These excerpts are adapted from the author’s latest book, published by Shambhala Publications.
It’s like an ox that enters through a latticed window. Its head, its horns, and its four legs, they all pass through. So. Why is it that its tail cannot pass through? — Gateless Gate, case 38
I’m not exactly sure when it happened. I was thirteen. Maybe fourteen.
Prior to that time, I felt clear on the world and how things worked. Within my small fundamentalist Baptist community pretty much everything was explained. It was part of God’s great, if mysterious, plan. I even had some kind of starring role in it.
Are not two sparrows sold for a dollar? And yet not one of them falls to the ground without our Father’s knowing. God knows the exact number of hairs on your head. So fear not, you are of more value to the Father than the sparrows of heaven.[1]
I sensed that my starring role would have something to do with calling others into the fold. I knew the men in our poor people’s church fell into two types. There were those who on a Sunday during church services sat in the cars smoking or in a bar drinking—my father, James senior, among them.
The others were the men who showed up at church: the preachers and some of the Sunday school teachers. After a missionary family visited our little church, I knew I wanted to go to Africa or China or someplace as a missionary. I wanted those jewels that would be placed in my crown, one for each soul saved.
But then it happened: I began to doubt the whole thing.
There was the hell my father was going to. We all knew it, we all dreaded it, but we never spoke of it as a specific of his particular future. Yet there was the preacher, railing on Sundays about those who would end up in hellfire—and, well, the person the preacher described also described my father. The drunks didn’t go to heaven. Nor did the rich. Not that that included my father. But it was a subject that loomed large from the pulpit. We were poor people, and we knew heaven did not include our oppressors, which, by a later calculation, I figured probably meant anyone from middle management and up.
This was my mother Barbara’s religion. More importantly, I realize now, it was my grandmother Bolene’s religion. She was the anchor of our small family. Bolene was spirit-filled, and she picked the churches we attended. I learned to read from a large, illustrated King James Bible resting on her lap.
But what if those illustrated stories just weren’t so? What if the Bible was just a cut-and-paste operation, put together by who knows who, over however long? And that had less coherent meaning than one of my mother’s Agatha Christie novels? Or, even more, what if the Bible was really just like a volume of my father’s preferred reading, science fiction?
And right to the heart of it, the question forming somewhere in the depths of my being: Is God real?
The alternative to a Christian faith for me was my father’s view: religion is hogwash. Born in 1919, James was orphaned as a child, passed around among relatives for a while and then into an orphanage in New Jersey, from which he fled to the streets of Manhattan. He hawked newspapers. From there he moved into petty crime.
When the Second World War began, James was in a California prison. In the last year of the war, he was released into the army, where he served as a medic. He was blasted near to the kingdom, lost the use of his right arm right to the shoulder, and would sprout shrapnel in various parts of his body right up to the week he died. James was a will-o-the-wisp, following an uncertain star, which always presented as some new opportunity; usually it was a scheme, and when it was, always badly thought through. Sometimes it led to jail. Usually it led to a quiet nighttime move to a new town.
He knew religion was a scam. He knew God was cooked up by the men in charge to frighten the sheep. I realized he might be right. I found my faith ebbing away from me, draining out through that simple question: “Is God real?”
I had no idea at the time, but this question would launch me on a life journey.
—
Across decades now of considering that question—Is God real?—I watched it shift and mutate. I found myself exploring the mysteries of the human heart. And those deeply burning wonderments: Love. Meaning. Purpose. Salvation.
The Unitarian minister and poet Lynn Ungar put that to words for me.
By what are you saved? And how?
Saved like a bit of string,
tucked away in a drawer?
Saved like a child rushed from
a burning building, already
singed and coughing smoke?
Or are you salvaged
like a car part—the one good door
when the rest is wrecked?
Do you believe me when I say
you are neither salvaged nor saved,
but salved, anointed by gentle hands
where you are most tender?
Haven’t you seen
the way snow curls down
like a fresh sheet, how it
covers everything, makes everything
beautiful, without exception?
I’ve contemplated that salvaging and that salving. More, I’ve lived it across several varieties of quests. First came a brief period emulating my father’s atheism. But as a person who came of age in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s, I found myself exposed to the kaleidoscope of human religious identities. I discovered Vedanta and drank deeply from the variations of that tradition presented by Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, and Gerald Heard. I thought briefly that psychedelics would save the world and that Huxley and Timothy Leary and Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac opened doors not only to perception but to what God might actually be.
Then I discovered Alan Watts and at the same time Nyogen Senzaki and Paul Reps. They seemed to describe truths that were both ancient and made sense for today. Then friends told me I didn’t need to just read about that stuff, that there was an actual Zen master who lived across the Bay in San Francisco: the Japanese Zen missionary, Shunryu Suzuki, and his San Francisco Zen Center, which had affiliated groups all around the Bay Area. Including in Berkeley.
My quest would lead me to learn the arts of Zen meditation at that Berkeley affiliate led by one of the roshi’s senior students, Mel Sojun Weitsman…..
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