Thanks especially to my husband, Brian Mahan—my primary conversation partner about Zen, Christianity, theology, spiritual formation, religious education, and writing—whose influence permeates the content, structure, and style of this book. In particular, I am indebted to Brian for my understanding of the centrality in spiritual practice of attending to what inhibits us from living with wisdom and compassion.
Thanks to Gerald May, who shaped my whole way of understanding contemplative practice, both Buddhist and Christian. Thanks to Laurie Watel and Jennifer Watts for our conversations about religion, theology, and spiritual practice and for sharing my excitement about this project. And thanks to Anne Mushin Kaufhold for joining me for a spring-break visit to Zen Mountain Monastery in 1987.
For publishing this second edition of Zen for Christians, I am grateful to Jennifer Feldman and Nora Rawn at Dover. For excellent editing of the first edition, I am grateful to Sheryl Fullerton at Jossey-Bass. For reading the manuscript and offering helpful feedback, I am grateful to Tom Frank, E. Brooks Holifield, Wynne Maggi, Brian Mahan, Steve Tipton, Bonnie Myotai Treace, and Laurie Watel. Thanks to Luke Timothy Johnson, Eric Reinders, and Neal Walls for looking over particular sections of the manuscript. Thanks to Stephanie Castillo Samoy, Bruce Emmer, and Fred Helenius for copyediting and proofreading. Thanks to Roberta Bondi, Rose Mary Dougherty, Jim Fowler, Susan Henry-Crowe, Rose Annette Liddell, John Daido Loori, Janet Jinne Richardson, Judith Simmer-Brown, and Steve Tipton for writing blurbs for the book. Thanks to Tom Beaudoin for help with the publishing game, and thanks to my dad and stepmom, Noel and Robin Boykin, and my mom, Karin Paris, for the computer and printer. And thanks to everyone at Dover and Jossey-Bass who worked on the book.
Thanks to Jan Thomas, Derek Owens, Jennifer Watts, and my dad for email conversations that led to drafts of sections of the book, and to the scholars and staff of the Youth Theology Institute for all the great theological conversations by email. Thanks to Jim Fowler for many kinds of support and to Michael Warren for encouragement at the beginning of this project. I am grateful for Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and V. A. Howard and J. H. Barton’s Thinking on Paper; I don’t think I would have been able to write a book without their help.
For getting me started leading Zen meditation groups for Christians, I am grateful to the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation. For opportunities to lead Zen groups and for their encouragement, I am grateful to Mary-Elizabeth Ellard, Budd Friend-Jones, and Helen Neinast. For other teaching opportunities, I am grateful to J.C. Aevaliotis, Carolyn Barker, John Barnes, Eugene Bianchi, Catherine Bova, Carlos Castaneda-Orlandi, Elizabeth Bounds, Steve Bullington, Tom Curtis, Taiun Michael Elliston, Jim Farwell, Jerry Kane, Millie Kim, Fay Key, Mari Kim-Shinn, Aaron Klink, Victor Kramer, Beth Luton, Alison Mallard, Ellen Mintzmyer, Amy Murphy, Don Richter, Fred Rossini, Sue Sherwood, Melissa Snarr, Jonathan Strom, Dennis Teall-Fleming, Steve Tipton, Terry Walker, Mark Monk Winstanley, Swami Yogeshananda, the Evening at Emory program, and Marymount School of New York. And I am grateful to all the wonderful participants in my meditation groups and classes—most recently, my students and colleagues at Marymount and my online “Zen for Christians” class at Candler School of Theology in the summer of 2017.
My understanding of how to practice meditation and how to teach meditation to beginners has been shaped by many teachers, in person and through their writing, but especially by John Daido Loori, Bonnie Myotai Treace, and the other monastics at Zen Mountain Monastery; by Philip Kapleau’s The Three Pillars of Zen, especially the teachings of Hakuun Yasutani; by Charlotte Joko Beck’s Everyday Zen; by the writings of Chögyam Trungpa; and by the meditation instructors of Naropa University and Shambhala Training. I am grateful also to Sister Eleanor Sheehan, Fay Key, and Gerald May for spiritual guidance and to Roberta Bondi, Bill Mallard, and Helen Blier for Christian catechism.
And finally, special thanks to Fay Key, Steve Bullington, and Oliver Ferrari of Green Bough House of Prayer, where I did most of the work on this book, for creating a place of prayer and silence and for their love and friendship.