How I Became a Christian Zen Practitioner
I grew up in Los Angeles, in no religious tradition. During my childhood, my mom was involved in the Unitarian Church on and off, and my dad was a Mormon for several years—this was after they’d divorced. I occasionally went to church with them. I liked the Unitarian church better because I could wear jeans and we did arts and crafts. For five summers, I went to a Unitarian summer camp where we tie-dyed T-shirts, sang folk songs, and played noncompetitive games, and the only rules were “Don’t do anything that will hurt anyone else” and “Don’t throw rocks.” My grandmother, who became a born-again Christian late in life, taught me a few bedtime prayers and gave me a children’s Bible that I never read. And at my private elementary school, we sang a little prayer before lunch, and we recited Luke’s narrative of the birth of Jesus at the Christmas pageant. That about sums up my childhood religious training.
At Vassar College, in upstate New York, I majored in cognitive science, which included classes in psychology, computer science, philosophy, and linguistics. Initially, I focused on computer science, but midway through college, I began to lean toward the philosophical side of my major and I also started taking religion classes.
When I read Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche, I thought they had religion pretty well figured out. Religion was a neurosis or the opiate of the people or the rationalization of weakness or something along those lines. That is, religion was something I didn’t need to bother with personally, though I figured I should learn a bit about it as part of a well-rounded liberal arts education.
But then I started reading about the mystical and monastic traditions of Buddhism and Christianity and I read William James’s classic on the psychology of religion, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and I started to think that religion might have something to say to me after all. Both of my grandmothers had died during my sophomore year in college, which almost certainly contributed to my newfound interest in the deep issues of human life, though I made that connection only in hindsight.
In the fall of my senior year, my Buddhism class took a field trip one Saturday to Zen Mountain Monastery in the nearby Catskill Mountains. I was intrigued by the monastery and felt a certain attraction to Zen, though I remember chatting with one of the monks and wondering how such a normal-seeming guy had ended up shaving his head and devoting his whole life to Zen. In the spring, the Zen teacher from the monastery came to Vassar to give a talk and afterward I inquired about the possibility of doing a retreat at the monastery. My friend Anne and I spent our spring break that year at the monastery, following the rigorous monastic schedule of work and meditation.
Monastic life turned out to be different in many ways from my image of bald men in medieval robes, in complete silence, copying manuscripts by hand. For one thing, there are both women and men in residence at Zen Mountain Monastery. The monastery usually has twenty to forty full-time residents, which at the time included about five “monastics” (their gender-inclusive term for monks and nuns), and now includes about twice that number. The rest of the residents are there for a limited period of time agreed on in advance, anywhere up to a year, without making or necessarily intending to make any longer commitment. And there are usually some twenty to forty guests each weekend for retreats.
The monastery was founded by John Daido Loori, Roshi, who was raised Catholic in New Jersey. (“Daido” is his “dharma name” or Buddhist name. The title Roshi, which literally means “old master,” is used for Zen teachers whose awakening has been certified by their own teacher.) Daido’s teacher, Taizan Maezumi, Roshi, was from Japan and founded the Zen Center of Los Angeles. Daido also counted among his spiritual teachers Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross.
When I made my first visit to the monastery, only two residents had shaved heads: Daido and the head monastic. In the meditation hall, residents wear Japanese-style robes—gray for students, black for monastics, white for senior lay students. The rest of the time, they wear ordinary clothes in black or other dark or neutral colors so as to blend in with the rest of the sangha or community.
A day at the monastery is spent mostly in work and meditation. The daily schedule varies slightly, depending on the season, but a typical day begins with wake-up at 4:30 a.m., zazen at 5:00 a.m.—two thirty-five-minute sitting periods separated by five minutes of walking meditation—and a twenty-minute service centered in chanting texts such as the Heart Sutra, which encapsulates core teachings of Zen. The day includes seven-and-a-half hours of work, three vegetarian meals, and some time for rest and relaxation. And the day ends with another block of two sitting periods at 7:30 p.m. and lights-out at 9:30 p.m. Silence is generally kept from evening zazen through about 10:00 a.m. the next day. My favorite exception to this rule is on Wednesday nights cookies are served in the dining hall after evening zazen and you can chat on “cookie night.”
Like all newcomers to the monastery, Anne and I were taught the practice of counting the breath. I spent a lot of time noticing the noisiness of my brain and the complaints of my body about sitting completely still with a straight back, and I discovered the simple wonder of paying attention to what’s actually happening. Immediately after doing zazen, I usually felt peaceful and relaxed, and I didn’t feel much like talking or performing any unnecessary actions. But this was not a feeling of drowsiness or lethargy. I felt focused and alert and very aware of everything around me. During my whole stay at the monastery, but especially after zazen, I really enjoyed eating. Maybe this was simply because the food at the monastery was so much better than the food at school, but I think it was also because I was attending more than usual to the actions and sensations of eating.
The monastery supports itself by offering weekend and weeklong retreats, so a lot of the work of the monastery is that of running a retreat center. Guests are assigned a job each day, depending on what is needed: helping in the kitchen, housekeeping, gardening, lawn mowing, office work. Monastics and other long-term residents have an ongoing job. There’s a head cook, an accountant, a work supervisor, a registrar, and so forth. The monastery residents don’t make hand-illuminated copies of sacred texts, but they do publish a quarterly journal and produce audio and video recordings of Zen teaching.
The monastery has the equivalent of a weekend, called hosan, from Sunday afternoon, after the weekend guests leave, through Tuesday afternoon. During hosan there is no schedule to follow and no rule of silence. Residents are on their own for meals, and you can leave the monastery grounds to go for a hike in the mountains or spend time in New York City or just go to nearby Woodstock for ice cream. The television in the library is off-limits during the week but can be used during hosan. While Anne and I were visiting, a bunch of us watched the movie Return of the Jedi.
One week of each month is a sesshin or intensive meditation retreat. During sesshin, silence is kept at all times and most of each day is spent in zazen.
Everything done at the monastery all day, all year, is part of the practice—not just zazen but working, eating, even resting. And everyone there—monastics and laypeople, residents and guests—follows the same monastic schedule and discipline. The whole environment is designed to encourage and facilitate practicing at all times the awareness that is practiced in zazen: repeatedly noticing wandering thoughts and returning to full engagement with the present moment.
Several years after this visit to the monastery, I heard someone say, after some intensive Zen practice, that it felt like she’d had all the plaque scraped off her brain. That’s how I felt at the end of my week’s stay: like I had a fresh, clean, shiny brain. Especially for the first few days after leaving the monastery, I was more aware of all the meaningless and unnecessary chatter going on all the time—my own chattering, other people’s chattering, and the incessant chattering in my brain. And I kept feeling like I was getting too much stimulation or doing too many things at the same time. As we drove away from the monastery at the end of the week, we were talking, listening to the radio, and watching the snow hit the windshield, and this seemed like two too many things to be doing at once, like this was more than one could fully attend to. Back at school, I found that I had an easier time taking care of tasks that I ordinarily would have put off or grumbled about.
Shortly after my college graduation in 1987, during a cross-country drive from New York City to Los Angeles with my aunt and my college possessions, I became suddenly and painfully aware of my own mortality and finitude, my smallness and powerlessness in the universe.
I had had a similar experience before, when I was about six: coming to the dizzying realization not only that I was mortal, but also that I might never have existed and that, in fact, nothing might ever have existed. But I had apparently managed to repress that line of thought for many years until, at age twenty-one, it hit me, in a gut way, that I would eventually die and that I wouldn’t be consulted about whether that was okay with me. Like it or not, sooner or later, I would die.
I felt terrified and confused, like my world had turned inside out. I wondered how people could so blithely go about their daily lives knowing they were going to die. I felt as though now I really understood the existentialist philosophers I’d read in college, the “sick soul” of William James, and the story of the Buddha, a pampered, sheltered prince who was in his twenties before he discovered some of the fundamental realities of human existence—aging, illness, and death.
I suppose you might call this crisis a conversion experience, in that it decisively and permanently reoriented my life, propelling me on my religious search. But we usually imagine conversion experiences as joyful, and this experience was horrifying. I was glad, some years later, to read what Susan Howatch, author of a series of novels about the Anglican Church, says about her own conversion: “I began to feel as if God had seized me by the scruff of the neck, slammed me against the nearest wall, and was now shaking me until my teeth rattled.” She adds, “Why people think a religious conversion is all sweetness and light I have no idea. It must be one of the big spiritual misconceptions of our time.”
I spent that summer in Hawaii with my mom and stepdad, who were living there at the time, but I didn’t much enjoy my exotic locale. I slept as much as possible—my preferred method of escaping myself and the world—and read anything that I thought might help me understand what was going on with me and what to do about it, mainly books on religious experience and meditation.
That fall, I moved to Boulder, Colorado, to start a PhD program in philosophy at the University of Colorado. Boulder is a center for Tibetan Buddhism in the United States, and I began a regular meditation practice there, with the support of classes and weekend meditation retreats at the Naropa Institute (now Naropa University), a small college founded by Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa. I also read some of the classics of the Christian contemplative tradition: The Cloud of Unknowing, Saint John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul, and Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation.
I quickly discovered that philosophy wasn’t going to address the Big Questions in a way that would satisfy me, and I sat in my philosophy classes wondering if the other students actually cared about the issues we were discussing and, if so, why. My undergraduate adviser had warned me that I wouldn’t like graduate study in philosophy, and he was right. I dropped out of the program shortly after the start of my second semester.
By that point, my religious search was by far the most important thing in my life. The questions of life and death were urgent and painful and unrelenting, and I wanted to devote some time to single-minded, wholehearted spiritual practice. So I spent three months of the fall of 1988 at Zen Mountain Monastery, which I had visited in college.
After that, I returned to Boulder and transferred into the graduate program in religious studies at the University of Colorado. But I quickly became frustrated that no one seemed to want to talk about religion in relation to their own lives. They were observing religion from the outside, as anthropologists and sociologists, and I realized that I was primarily interested in exploring religion from the inside. At that point I didn’t want to be reading and writing and talking about religion; I wanted to be practicing it.
So I left the program and went back to the Zen monastery, this time for a year’s residency, beginning in the summer of 1989.
When I tell people that I lived at a monastery, they often say something like “That must have been so peaceful.” But peaceful is not one of the adjectives that comes to mind. I remember thinking that the schedule felt relentless. The experience was intense, challenging, difficult. I almost always felt sleep-deprived. I was only twenty-three and was dealing with basic issues of growing up—work, relationships, and so forth—at the same time as questions about life and death. I once asked one of the monastics, “Don’t you sometimes wish you believed in Someone you could pray to for help?” But he looked at me uncomprehendingly and said no. I learned a lot about myself during my time at the monastery but felt afterward that it might have been too much all at once.
My future husband, Brian, and I dated during my year’s residency at the monastery. We had met two years earlier through the Buddhist community in Boulder, but we got together long-distance, writing letters while I was in New York and he was in Colorado, and he came out to the monastery three times to visit. Brian was teaching at the University of Colorado while finishing his dissertation in theology for the University of Chicago.
After my year at the monastery, I returned to Boulder to be with Brian, who had just finished a thirty-day silent retreat at a Jesuit retreat center. We got married two years later.
Although Brian is Boston Irish-Catholic and my background was Southern California agnostic, we somehow ended up with strikingly similar worldviews. When we moved in together, between the two of us we had no car, no couch, and no television, but we had three zafus and five copies of The Cloud of Unknowing (in three different translations).
Toward the end of my time at the monastery and especially after I moved back to Boulder, I was really struggling with my Zen practice and my Zen teacher. On Thursday nights, Brian and I sat with a small Zen group that met in the basement of the Tibetan Buddhist center downtown, but that was all the Zen practice I was doing and even that felt like a chore.
At the monastery, I realized that I never had to work for much of anything in my life and never had done much of anything requiring discipline. School work had come easily; I was never involved in sports; I had quit piano lessons after a year and a half. And I was discovering that some of the most important things in life—spiritual practice and committed relationships—took work and discipline. I tended to give myself guilt trips about not sitting much, thinking things like “What will help me be at peace is to sit, but I really don’t feel like sitting, but by not sitting I’m contributing to my own unhappiness, and isn’t that stupid.” Naturally, this line of thinking didn’t exactly inspire me to spiritual discipline. It just made me feel guilty on top of not being at peace.
I eventually figured out that at least part of what I had been thinking of as existential angst or a “dark night of the soul” might be better understood as garden-variety depression, so I started to see a therapist. But I didn’t trust an exclusively therapeutic world view, and I felt like I needed some sort of spiritual guidance also.
Brian knew a Catholic nun who worked at the Jesuit retreat center where he’d done his thirty-day retreat, and he thought I’d hit it off with her. I did. I went to the retreat center every few months for a two- or three-day silent retreat and met with Sister Eleanor for spiritual direction. This didn’t seem like a radical shift to me—talking about my spiritual life with a Catholic nun instead of a Zen teacher. I had been getting inspiration for my Buddhist practice from the Christian mystics all along, and Eleanor was happy to work with me even though I wasn’t Christian. One welcome difference from the Zen monastery was that Eleanor encouraged me to relax and get lots of rest while I was on retreat.
A big part of my struggle with my spiritual practice was that I had smashed up against the limits of my own willpower. The style of practice at the Zen monastery at that time felt willful, effortful, goal-oriented, and that was my own approach to Zen practice. I thought it was all about pushing for kensho—an enlightenment experience or “breakthrough”—but I hadn’t had any breakthroughs. Buddhism is supposed to be about liberation from suffering, but I was still miserable.
Both Zen and Christianity teach that our liberation is not something we can earn or create or achieve, but it was in the Christian tradition, through my retreats with Eleanor, that I truly started to understand what this means. I had begun to recognize the vital importance of grace. I had begun to recognize that if my liberation depended on me or anything I did, it was hopeless.
Gerald May’s Will and Spirit, a book on the psychology of contemplative spirituality, helped clarify my struggles and gave me some vocabulary for the “willingness” of true contemplative practice as opposed to the “willfulness” with which I had been practicing Zen. I had been trying to use my spiritual practice to get what I wanted, when spiritual practice is actually about being with reality as it is. I had been trying to satisfy my own will instead of opening to God’s will. No wonder my practice had been such a struggle!
With this new insight into spiritual practice, I thought that now I could get back into Zen and practice willingness instead of willfulness. But whenever I started to think about it, I would immediately get caught up in thoughts about how it would be good for me. That is, I would fall back into making my Zen practice an instrument of my will. So I decided I’d better give my Zen practice a rest for a while longer, since it seemed only to exacerbate my willfulness.
An insight I was missing at the time was that of course I would practice willingness willfully—that’s natural and inevitable—and my willfulness could be treated like any other wandering thought that arises during meditation: notice the willful thought and return my attention to the present moment. Notice, return, notice, return, notice, return—that’s what Zen practice is. It was fine if I kept noticing myself thinking, “I will be willing!” But I didn’t get that then.
I had told Eleanor, when I started doing retreats with her, that I could talk God language but had no idea what to do with Jesus. Tentatively, after many meetings, she suggested that I might want to try a little visualization: imagine that Jesus is walking toward you. What do you do? She had intended for me to go off to the chapel or someplace later in the day and try this, but I did it right when she said it. I was in a meadow in the High Sierra, and a stereotypical Jesus, with beard and flowing robe and sandals, was walking toward me on a little path. As he got closer, I ran up to him, fell down at his feet with my arms wrapped around his ankles, and, crying, said, “I’m so glad you’re here!” He would know exactly what I needed. He would be able to help me. Jesus had apparently made his way into my psyche despite my essentially secular upbringing.
Eleanor got to hear a lot about my vocational cluelessness as well as my difficulties with spiritual practice. After returning to Boulder, I had fallen into a job as an assistant teacher at a preschool affiliated with the Tibetan Buddhist there. It was stressful and exhausting work, but as Brian noticed, the two-year-olds brought out a compassionate part of me that had been largely dormant for several years while I had been preoccupied with my own pain and struggles. After a series of other miscellaneous jobs, including working at a bookstore and the public library and doing freelance proofreading for two academic publishers, I decided to give graduate school one last try. I realized that what I’d actually been interested in all along was theology, not philosophy or religious studies, and I wanted to study Christianity in depth.
In 1993, Brian and I moved to Atlanta so that I could start a master’s degree program at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology and Brian could work on some writing he’d been wanting to do with the help of an old friend and mentor who was now teaching there. For me, the master’s program functioned as Sunday school or catechism. I didn’t know whether this schooling would relate to a future career, but I knew very little about Christianity and wanted to learn. I was also sporadically attending Catholic Mass with Brian, and we were going to Tuesday-night graduate student dinners at Emory’s Catholic Center. After a while, I started thinking about whether it was time for me to make a formal commitment to Christianity.
At Easter Mass in Emory’s Cannon Chapel in 1995, I had a little religious and vocational epiphany. “Oh dear, I think I want to be a Catholic priest.”
I knew, of course, that the Catholic priesthood wasn’t likely to be a possibility for me anytime soon. I told a Catholic friend that I figured women wouldn’t be ordained in the Catholic Church in my lifetime unless aliens invaded the Vatican. She thought the issue was, rather, that the aliens needed to leave the Vatican.
Since the Catholic priesthood wasn’t an option, it seemed that the obvious thing for me to do was to consider the Episcopal priesthood. So I tried being Episcopalian. I started worshipping at an Episcopal church, attending its confirmation class, and talking with Emory’s Episcopal chaplain. Somehow it didn’t quite click.
Then I tried the Methodist Church. I was attending a United Methodist seminary, after all, and had already met many of the requirements for Methodist ordination. I felt comfortable with Methodists, and I liked the theology of Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, especially the way he juggled an uncompromising belief in salvation by God’s grace alone with an equally uncompromising insistence on the importance of Christian practices like worship, prayer, and charity. But the Methodist Church didn’t quite feel like the right place for me either.
These excursions made it even clearer that Catholicism was where I felt at home.
How I ended up with Catholic sensibilities I’m not exactly sure. Certainly, an important part of my attraction to Catholicism is my strong connection to monasticism and contemplative practice. I also like the high liturgy of Catholicism—the ritual, the “smells and bells.” My husband, my best friend from college, a guy I had a crush on in junior high and high school, my first boyfriend, and even my Zen teacher all had been raised Catholic. For some reason, I seem to be drawn to people who were formed by Catholicism. Maybe I inherited my Catholic proclivities from my Mexican grandmother, along with my brown eyes. She spent most of her life trying not to be Mexican, which included not claiming the Catholicism she was born into, but she asked for a Catholic priest when she was on her deathbed.
I finally decided that it was more important to me to be in the religious tradition that felt right rather than in the career that felt right, so I decided to go ahead and become a lay Catholic rather than an ordained Episcopalian or Methodist.
Brian noticed that I and my friends Laurie and Jennifer, who also became Catholic as adults, entered the church already disgruntled about certain things. As he says, we got baptized and five minutes later said, “Okay, I’ve had it with this!” He finds this amusing and wonders if it’s a new phenomenon in Christianity.
The process of becoming a Catholic is an extended one, and I was glad of that. I wanted some time to ease into this commitment and be sure about it.
In one of the rites leading up to baptism, during the regular Sunday Mass, the priest asks those preparing for baptism, “What do you ask of God’s church?” and our reply is “Faith.” I like that. I wouldn’t have been a good candidate for “believer’s baptism,” as practiced in some denominations. I couldn’t confidently say, “I have faith in Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, so please admit me to the church.” But I could easily and earnestly say, “I want to have faith, so please admit me to the church.” Similarly, I liked that in the Nicene Creed, recited at every Sunday Mass, we said, “We believe in one God. . . .” On the days when I seriously doubted that I believed, I could confidently say that we believed, letting the church carry me along in her arms.
But as a part of the baptismal rite, in response to the priest’s questions about whether I believed in God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, as described in the Apostles’ Creed, I would have to answer, “I do.” I was worried about this. I didn’t know whether I believed, and I didn’t want to be crossing my fingers behind my back when I said I did.
Did I believe that this mess of a world is good, as God said it is? Did I believe in a power behind creation who cares about me personally? Did I believe in the possibility of the redemption of all the sin and suffering in the world? Did I believe in the meaningfulness of life even in the face of death?
Well, no. Christian faith seemed—and still seems—kind of nuts. But I dearly, desperately longed for that faith, and it seemed to me that my only hope for peace and joy in this life lay in that sort of faith. I consulted with a Jesuit friend and another priest I know, and they assured me that my deep longing for faith would allow me to affirm my faith at my baptism in good conscience.
I was baptized and confirmed in the Emory chapel at the Easter Vigil service in 1998.
Around the same time that I decided to become Catholic, I also started to get back into my Zen practice. Along with several people from the Atlanta Soto Zen Center, Brian and I helped to start and run a Zen meditation group at Emory. And in the fall of 1997, I went back to Zen Mountain Monastery, which I hadn’t visited for five years, for a weeklong sesshin. I wanted to do some intensive practice, but it also felt like I was going home to make peace with my past, since I had been so unhappy when I lived there. It was a difficult but good sesshin, and I was pleased to find that the effortful feel of the practice there had been toned down in favor of a more grace-full feel. I wondered if it was only my perception of the place that had changed, but others confirmed that it was indeed different.
A fairly new spiritual practice for me is prayer. Having decided to formally become a Christian, I realized that although I had done intensive spiritual practice in the Zen tradition, which bears strong resemblances to certain elements of the Christian contemplative tradition, I had very little experience with the basic Christian spiritual practice of verbal prayer. I said all the communal prayers that are part of the Mass, but I had trouble praying on my own. I had a lot of inhibitions and questions about prayer. So during my last semester at Candler, I arranged an independent study with a similarly prayer-impaired friend and a professor, and we read a bunch of books on verbal prayer, some of which were a big help in getting me over my blocks to praying.
In particular, Karl Rahner, one of the great Christian theologians of the twentieth century, assured me that no matter the depth of my doubts about God and Christianity, I could still pray. “If you think your heart cannot pray,” he says, “then pray with your mouth, kneel down, fold your hands, speak loudly, even if it all seems like a lie to you (it is only the desperate self-defense of your unbelief before its death which is already sealed): ‘I believe, help my unbelief; I am powerless, blind, dead, but you are mighty, light, and life and have conquered me long ago with the deadly impotence of your Son.’” This was liberating. Although I couldn’t will my heart to have a stronger faith, I could certainly will my body to take a posture of prayer and my mouth to say some words of prayer. Rahner assured me that not only was there no hypocrisy in this, but it was vital that I express my half a mustard seed of faith in this way.
My favorite definition of prayer also comes from Rahner, who says that prayer is opening our hearts to God. In the most familiar type of prayer, verbal or discursive, we open our hearts to God using words. We talk to God, either out loud or mentally. But that’s not the only way to pray. Christianity also has a tradition of contemplative prayer, in which we open our hearts to God without words or with very few words. We heed God’s call in Psalm 46:10: “Be still, and know that I am God.”
In the 1970s, Christians began to dust off Christian contemplative practices and popularize them. One popular form of Christian contemplative prayer is centering prayer, a practice with roots in the medieval mystical tradition, especially The Cloud of Unknowing. Centering prayer is a practice of sitting silently in simple openness to God’s presence and God’s will and in the longing to know God more fully. Since the mind is prone to wander, you choose a “sacred word” to help bring you back to stillness with God—a word like God, Jesus, love, or mercy. When you become aware of thoughts, you return gently to the sacred word, a symbol of your intention to rest in openness to God. (The list of recommended resources at the end of the book includes resources on Christian contemplative practice, in case you’re interested in exploring this.)
Gerald May, whose writing on willingness and willfulness had been so helpful to me, was one of the founders of the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, an ecumenical center in Maryland supporting Christian contemplative practice. My husband, Brian, participated in Shalem’s Group Leaders Program, which provides training for the leadership of Christian contemplative prayer groups, and a few years later I participated in the same program. One of the requirements of the program was to lead a seven-session contemplative prayer group, but I got permission, instead, to lead a Zen meditation group specifically for Christians.
Another requirement of the Shalem program was to meet regularly with a spiritual director. I hadn’t had a spiritual director since Brian and I left Colorado, and this prompted me to seek one out. A few years earlier, I had done a silent weekend retreat with a group of other students from Candler School of Theology at a tiny ecumenical Christian retreat center in rural Georgia called Green Bough House of Prayer. I had met with the spiritual director there and liked her, and I decided it was worth driving three hours each way whenever I wanted to meet for spiritual direction. So I started making regular retreats at Green Bough, and Brian came along too.
After my first visit to Green Bough, I told Brian that it was like a Jesuit retreat center run by your grandma. It had that same palpable sense of being a place of silence and prayer, but it felt softer and homier. There were knickknacks and needlepoint pillows around, and meals were eaten at the kitchen table. At the time, Green Bough had two permanent residents, living a sort of monastic life—Fay, who offers spiritual direction, and Steve, an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church, who leads the services—and they had room for about ten guests. There was a regular schedule of prayer, based on the Liturgy of the Hours. Each service was centered on reciting Psalms and other prayers and also included periods of silence. Many of the meals were eaten in silence. For a couple of years, Brian and I went on a retreat at Green Bough every month or two.
Partway through my master’s program, I started working for Candler’s Youth Theology Institute (now the Youth Theological Initiative), which runs a summer theology academy for high school students, and I continued in that position after I finished my degree. I was the assistant director, which basically meant that I was the year-round office manager. I also taught a bit of Zen meditation and Christian contemplative prayer during the summer academies.
In my early thirties, restless with my administrative job, I finally figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had discovered that what I like best is teaching religion and writing about religion. So I decided to get a PhD.
My doctoral work at Emory focused on Buddhist thought, Christian theology, religion in the United States, and religious education. On the side, I was leading workshops and teaching adult Sunday school classes and continuing education classes on Zen and on Christian spiritual practices.
Brian had joined the Candler faculty, and as we were making plans for his sabbatical year, I decided to take a leave from the doctoral program for a semester so that we could spend part of the year living at Green Bough. It was after we had already made this plan that I came up with the idea of writing Zen for Christians. This worked out perfectly. I used my time off from school to do most of the work on this book, while living in a community centered in prayer and silence.
After several more years in Georgia, Brian and I spent a year in Wisconsin, where I taught in the religious studies department at Carroll University, and then we moved to New York City. I completed my dissertation, “Teaching Zen to Americans,” and I have a job I love, teaching the ninth-grade world religions class and the eleventh-grade Scripture class at Marymount School of New York, a Catholic girls’ prep school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
In the summer of 2017, on my first day of teaching an online Zen for Christians class for Candler, I was contacted about the possibility of republishing this book.
I was pleased to have the opportunity to update and revise it and to send this little book out into the world again. I hope you will find it a helpful guidebook!