mark, which is known for its pacing — it is the shortest and quickest moving gospel — Jesus tells his students that suffering will be a part of his path. He must go through it, he explains. And in the context of Buddhist teaching, we might just hear him acknowledging the reality of our situation. Offering it almost as a precept. Suffering is just a part of life. Do not avoid contact with suffering or close your eyes before it.

As the story goes, Jesus’ student Peter, cannot accept this and rejects Jesus’ teaching altogether. Jesus calls Peter satan, which means adversary, and tells him he has put his mind on the wrong things. Then Jesus calls the crowd and tells them that suffering will not only be part of his life, it will be part of everybody’s life. And if you wish to follow the way I’m teaching, he explains, then you will have to take up a kind of cross. You will have to accept, in some way, that there will be suffering. Then he offers a saying so paradoxical that it’s almost a koan, a saying that we are meant to carry with us for a while and puzzle through. Buddhists, contemplatives, and mystics down the ages have loved it. If you want to save yourself, Jesus says, then you have to lose yourself. Only those who lose themselves for the sake of this way will ever save themselves at all.

There’s so much to what Jesus is saying here, but to unpack too much of it or examine it too closely is to threaten its poetry and power. Jesus is talking about acceptance of suffering and mortality. Jesus is talking about life’s inherent paradoxes. Jesus is talking about transcending our egos and reaching a kind of bodhisattva wisdom. You know this is not about you, right? You know each of us is here to give ourselves away. You know we are meant to help others. If you want to follow me, if you want to follow the path, this is the way.

It may occur to us that this teaching is every bit as radical a reinvention as what Sister Chan Khong and Thich Nhat Hanh did with Buddhism. Jesus said, with his words and also with his life: You have heard it said before, but I’m saying something different. You have seen it done before, but I’m doing something different. When the priests and scribes didn’t make any sense, Jesus made his own sense.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see that Jesus would have loved Sister Chan Khong. Because she took her tradition and put it to use. She asked her questions and followed where they led. She found her people and started a new movement. Engaged Buddhism. Relevant religion. Peaceable living.

After a week, the retreat, which had been held entirely in silence, came to an end. When the final bell was rung and the program was over, people began to talk for the first time. And they talked about Sister Chan Khong. What she taught was so helpful, they said. I cannot wait to put it into practice. I think it will really help me and my family. Because while Thich Nhat Hanh had spoken in broad and inspiring ways, Sister Chan Khong guided the group through specific exercises meant to create peace in relationships. She offered steps for better communication and mindful connection with the people we love most: our partners, our parents, our children, our friends and colleagues. The real work of peace, she taught, was not only international; it was interpersonal. Peace begins here and now. In this moment. With each other. With our dear ones. With every breath and every word. She brought the teachings home and gave us something we could use.  

Some time later, Sister Chan Khong’s talks were published as a book entitled, Beginning Anew. Some of the pilgrims picked it up and remembered her voice as they leafed through the pages. They did not need to deny suffering or look away from it. They did not need to use religion to avoid reality. They did not need to be bodhisattvas or buddhas. They only needed to wake up and help each other.

Amen.

See Sister Chan Khong, Learning True Love: Practicing Buddhism in a Time of War (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 2007) and Beginning Anew: Four Streps to Restoring Communication (Berekely: Parallax Press, 2014).

nothing has to happen

Green Gulch Farm, Muir Beach, California

Nothing has to happen. (Ecclesiastes 3.1-8)
Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church

February 19, 2024

After a week at the Zen farm, Sara came to pick me up. When she saw me, unwashed and unshaven, covered in Marin County dust, she smiled and asked: What happened to you? You look great. 

I gave a very Zen answer. Nothing happened, I said. 

She got the joke. 

I first learned how to do nothing from my friend, Gaelyn Godwin, who was the abbot at the Houston Zen Center. Years earlier, I attended her introductory meditation classes. A group of us met in the evenings to learn Zen practice and etiquette from Gaelyn. She guided us with care, starting things out easily with ten or fifteen-minute meditations as we gradually built toward the forty-minutes of silence that were more typical. It was funny how strange the silence felt to the group.

I remember after our first ten-minute session, I remember one man raised a question. I think I’m doing it wrong, he said. How do I know if I’m doing it wrong? Gaelyn smiled as she explained that there was no wrong way to sit quietly. It just took some time getting used to it. The man went on to explain that he thought something was supposed to happen that was not happening. I’m pretty sure I’m doing it wrong, he concluded. 

As it turned out, the class was not for everyone. A few, like the man, were uncertain about the value of meditation or its effects, and once our class ended, we never saw them again. But most of us in the group really took to the silence. We moved beyond its initial strangeness and began to experience the rich and nourishing qualities of shared silence. We learned the Zen ropes, as it were. Bowing before entering the meditation hall, walking kinhin, finding our cushions, listening for the bell. Ten minutes of silence grew to twenty, then forty, and finally we were ready to practice with the larger community. I began attending the morning zazen at 5:50 a.m. 

Here’s what I learned: over time, meditation really does change us. It doesn’t make us more spiritual or religious than anyone else. But it does help us begin to learn our own minds a little better. It helps us learn to slow down, breathe, and reclaim some control over our own attention. And these things make all the difference.

Many of you know this from your own practice, but when we sit in silence, we may observe our own thoughts. Gaelyn likened it to watching the sky. Sometimes it is full of clouds. Sometimes it is clear. But we just observe. In meditation, I learned for the first time a strategy for taking account of my strong thoughts and feelings. Oh, I would observe one morning, my mind is full of stressful thoughts. Oh, I would observe the next, I have a lot of sadness today. Oh, I would observe on some of the easier mornings, my mind feels less cluttered. Yet Gaelyn taught me that it was not necessary to judge these things. Just observe them. Just notice. Just make friends with your mind and smile toward it. You don’t have to do anything. 

What Gaelyn showed me was that observing my own thoughts and feelings meant I did not have to attach to any of them. I could simply sit with each thought or feeling for the time it was there and allow it to be the transient thing it was. Like clouds in the sky, thoughts and feelings pass. They are not reality; no need to cling to them. 

This idea, that we didn’t have to attach to every thought or feeling, came as something of a revelation to the students in our meditation class. I suppose this is because everyone in the class came from a Christian background. We had been taught to assess and judge. We had been taught that we had to do something with our thoughts and feelings; perhaps change them, work on them, fix them, or shape them into a story that made sense or moved toward a good end. Several people had been burdened with strong feelings of guilt or shame they were taught in church from an early age. Some of us, as we learned how to meditate, also began to unlearn harmful religious concepts that came to mind. For the first time, we could see them clearly and begin the process of letting them go. 

It was a different kind of religious practice. Learning to sit still. Learning to be. Learning not to do. Or at least to do nothing for a moment. Which wasn’t all we were doing. Gaelyn and the Houston Zen Center sangha were deeply involved in the larger community and efforts to make it better, but all these efforts derived from that initial practice of meditation. We were trying to cultivate compassionate, grounded lives in order that we might then be of some use to the world. And doesn’t it seem like we could use a little more of that right now?

Think of the moment in which we live. Think of all the distractions in our lives. So many things have been designed to compete for our attention. Smart phones ping in class. News stations offer never-ending commentary. Social media algorithms amplify emotional content. People walk right past each other in noise-cancelling headphones. One streaming show rolls over into another without pause. E-mail accounts receive dozens of messages per hour. Text messages blow up our phones. There is so much noise, so much bang and clatter in our minds. Doesn’t everybody need some time to clear their heads? Doesn’t everybody need some time to do nothing? By which I mean some time to sit still and reclaim our own attention. We don’t have to attach to everything clamoring for it. We can step back, smile, and simply let things pass for a moment. 

I am aware that this is an incredibly countercultural invitation. Yet I am also sure it is a healthy one. I learned from Zen teachers, but the wisdom of nonattachment runs through many traditions. We heard it this morning when Celia read to us from the Book of Ecclesiastes.

For everything there is a season, the old Hebrew writer began. There is a time for every matter under heaven. And then all the thoughts follow. Not unlike all everything that may come into our minds when we sit quietly. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to plant and a time to uproot. A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to seek and a time to lose, to tear and to sow, to be silent and to speak, to love and to hate, to wage war and to make peace. To listen to the old litany is to hear the breathtaking variety of human experience. Yet if we listen deeply, we may also hear our moment in it. There is a time to pick up our smart phones and a time to put them down. A time to turn on the news and a time to turn it off. A time to sign on to social media and a time to sign out. A time to do something and a time to do nothing. Or at least to do something that will help. Like sitting quietly and cultivating that different kind of attention. 

And, friends, that is our invitation for today. May we each make a time to breathe, for a moment, and be. We may sit on a cushion in the style of Zen. We may pray as contemplative Christians. We may walk barefoot on the beach, taking a deep breath with each step. We may pause by the open window and listen to the birds. But let us be intentional in our practice. Let us be countercultural in our commitment. Let us embrace the Zen joke that if we are to be healthy and well and bring our whole selves to this moment, then nothing has to happen.

Amen.

religion should answer to our lived experience, not the other way around

Religion should answer to our lived experience, not the other way around.

Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church (Ps. 147.1-11)

February 4, 2024

The Sunday after George Floyd was murdered, Cole Arthur Riley tuned into a church service on her computer. She was reeling from all of the beautiful Black people killed by the police. Their names were a litany constantly running in her mind.

Cole was a Black woman, but she hadn’t been raised in a particularly religious home. She found her way into Episcopalian and Catholic spaces, churches known for their high liturgy, the rituals that grounded and sustained their members. She liked the feeling of liturgy, the way it held her and let her rest. As a religious scholar and writer, she traded in, and puzzled over, words all day. But it was nice sometimes just to surrender to the rhythms of a good old fancy church service.

But on the Sunday she tuned in, she needed more. Cole followed along with a service she had previously loved, but grew increasingly uneasy. It wasn’t for her. “There are days,” she wrote, “when it is particularly difficult to pray words written by a white man.” For all its beauty, she said, the liturgy was “suffocating” her. In the wake of George Floyd, she could not breathe. Not in church, anyway. Cole looked over words on the screen from the Book of Common Prayer, written by a man named Thomas Cranmer. But all she saw were images of beautiful Black people in bondage at the very time those words were written. She switched off her computer and started a project, “mostly out of rage,” she explained. It was called Black Liturgies.

Cole began to create the thing she had been looking for, the thing she needed most. In her words again, “I was desperate for a liturgical space that could center Black emotion, Black literature, and the Black body unapologetically.” She began by simply sharing poems, prayers, and quotations on social media. And you can still follow her Black Liturgies on Instagram and receive regular wisdom from James Baldwin, Zora Neal Hurston, Toni Morrison, and others. Not a white man’s prayer among them. Which is important.

We gather this morning as a mostly white church at the beginning of Black History Month. One month isn’t nearly enough, a point to which we will return, but even so, this month is a powerful and important one. It is a time to set our intention and draw from the wisdom and experience of our beloved Black family. And we could do worse than to pick up Cole Arthur Riley’s books, This Here Flesh and Black Liturgies, and find ourselves challenged and enriched by their depth, humanity, and spirit. I know I’ve been grateful these past weeks, as I have recovered from illness, to read from Black Liturgies every day.

I don’t believe that Cole Arthur Riley actually set out to write for white people. She was rather responding to a lack, a void, a need. She saw who was missing and brought them. Yet in her generous introduction to the work, she invites white people and everybody else. She hopes the wisdom of Black voices might help those who aren’t particularly religious, those who have been left out or left behind, those who aren’t sure they can trust church after all it has done, those whose creativity, insight, intelligence, and vision haven’t always been welcomed. The introduction to Black Liturgies is practically a liturgy itself: a liturgy of radical welcome. But I’ll be honest. I was skeptical at first. I don’t usually like things like prayer books, preferring to read poetry instead. But Cole Arthur Riley confesses that she feels the same way. I was drawn in by our shared reluctance to read, write, or experience the same old thing. And then I was blessed by the words of Black ancestors, the wisdom of Black experience, and the questions of Black spirituality.

It’s a powerful reminder that a few weeks in February aren’t enough. Not when set against every white prayer book, white worship service, and white history lesson. No, we are desperate for the corrective. We need to thread Black stories through every week and season of the year. Especially here. In this place. In the Lowcountry where Harriet Tubman led freedom raids. Where Denmark Vesey and Rolla Bennett preached and planned liberation. Where Millicent Brown helped desegregate the schools and Minerva Brown joined sit-ins. Where Joe Darby and Nelson Rivers sat in the first meetings to organize our Charleston Area Justice Ministry. Friends, these are our best stories. And we should sing them and shout them all year long.

How good it is to sing praises, said the psalmist. For God is gracious. Gathers the outcasts. Heals the brokenhearted. Binds up their wounds. Lifts up their stories. Makes a place for them in the liturgy. And the Mystery that we call God determines the stars. It covers the heavens and prepares the rain. It provides. And we are invited not only to sing praises, but to show reverence. The old word for it is fear, as in “the fear of God,” but what it means is a kind of reverence, wonder, or awe. We sing and fall silent before it all. . .and we say their names. . .the ones who have been taken too soon. Emmett and Walter and Sandra. And the ones who have challenged and inspired us. I don’t have to keep going with the litany. You can call them to mind. Or go back through our services, page through my sermon blog. Black beloveds are there in every season, helping us all.

This is a spiritual practice for us. I learned it long ago in a graduate seminar in Chicago. We audit ourselves. We ask who our sources are, where our liturgy comes from, which voices we include. We look for who is missing and bring them in. And we try and include everybody, not because we’re checking off boxes or hoping to signal our virtue. No, we try and include everybody because there is wisdom in our difference, in the variety of our experiences. So we draw from Black experiences. Women’s experiences. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer + experiences. And the experiences of everybody with every kind of body, every kind of question, every kind of uneasiness. Like Cole Arthur Riley watching a white service and feeling that it just wasn’t right.

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned straight, cisgender, white men. That’s because we’re already included. In fact, we’ve been at the center of things for essentially all of religious history and our work in this moment is to decenter ourselves and delight in just how liberating that can actually be. We are enlarged and expanded by the wisdom of the group. Besides, the psalmist didn’t say that the Divine gathered up the ones who been in charge all along. He said the Divine looked to those who had been cast out before, those who had not previously been included.

I know there’s little that appeals to the members of this church more than our commitments to inclusion, equality, and welcome. Black History Month invites us into a kind of mindfulness by welcoming voices of Black history and the Black present into each day. We could make a liturgy of it in the style of Cole Arthur Riley. We could fashion a daily ritual. Make the tea. Ring the bowl. Sit with her book or Baldwin’s, Walker’s, or Raboteau’s. Close our eyes and listen to Duke, Aretha, or Charlie. Make a pilgrimage to lay a flower on Remount Road, at Vesey Park, or here in our own churchyard. . .

All of it done with the intention that our lives and our religion answer to beautiful, bittersweet, and Black lived experience. In the hope that we might create of ourselves, and our church, something new.

Amen.

*See Cole Arthur Riley, Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human (New York: Converent Books, 2024)