Too Much Thinking

Call It Grace: Finding Meaning in a Fractured World by Serene Jones.  Viking.  310 pp. ***1/2

Four Men Shaking: Searching for Sanity with Samuel Beckett, Norman Mailer, and My Perfect Zen Teacher by Lawrence Shainberg.  Shambhala.  134 pp. $16.95.  ****1/2

“To stop your mind does not mean to stop the activities of mind. It means your mind pervades your whole body.”

—Shunryu Suzuki

The first thing that strikes you about Serene Jones graceful memoir is its bold and unflinching honesty.  She is President of the Union Theological Seminary, and the daughter of a minister who has fought all his life for civil rights and the rights of all people, but she lets us know early on that her grandfather—that wonderful father’s father—was an overt racist and was also sexually abusive to the young women in the family.  Her mother, though she was a striking beauty and nominally a Christian, was a self-centered woman who resented her children and treated them badly all their lives.  The tirade against her daughter that this woman goes on in her early seventies, when Serene was assuming her post as President of Union, was almost unbelievable in its pettiness and viciousness.  She seemed not to have learned a thing in her seventy years of life.

Jones begins winningly with a Forward that announces her six core beliefs, and even to me, a man with a Christian background who now practices Zen, they sound accurate and true to experience.[1]  She organizes her book according to what she calls stations of the cross, by which she means key moments that taught her something important, and she tells the story of the early stations succinctly and gracefully.  This isn’t the kind of memoir that blathers on with a lot of detail.  She talks at some length about the theology of John Calvin, who is apparently central to the thinking of her denomination, the Disciples of Christ, and almost (but not quite) convinces me I should look into his work (she admits that others have a different take on Calvin).[2]  And her foray into liberation theology, when she travels to India and becomes very seriously ill with dysentery, is not only an admirable (if perhaps slightly foolish) venture, but she relates her experience to that of the mystic Teresa of Avila, who described four stages of prayer, and in that country where she was surrounded by Hindus and mystics of various kinds, she has what seems very much like an experience of No Self.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that she nearly died.[3]

I have to say that I found these early chapters thrilling, and I haven’t really covered all their richness, what she calls the prairie theology of Oklahoma, reflected perhaps most notably in her grandmother, her gradual education through other famous thinkers, like Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Howard Thurman, and her father’s bravery in the face of racism and bigotry.  But the book bogged down in the middle, when she got into more traditional Christian concerns (in the second half of the book, the stations are such things as forgiveness, justice, mercy, love), especially the long chapter about forgiveness.  In that chapter—surprisingly, after all she’d been through and understood—she seemed to be trying to measure up to some standard of behavior instead of examining what was happening.  It was hard enough to try to forgive her husband after their divorce, but she got terribly bogged down with the idea that she should be able to forgive Timothy McVeigh.  Talk about impossible tasks.

I happened, right about the time I was reading that chapter of the book, to read a teaching on forgiveness by the Buddhist teacher Susan Piver.  It’s well worth a listen, but the gist of it is: feel what you feel when you’re feeling it.  If you’re feeling anger (toward Timothy McVeigh), just feel that.  Don’t stifle it.  Don’t try to measure up to an ideal.  As a friend once said to me (about a much more trivial situation): when you understand why the person did what they did, you’ll automatically forgive them.  Until you do understand it, you can’t forgive them.  It may be that we’ll never understand Timothy McVeigh, but so it goes.  We’ll leave that to the saints.

Jones does have a chapter on Breath, when she gives a harrowing account of her battle with cancer, but even there I felt she was overintellectualizing, quoting a Western philosopher named Luce Irigaray, who somehow manages to turn that physiological function into something to think about (when any meditator will tell you just to feel it.  It’s a miracle!).  Jones largely recovers in her final two chapters, when she gets back to the difficulties of her parents.  The closer she stays to her experience as it actually is, the better her writing.

Lawrence Shainberg is an old hand at memoir.  His 1995 book Ambivalent Zen was not only one of the most entertaining books ever about Zen practice, it also moved through a number of the most famous figures in 20^th century Zen, including Eido Roshi, Soen Roshi, and Bernie Glassman.  But the star of that book—and of this book too, despite the famous cast of characters—is his own unforgettable but rather obscure teacher, Kyudo Nakagawa, a disciple of Soen who first ran a zendo in Israel for thirteen years (when he got the assignment he had never heard of the country; Soen just sent him because his English was the best of any of the Japanese monks), then New York for ten years, before he returned to Japan, somewhat to his regret, to take over Soen’s old temple.  He continued to come back to New York once a year, for a month, when the temple in Japan was closed.  This book largely focuses on his final visit, before his sudden death in 2007.  He had seemed in perfectly good health on his visit to New York.  He was found dead a few months later.

The supporting cast is this book is quite distinguished, two of the most famous writers of the twentieth century, Samuel Beckett and Norman Mailer.  Shainberg met Mailer when he asked him for a blurb for Ambivalent Zen (and got one; I must say, that that name seemed incongruous on a book about Zen or any other religion, but any writer would kill for a blurb by Mailer[4]), and then they became casual companions, meeting regularly for dinner.  He had had his publisher send Beckett all of his work, because Beckett was the writer he most admired, and somewhat to his surprise Beckett sent him a letter after a nonfiction book called Brain Surgeon.  These two men met on various occasions as well.

Both writers are charming and fascinating, if past their prime.  Mailer, who was famously pugilistic, once head-butting a writer on a television show and famously stabbing his second wife in the neck, is reduced at this point to challenging Shainberg to episodes of thumb wrestling to see who pays for dinner (Shainberg actually beats him on one occasion.  In his younger days Mailer would have head-butted him silly).  He has a certain fascination with Zen while not ever really understanding it.

Beckett, on the other hand, scorns the idea that his work has anything to do with Zen or any other spiritual tradition, but he seems to write from the place of impermanence and emptiness that Zen is all about.  (Actually, all writers write from that place, but Beckett really faced it.)  Shainberg speaks of the key moment in Beckett’s career, when he came home at the age of 39 and found his mother suffering from Parkinson’s, wearing a masklike face that he didn’t recognize, and he had a deep experience of impermanence.  From then on that was his subject, especially in the three novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable.  His most famous and perhaps his greatest work, Waiting for Godot, followed those novels almost like an afterthought.  By the time Shainberg met Beckett he felt his inspiration had dried up, that he wasn’t doing good work anymore, but he felt that way for much of his life.  Most writers are morose about their work, but Beckett took morose to a new level.  He was nevertheless a friendly and winning companion, and comes forth that way in these pages.

I still think the hero of the book, the man who had actually solved the questions of existence that these men battled with, was Kyudo Nakagawa, who didn’t ponder the mystery of life but lived it.  He was the first one in the zendo every morning and evening for zazen, the activity which faces the mystery of life head on, without trying to escape it.  And one of the reasons he was grateful to be back in New York was that he had returned to this small obscure zendo, where twelve people were a big crowd, and where he could spend his spare time vacuuming and cleaning the place (one of my favorite moments in Ambivalent Zen was when Shainberg asked him his plans for the weekend.  “I wash underwear this weekend,” his teacher replied).

Beckett and Mailer were great writers, of course; Beckett may have been the greatest of his day (my revered French professor Wallace Fowlie once said to me, “I think he’s the writer from our time who will survive”).  But Kyuodo Roshi was in rare form on this last visit to New York, and as sheer advice on how to live, you can’t improve on the first talk he gave.

“I hope everyone appreciate this life!  I was born human being, thank you very much.  My parents, thank you very much.  Much appreciate parents.  Without them, you never born human being!  Must gratitude your life!  You sincere, whole world helping your life.  But first must believe yourself.  If you can’t believe yourself, you can’t believe Buddha.  Can’t believe God.  Pain come, thank you very much!  Maybe you think I’m talking joke.  No, I only talk my own experience.  I expect pain because pain become good zazen . . . You think pain no good.  I think pain is good for me.  I have friend paralyze, how you call it, stroke, cannot walk straight, half his body dead, cannot walk straight.  But you—you still have both legs!  You happy!  Healthy! If you become everything is good, you enjoy your life.  Endless!  Permanent!  Even under cemetery, some work bite your bone, you have great, endless, your life become happy.  Please don’t waste your wonderful life . . . Understand?  OK?  Good night!”

Lawrence Shainberg has been a dedicated practitioner of Zen since the seventies, and is a superb writer of memoir, mixing events from different time periods in a skillful and often surprising way, but he somehow has a different take on zazen than I do (zazen is so massive an activity that it can accommodate all kinds of views).  He sees it as an activity of the mind, specifically of the brain, whereas I’ve always seen it as a body practice, ignoring the machinations of the mind (which seem, the longer I practice, more and more repetitive and idiotic).  The deep intelligence of the universe is in every cell of our bodies, not just our brains.

He has always found his study as a Zen student and his vocation as a writer to be at odds, whereas I think zazen and writing are more or less the same thing, except that in writing you do call up the contents of the mind, even while realizing they’re all emptiness.  Shainberg talks constantly in this book about the brain’s confrontation with emptiness, and at the end, when he has an experience of extreme shaking during zazen, feels he suddenly understands something in a new way.  I—who have that experience of extreme shaking almost every time I do sesshin—was a little lost by his explanation.  I feel shaking is just the way the body throws off tension and relaxes, while Shainberg seemed to think he’d come to some ultimate realization.  But though I found the ending a puzzle, the book as a whole is a small gem.  I only wish it were a couple hundred pages longer.

[1] 1. God is mystery. 2. This infinite mystery is our creator, sustainer, and ultimately our consummator. 3. Jesus stands as the truest and most vivid and profound manifestation of that life force. 4. God does not stay at a distance from us but constantly seeks to transform our lives by asking us to awaken to the divine presence. 5. When you catch glimpses of this truth, you become painfully aware of how asleep you’ve been and how most of us spend our lives acting as if that brilliant love of God does not exist. 6. The transformations that happen to you when you wake up to grace from sin are overwhelming and real.

[2] I was raised in the Presbyterian church, which was supposedly a Calvinist institution.  But in all my years in that church, through much of my twenties, I can hardly remember anyone mentioning Calvin, and no one ever suggested I read him.

[3] Teresa of Avila’s four stages could, with a few changes in vocabulary, easily be the words of a Buddhist.  The first is meditation, working to discipline your mind to stay focused.  The second is “quiet prayer,” learning what it is to be still and let God come to you.  In the third you allow the water of God’s love to flow into you.  The fourth is beyond feeling and knowledge.  In a state of “rapturous unknowing,” you become one with the Divine.

[4] Shainberg seems to have great luck with blurbs.  There is one on this book from Jonathan Lethem, about as startling as Mailer’s on Ambivalent Zen.