Shoshaku Jushaku

My attitude shown toward the experience of others in matters psychological, sociological, spiritual was often dismissive, as if I couldn't be bored with all that. In sharings with Compaňeros, a group of former Jesuits, I wrote about the Jesuit years, 1949-1957 and the current ones, 2002-2008. Almost nothing for the in-between years, 1957-2001, the bulk of the experiences of my life as a husband, father, working man, pilgrim.

Truth is I was always trying to figure things out, myself included, via methods psychological, sociological, spiritual, religious. It began in 1949 in a Jesuit novitiate, when Father Master gave us the four types: Choleric, Sanguine, Melancholic, Phlegmatic. I was Sanguine, often Melancholic, terribly Phlegmatic, and Choleric only when I blew up, on occasion. As to which one was basic, or me, flip a coin.

That stuff went dormant until I was 44, brand new in a recovery program, and waking up, "My God! I am alive!" Ignoring the stories of old-timers, I felt it necessary to launch out on "self-discovery."

It was the spring of 1973. I began in my own little medical library, a tool not for learning medicine, but to pick up the buzz words so as to sound intelligent when examining a medical professional in depositions or a courtroom.  I read Merck's Manual, Sec. 12. "Psychiatric Disorders, " pp. 1531-1644  – alcoholism was filed in that section – and when I finished, my self-diagnosis was that I had them all: personality and mood and schizophrenic and delusional disorders, plus the neuroses and drug dependence. I was shook. [Don't cheer if they call you "A Quick Study." Quick students flunk with professionals.] 

That's when Fr. Joe Desmond, chaplain at UNH, gave me the tapes of Thomas Merton's lectures to novices, and off I went to collect Merton's writings and find myself.  Heard of Freud, but BC professors in the 1940s had dissed him. Found Carl Jung and became a Jungian. For a while, that is, until a new psychologist caught my attention.

The library grew. The favorite section in bookstores was Self-Help.  I tried a lot of them: TM, Rolf, Yoga, MBTI, Enneagrams, Weekend Retreat Seminars at Kripalu – new owner of Shadowbrook, the novitiate of my youth! -- One-on-ones, Two-on-twos, Proprioceptive Writing, Sharing sessions weekly, Private counseling (expensive) Reiki, and most of the others, the fads of those times. Even tried acupuncture for a series of treatments to find me somewhere inside me. Didn't feel a pinprick and wondered what that one might be all about. 

Never told the old-timers what I was doing outside the meetings, and never told the groupies I was in recovery. It's all anonymous, you see, and I was beginning to conclude that I, too, was anonymous. No me, at all.  Zen can get tricky, you know. "When I go to work on my own mind with my own mind, how can I avoid immense confusion?" A very favorite Chinese saying I memorized in the searching years.

In the mid 1980s, Jean began her MA studies in Counseling, got friendly with her leading teacher, and we both joined the groupy sessions in her home. She was into A Course in Miracles. Yup! Off I went, again, for a couple of years.

During this period, I was practicing zazen -- za means sitting; zen means meditation. Zen practice had been the sole grasp on whatever reality was left in me. It began in a way at Sophia University, Tokyo, where I taught from 1954 to 1957, became mine in the 1970s, and has lasted to this day.

Somehow, in the late 1980s, while sitting zazen, I took a deep breath. Quietly, I reviewed all the psychological and sociological adventures I'd been through since 1973, counted the books on the shelves – enormous --  picked up The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, and putting all the other stuff off to one side, went back into my eight years as a Jesuit scholastic, where Church was 24/7, and no matter where I went, was in a community. 

The fierce and furious searching slowed down, slumbered into a long sleep. Still there, murmuring from time to time, but more like distant memories than present urges. I didn't know it then, but I was heading home. Gave the library away to friends and to Jean's classmates.

It was at this crucial crossroads in 1989 that Wade, the leader of the Bear Tree Zen Group asked me to join the Zendo. We sat during the week and on Sundays, from 9:00 am to 1:00 pm, in a newly built Zen hall in the woods in Hopkinton, NH. No heat, but a wood-burning potbellied stove. No water, but an outhouse. A long, narrow hall, with cushions lined up in such a way that we sat, facing the wall.

Wade was not a Roshi, but was a Zen priest, and had been trained by Maureen Stuart Roshi – author: Subtle Sound -- in Cambridge, MA. He knew much, but had no authority to teach, nor could we sit with him in dokusan – private session of pupil and Roshi. But, we did learn the protocols and the mechanics of sitting and walking meditation. And I was doing it in a group. For the next eight years, until we left New Hampshire in 1997. There is no doubt inside me today of how immense is my debt and how deep is my gratitude to that Zendo.

Zazen suggested that I abandon self-help and get professional help. I did, but, as with counselors and old-timers before, many sessions wound up with my counseling the psychiatrist, at his request. He wanted to learn about the natural law, as philosophers saw it. I gave him my copy of Rommen, The Natural Law, and shared my teaching of it to the Japanese Supreme Court Justices in the 1950s.

Didn't realize until later that it was his technique to uncover what was deeper down than the surface of me. I said, "I am shallow."He said, "Not so, not so." He saw two beneath the surface of me and said so: Jesuit and the law. At discharge he gave me the diagnosis I could not see. "Get out of trial practice as the law. You're a poet in a butcher's shop."  So, I did.

We closed down, packed up and left New Hampshire in 1997, for Colorado and the eleven years of our Great Adventure discovering The West. All the spiritualish, psycho-, socio-, stuff ceased. Zen practice stayed. We went to Church on Sundays. Over those years, my work took me to Lake Tahoe and San Diego in California, Dover in New Hampshire, just south of our family home on the Atlantic Ocean at Pine Point, Maine. There were 17 fascinating transcontinental trips in our RAV-4, with two miniature Dachshunds, travelers with the composure to insist on built-up beds so they, too, could see out the windows and marvel at America.

In 2002, the sex abuse crisis gave me a third thing to do with me: Jesuit and lawyer, retired from both,. There was a profound and startling desire to do something for the community of Church, or at least see it as it is and as it could be. Robert Blair Kaiser found me and invited me to join Compaňeros and to write on religion and the rule of law in his cyberjournal Just Good Company. That's how some of my work appeared in Corpus Reports and Mirabile Dictu, as well. I'm still here. For life, I hope.

Were I to diagnose myself today, it would probably be: He is a hodge podge of this and that, frenetic for a while, calmer now, writes more volubly than when he was a talker, sort of choleric, sanguine, melancholic and phlegmatic, and he sits and counts his breaths.

My apologies then, to those who favor self-help -- I did get into MBTI a lot -- and the Traditionalists -- I do cherish our traditions – and to  the others so immersed in what I was pursuing for those twenty years, 1970s to 1990s. My thanks to Compaňeros for being the community I did not have, for sharing with me the way out of solipsism. Deep thanks for the training and the people in the first two sections of life: Jesuit and the law; and for the chance to have a third. Amazing thanks to Merton, Berrigan, Johnston, Barry for opening up the glory of my traditions, for helping me cherish the instinct to keep them alive in me, and for inviting me to explore the wisdom of the Orient, as they have. The Church is more, far more, than merely Roman.   

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi wrote in Zen Mind Beginner's Mind,

"Dogen-zenji said, 'Shoshaku jushaku.'
Shaku generally means 'mistake' or 'wrong.' Shoshaku jushaku means 'to succeed wrong with wrong,' or one continuous mistake. According to Dogen, one continuous mistake can also be "Zen. A Zen master's life could be said to be so many years of shoshaku jushaku.  This means so many years of one single-minded effort."

Community is the single most important part of all of the above. Be it Church, Jesuit, Compaňeros, Corpus, two or more gathered in his name, or a group. Going it alone is not only lonely, it is dangerous.

I brushed solipsism and was terrified. I'm home now.

Shoshaku, jushaku.