In Search of the Buddha

I'm fortunate to live in Seattle, a coastal city with strong ties to the Far East. Seattle has a large East Asian population, and with that population comes its cultural traditions -- including strands of Buddhism that most people never talk about in the West.

Americans -- and, to be blunt about it, mostly white, urban, liberal, middle-class Americans -- have embraced the meditative practices of Buddhism while holding some of the Buddhist teachings and Eastern cultural trappings at bay. The result has been a sort of agnostic Buddhism -- what author Stephen Batchelor calls "Buddhism Without Beliefs" -- that approaches the tradition more as a psychology, a self-help program, or a secular philosophy of life.

That's all well and good, and surely the Buddha would not begrudge those who found his teachings useful, even if they didn't adopt the teachings in their totality. But a practice that has silent meditation at its core has never held much appeal to me. As Rodney Smith's class at the start of January showed me, I enjoy hearing dharma talks as much as I enjoy the refreshing silence of meditation, if not more.

With that in mind, I set out this year to sample as many different "styles" of Buddhism as would fit around my schedule. Some of them were still meditation-focused, but others either downplayed meditation or approached it from a different perspective. Those that downplayed meditation tended to be those that remain heavily weighted toward East Asian culture. And that wasn't really a surprise to me, because Asian Buddhists don't put as much emphasis on meditation as Western Buddhists do. Whereas often meditation is the most important, or even only, practice Westerners focus on, many Eastern Buddhists meditate very little or not at all. That's something the monks do, but not so much the lay people.

So with that in mind, these are the groups I visited, along with my impressions of each.

Seattle Insight Meditation Society
This, of course, is where I started the year. Rodney Smith's group is one of several Insight Meditation organizations across the country. I used to occasionally attend the D.C.-area group headed by Tara Brach, so I wasn't unfamiliar with the Seattle group's approach to Buddhism. Essentially, it's a very secular-oriented group that focuses on vipassana, or insight, meditation based on the Theravada school of Buddhism. Theravada is the oldest existing line of Buddhism, and in the places where it's practiced in the East, it tends to be a heavily monastic tradition. Western teachers have taken the meditation practices out of the forest monasteries in Southeast Asia and offered them as a practice for lay people in the West to benefit from. The meditations are usually followed by dharma talks, which tend to take Buddhist principles and apply them to the ordinary modern world. The Insight Meditation groups also usually offer extended meditation retreats.

I like what Insight Meditation has done to bring some of the Theravada traditions to light in the West. I admit to some bias toward Theravada Buddhism, as I've found many of the teachings to offer the most direct glimpses into the actual words of the Buddha and his original core teachings. I also appreciate its emphasis on cultivating one's own mind. The Theravada tradition is sometimes criticized for being selfish in its approach to the dharma, but the way I see it, you have to work on yourself before you can hope to help others in a constructive way. The Theravadins would be the ones to say, when the plane is going down, that you need to secure your own oxygen mask before helping anyone else. As someone who needs some serious work on himself, I totally get it.

Overall, I like the Insight Meditation group. I enjoyed Rodney Smith's talk, just as I used to enjoy Tara Brach's talks. I think the Buddhism is at risk of getting lost at times, but then the point of Buddhism isn't to be a Buddhist, but to benefit from the teachings. So maybe that's not such a terrible thing, even though, as with many modern Western Buddhist traditions, there comes a point where everything starts to feel more like a secular self-help group -- in which case, should the practice even be called Buddhist at all? Why not just call it a secular self-help group to begin with?

Shambhala Meditation Center of Seattle
Shambhala Buddhism is rooted in the Tibetan tradition. I started my Buddhist studies with Tibetan Buddhism, which, like the Catholicism of my upbringing, is rich in pageantry, ritual, ceremony, and a pantheon of saints -- or, in this case, bodhisattvas, including Avalokiteshvara, or Kwan-yin, the bodhishattva of compassion. Kwan-yin has long been an important figure in my Buddhist path. The Dalai Lama is, of course, a Tibetan Buddhist, and I still love listening to the elaborate and often haunting meditative chants of the Tibetan monks. 

The Shambhala tradition, though rooted in Tibetan Buddhism, is open to people of all spiritual persuasions and uses Buddhist tools to influence the secular world. It embraces a meditation practice whose focus is to cultivate mindfulness, and its emphasis is on helping people break through the limitations of their ego, to embrace their inner goodness -- what Buddhists like to call one's Buddha-nature -- so as to approach the modern world with a combination of fearlessness and deep compassion for all beings, the ultimate goal being to create an enlightened society through secular means.

That mission statement was on full display in the meeting I attended. A guest speaker named Dan (I forget his last name) talked about his own training and experience, and his calm, happy, gentle demeanor left a lasting influence on me. I was fresh off Rodney Smith's invigorating talk when Dan spoke to some simple truths about Buddhism I already knew but that I hadn't encountered in a long time, and they helped bring back into focus that maybe this was the path I really belong on.

The first thing he said that has stuck with me was, in essence, that our suffering ends the day we move past the conceit of the separation between self and other. When we see ourselves in others, whom can we harm?

The second thing he said was to always bear in mind, in our dealings with others, that each and every one of us has a kernel of goodness within us -- and without missing a beat, he added, "Adolf Hitler." We all like having villains, and we all have a tendency to want to judge others, in the process setting ourselves above and apart from them -- which goes back to Dan's first point about the lack of separation between all of us. So how do we find pity, or even love, for unpleasant people? That's the challenge, isn't it? Dan pointed out that those who are unpleasant are already living in their own hell. When you look at it from that perspective, and bearing in mind our interconnectedness, it becomes easier to want to find pity for the unpleasant people of the world.

That's how Dan approached George W. Bush, using an anecdote about a speech Bush gave at a military base in which Bush was so tongue-tied that he couldn't complete a coherent sentence, and he was gently pulled off the stage. Forgetting our potential dislike for the former president, how would we feel in that position? I know I'd feel embarrassed. Seeing ourselves in that same spotlight, we can find a place within ourselves to have pity. But lest things get too serious, when someone earnestly asked, "Can we still laugh at them?" Dan, again, not missing a beat, said, "Sure. They laugh at us." So we have permission to laugh at Donald Trump, even if, in the end, we're only laughing at ourselves.

The last thing Dan said that remained with me was when he was answering a question about how people in other religions deal with the idea of God, and how that translates to the non-theistic tradition of Buddhism. When the questioner said a Muslim friend of his described his experience of "surrendering" to God, Dan said that in Buddhism, you surrender your ego -- and that when people stop surrendering to something external of themselves, that's when they become Buddhists. Plain and simple, but it sure did drive the point home.

Ultimately, I don't find much difference between the Shambhala group and the Insight Meditation group. The groups are rooted in different Buddhist traditions, but their practices and approaches are very much the same. I think the Shambhala group embraces its Buddhism a little more fully, but the silent meditations and dharma talks were very similar.

The Shambhala people were overall very friendly, too. I got a warm welcome when I walked in the door, and a feeling of calmness and kindness prevailed throughout the evening. It was a much smaller group than the Insight Meditation gathering -- maybe 20 people at the most, compared with probably 200 at Rodney Smith's talk.

I've never been enamored with the Shambhala group's founder, Chogyam Trungpa. Some called his spiritual approach "crazy wisdom," but that term has always felt to me to be something of a cover for his unethical behavior, including substance abuse and his sexual exploits with numerous women. His actions to me seemed highly unbecoming for a monk. But to Shambhala's credit, Trungpa's foibles don't seem to have affected the teachings that have carried on after his death.

Seattle Buddhist Center
The Seattle Buddhist Center is part of an international group called the Triratna Buddhist Community. Formerly called Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, the group was founded by an English-born monk who wanted to combine the core teachings of Buddhism from all of its lineages and present them in a Western context. The ecumenical approach sets it apart from the Theravada-based Insight Meditation Society or the Tibetan-based Shambhala Meditation Center, and placing the teachings in the context of Western culture and art reinterprets Buddhist traditions rather than abandoning them, as some other meditation-focused groups seem to have done.

It's a novel approach, but at the one meeting I went to, there seemed to be a lot of meta-discourse about what goals the group wanted to achieve in the larger community. There was a silent meditation, but the rest of the meeting consisted of drinking tea and chatting around a table. It was very informal, which in itself was fine, but there wasn't any kind of real dharma talk from which I could draw lessons or inspiration to send me on my way. I also have to admit that, as pleasant as the small group was, it felt cliquish. I felt invisible for long stretches as the others around me, clearly familiar with each other, engaged in casual chat with each other. One fellow sitting next to me talked to me for a bit, but that was the extent of my interaction. I felt out of place.

Kadampa Meditation Center
Kadampa Buddhism, without getting too much into specifics, is a breakaway tradition with its roots in Tibetan Buddhism. Seattle's Kadampa center is in what appears to be an old church building, which makes for quite the impression when you go upstairs to the meditation room. There you're greeted by a gigantic golden 8-foot Buddha, situated in front of a large stained-glass window that encircles the statue's head like a halo.

The center offers many meditation classes, programs, and dharma talks throughout the week. Downstairs is a bookstore and gift shop with many great spiritual resources to choose from. I went for a Thursday night meditation and dharma talk, and although I enjoyed myself well enough, I didn't take away anything strongly enough to make me want to go back -- especially since you have to stop at a register and pay before you can even go up to the meditation room. All temples rely on donations, and most put a donation box in a conspicuous place, but none that I'd been to before actually required payment up front before you could even participate. I have to admit, that kind of rubbed me the wrong way.

Sakya Monastery of Tibetan Buddhism
Where some other Seattle-based Buddhist groups based their teachings on the Tibetan tradition, Sakya Monastery really is genuine Tibetan Buddhism, complete with a lama and teachers who either hail from Tibet or can trace their lineage there. Although I was taken in by the ornate look of the temple and I still appreciate the depth and breadth of the Tibetan teachings, the service I took part in -- a meditation on Chenrezi, or Kwan-yin -- felt distant somehow. It was all very elaborate and structured, and we were told how to place our books to follow along, how to greet and address the teacher, and so on -- and maybe that was part of the problem for me. It almost felt as if the importance of carrying out the ritual itself, and making sure it was all done in a proper manner, was more important than gaining any spiritual insight from the service.

I say that as someone whose Buddhist path began with Tibetan Buddhism. I still have the deepest respect for the Dalai Lama and the teachings themselves. And, granted, I went to only one service -- perhaps I would have warmed up to it over time. But much like with the Kadampa center, I felt no compelling urge to go back once I'd visited. I have to admit that there was also something about the veneration given to the teacher that seemed somehow a bit too reverent. I bristle against hierarchy in the first place, so to have a teacher perched over us in an elevated seat, and to have to do things like not get up from your seat at the end of the service until the teacher has left his seat, crossed the room, and exited just seemed to be laying on the reverence a bit too thick.

Atammayatarama Buddhist Monastery       
Going to this monastery transported me back to when I first began reading about Theravada Buddhism and immersing myself in the Pali canon. The Seattle Insight Meditation Society based its teachings on the Theravada school, but this was the real deal -- a monastery tucked away on several wooded acres outside Woodinville, north of Seattle.

The temple itself is beautiful, including a massive meditation hall where weekly meditation services were open to the public. The monastery is home to five monks -- four Thai, and one American -- and I arrived one rainy night with no one to be found for that evening's scheduled service.

Soon two other women showed up, and we were all about to leave when the temple's caretaker noticed us and came in to say hello. He explained that the abbot was away and unable to give the service that night. But he did give us a tour of the temple, told us of its history, and led us in a short session of silent and chanted meditation.

I meant to go back after the abbot returned, but I never made the time to do it. One of these days I'll probably head out that way to check it out again.

Seattle Buddhist Church
That really is what it calls itself -- a Buddhist church. As I would learn, there's a historical significance to that designation.

Going to Seattle Buddhist Church marked my first experience with both a Japanese-majority temple and the Pure Land tradition. Pure Land is one of the most widely practiced sects of Buddhism in East Asia, yet most Westerners don't know much about it. Most of our flavors of Buddhism in the West either emphasize meditation or have been distilled down to a practice of meditation and philosophical talk. But Pure Land retains its Eastern approach to Buddhism, which is actually quite religious -- to an extent that would probably surprise many Westerners who think of Buddhism as purely rational and philosophical. In fact, the Pure Land service itself is nearly indistinguishable from a Protestant church service, complete with hymns and a sermon. Everyone sits in a pew, and no one meditates.

The central figure in Pure Land Buddhism is not the historical Buddha, but rather another buddha called Amithaba -- or Amida in Japanese. This buddha was said to have established a heavenly pure land, and the only thing practitioners must do is call his name with sincerity, reciting the mantra Namu Amida Butsu. If they do, they'll be reborn into his pure land after this life, where they can work unimpeded toward enlightenment.

In a sense, then, Pure Land Buddhism is for those who follow Buddhism but don't believe they'll find enlightenment in this lifetime. They may try to live by the precepts and the Eightfold Path, but ultimately they put their faith in Amida to help them sort it all out.

This is an idea Pure Land Buddhists are quite serious about. They emphasize the importance of "other-power" over "self-power" -- since most of us are helpless to be lamps unto ourselves and work out our salvation with diligence, as the historical Buddha called on us to do, we put our faith in Amida's power to help us do what we can't. If this sounds to you like the salvation teachings of Christianity, you would not be mistaken.

Pure Land took hold among the poor and rural folks of East Asia, along with others who for various reasons could not devote themselves to deeper Buddhist practice. Some critics refer to Pure Land as a sort of "stop-trying Buddhism," where people give up and hand over all their troubles to Amida. But it can also be understood more metaphorically -- if "self-power" is our ego, then "other-power" is our realization that we won't find enlightenment until we let go of the illusion of self and give ourselves over to the teachings of the Buddha.

That was an interpretation that worked fairly well for me, and I spent quite a bit of time researching Pure Land, thinking this might be the place where I become a member. I sought out Pure Land teachers. I read books. When I went to the temple, a woman who greeted me at the door was extremely friendly and wanted to get all the information she could from me. To my surprise, at the end of the service, she called out my name, along with the name of one other visitor, and both of us were asked to stand. The congregation -- and it was a large one of probably 200 people -- all applauded us.

I attended one other Japanese Pure Land temple in the area -- the White River Buddhist Temple in Auburn -- and I visited a Taiwanese temple in Renton, the town I live in. I thought having a temple so close to home would be nice, but as it turned out, although their services were open to the public, they were all carried out in Chinese. In fact, on the day I visited, a caretaker had to translate between me and the Chinese-speaking priest. So that wouldn't have worked out too well. 

So why is Seattle's Pure Land group called a church and not a temple? In the World War II era, Japanese-American Buddhists went out of their way to try to assimilate into American culture -- and among the steps they took was to Westernize their temples and religious practices.

Seattle has a fairly large Japanese-American population, and as I continued to attend some different temples, I got the sense that some of the older generations treated their temples as a cultural center as much as a place or worship. That sense was confirmed to me upon talking to a few American converts. They'd managed to fit in, but they acknowledged that doing to wasn't always easy.

That made me a little hesitant to deepen my involvement with the Pure Land temple. So before I committed to giving it a try, I decided to test out a few other temples in the area first.

Seattle Choeizan Enjyoji Nichiren Buddhist Temple
Nichiren Buddhists are sometimes called the "noisy Buddhists," and for good reason. They do a lot of chanting, and they use a lot of drums and bells during their service. As someone who struggles with silent meditation, I thought the Nichiren service might be a good one for me to try.

At first I tried to get some information on the Seattle Nichiren Buddhist Church. I noticed that their website hadn't been updated since 2011. I sent an e-mail, and it bounced back to me. So I took a drive past the temple, only to find it closed off with a chain-link fence.

Doing some more research, I found that the priest mentioned on the website was now leading a new Nichiren congregation in Seattle. Curious, I went to a service, located on the second floor of an old building in Chinatown. After being buzzed in, I was greeted by an assistant to the priest, who, when I mentioned I'd been planning on attending the other Nichiren temple in town, offered a reply that made me think there had been some tension between this temple and that one, possibly leading to a split. I know the priest had been the first non-Asian appointed to the old temple. Was there a cultural divide? I didn't feel comfortable asking.

What I did find was a small group of people who sort of felt like an endearing collection of misfits and oddballs, all of whom were extremely friendly and welcoming, and at least one of whom had a rather earthy sense of humor. Some were white; some were Asian; some were, I think, Hispanic. Not that I cared anything about that, but I couldn't help wondering: Did the original temple want to preserve its cultural purity? Was this Asian/American cultural divide I'd heard about a real thing, and did it drive a wedge between the people at this temple and the old one? Again, I didn't feel right coming out and asking.

Maybe that colored my perceptions, but I couldn't shake the feeling. I happened to attend one week when the temple was holding its annual meeting, and when one of the members rose to give a report, he mentioned the temple's decline in membership over the past year and talked about his concern regarding a former member and how that person was speaking out against the temple publicly. And this was after the priest mentioned that he'd recently had to take up a day job, presumably because there weren't enough funds to go around to support him as a full-time priest anymore.

After taking all this in, I felt as if I'd walked in on the middle of a family argument, and the family seemed to be struggling and may well have been a bit dysfunctional. I don't know the whole story, but I didn't want to be party to it. So I stopped going.

I'm not sure Nichiren was the right place for me, anyway. Nichiren Buddhists venerate the Lotus Sutra, to the point of chanting to the Lotus Sutra at every service -- their central mantra is Namu Myoho Renge Kyo, which roughly translates as "glory to the Lotus Sutra." I understand favoring one teaching or sutra over another, but to glorify one over all others, and then to chant its praises, seemed a little odd to me.

Nichiren himself, from what I've learned, was a rather unlikable character, driving wedges between his views and those of other Japanese Buddhist schools of his time. Maybe he was also a little too full of his own ego, with his sect of Buddhism literally named after him. In the end, too much emphasis on Nichiren and the Lotus Sutra, and not enough on the Buddha himself.

Soka Gakkai Seattle Buddhist Center
Soka Gakkai is an offshoot of Nichiren Buddhism. I had a lengthy talk with a director of the Seattle SGI center, who told me a little bit about SGI, how it broke off from Nichiren, and how it placed a great emphasis on the mantra to the Lotus Sutra.

I never even went to one of the meetings. I'll just say from what I learned on my own that SGI comes of a little bit too much like a prosperity cult. I'm not even sure it's really Buddhism at all.

Seattle Koyasan Buddhist Temple
This is a Shingon Buddhist temple, just one block over from the Seattle Buddhist Church, the Pure Land folks. It was the last on my list of places to visit. It also is largely Japanese-American, led by a priest from Japan.

Shingon is an old Japanese lineage, founded around 1,200 years ago by the monk Kukai, who studied in China and brought back the esoteric teachings he'd learned to Japan. However, it's virtually unknown here in the West. The Seattle temple is one of less than half a dozen on the American mainland, and all of those are on the West Coast.

I attended for the first time during the temple's monthly Goma fire ritual -- a ceremony dating back to Hinduism in which our defilements are ceremonially burned up, as the congregation chants to Fudo Myo-o, a wrathful deity. I was entranced by the fire, the chanting, and the accompanying drumming, enough so that I wanted to come back.

This is what the fire ritual looks like, although this one is not from the Seattle temple:

The next week, I attended a regular service and was both fascinated and mystified. The priest, with his back to the congregation, recited prayers and offerings for the first half of the service, before leading the congregation in a series of chants. We chanted the Heart Sutra, we chanted to the 13 buddhas central to Shingon, and we recited the refuge and precepts. Now that was fascinating to me -- what the Seattle Insight Meditation Society did as an annual service, the Shingon Buddhists did every week, as an ongoing public commitment to the faith. I liked that a lot. I could see how it would keep me grounded in the teachings.

I also liked the symbolism and the ritual -- they both helped bring the dharma alive for me. There are some surface similarities to Tibetan Buddhism, but although we certainly respect the priest, there's no sense of veneration or rigid hierarchy. He's kind and very human and approachable.

That said, I had some trouble fitting in at first. I was trying to get the priest's attention to ask him some questions about Shingon Buddhism, as there isn't an abundance of information on it in the West, but I had a hard time pinning him down. Others at the temple encouraged me to keep trying and promised me the lack of communication was nothing personal. Thinking back to all I'd heard about the cultural divide between white Western Buddhists and East Asian Buddhists, I ended up leaving in frustration for a while. I took that time to seek out answers to some of my Shingon questions on my own.

The time away was good, because it made me realize that of all the Buddhist temples and meditation groups I'd attended, this one felt most like home. Shingon, as I mentioned, is an esoteric tradition, which means many of the teachings are secret and have to be passed down from teacher to student. But the lay service is perfectly understandable (once you get used to chanting in Sanskrit and Japanese) and in itself brings me closer to the teachings of the Buddha. I also finally managed to find some time to talk to the priest, and I was surprised and relieved to find that he wants to build an "international" temple -- one that reaches out to all people who come there to seek out the dharma.

One of many things that endears me to Shingon is that, in a way, it touches on several of the stops I've made along my journey and blends them into a seamless whole. Among the 13 buddhas Shingon venerates are Amida Buddha, central to the Pure Land sect, and Kuan-yin, for whom I've had great admiration since I discovered her during my studies of Taoism. She figures in Chinese spirituality just as strongly as in Japan.

Another popular figure among the 13 buddhas is Jizo, popular in Japan as the guardian of children. The Medicine Buddha is there, too -- and I became fond of him when my body began malfunctioning. Fudo Myo-o, meanwhile, is an impressive figure, as he symbolically frightens us out of our bad habits and with his sword cuts through our defilements.

And then there's the central figure in Shingon Buddhism. It's not the historical Buddha, although he's one of the 13. It's Dainichi Nyorai, known in India as Mahavairocana. He's the universal buddha, from whom all other buddhas come. Essentially, he's en embodiment of the universe himself -- which makes him a rough equivalent to the notion of the Tao.

And that's another thing that helps me connect with Shingon teachings. In a lot of ways, I feel like I've come full circle. I began my Buddhist studies long ago with Tibetan Buddhism, and Shingon, like the Tibetan school, is an esoteric, tantric tradition full of symbolism and rich with rituals. And there are also things that make Shingon feel not so removed from Taoism, of which I've always been fond.

There are weekly meditation sessions for those interested. They take place in a beautiful meditation hall attached to the temple. Although meditation is not a large part of most Asian Buddhism, Shingon teaches the importance of harmonizing body, speech, and mind, and meditation is a part of that process.

There's much more I could say, but I'll wait until I learn more and immerse myself more deeply. For now, suffice it to say I'm in the process of becoming a member.

Where things stand for now
I feel pretty fortunate to live where I do, given that this temple is one of a tiny handful on the U.S. mainland. Had I lived almost anywhere else, I probably never would have found Shingon Buddhism. The priest says he wants to build an international temple, which I took as a way of welcoming non-Japanese to the services, and now he seems eager to get me involved in temple life in whatever way he can. The temple is fairly small, with maybe 10 to 15 people at any given service, so it almost feels like a family.

Will this be the last stop on my spiritual journey? We'll see. But at least for now, I'm pretty pleased with where I've landed. The hard work I put into finding my current temple feels as if it's been worth it.

Why Trump's Supporters Aren't Going Away, and Why There's a Paradigm Shift Coming for Both Major Parties

I'm old enough to remember Pat Buchanan's fiery speech at the Republican National Convention in 1992. Buchanan, like Trump, was a nationalist and a xenophobe. He also warned against the then-emerging trend of using international trade deals to ship American jobs overseas, and he saw how those and other policies -- but especially economic globalization -- were going to benefit the elites at the expense of the working class. To his credit, he even sounded the alarm regarding the blowback from military adventurism.

Buchanan never gained any traction for his presidential campaign. Now, two decades later, Donald Trump has picked up the populist banner and is a roaring success. The difference? As Michael Brendan Dougherty of The Week recently wrote, "Buchanan said that it was because the returns are in on the policies he criticized 20 years ago."

There's been much criticism of Trump's followers, some of it justified. But looking deeper, we can hear the cries of poorly educated working-class people who feel hopeless and desperate. Their addiction rates are up; their suicide rates are up. They see talking heads inside the Beltway praising an economic recovery that's left them behind. Their incomes haven't gone up, but their cost of living has. They know that the unemployment numbers don't reflect the massive number of underemployed or those who have given up looking for work. They're working two and three jobs just to stay afloat because employers are suppressing wages and benefits, even as corporate profits hit all-time highs. They see the plants closing where they and their families have worked for generations, all because some wealthy executive decided he could save a little money by shipping his manufacturing overseas. In short, these people don't see a future that cares about their interests. They feel hopeless and forgotten.

I understand why. I visited my hometown in 2014 for the first time in a decade. I remember the family hardware store, the movie theater, lots of little thriving mom-and-pop shops. It was a busy little town when I was growing up. Now there are mostly empty storefronts. The gas stations and a McDonald's on the edge of town seemed like the only places that were doing any business. Small-town America is turning into a series of ghost towns.

I worked inside the Beltway for a year, at a political policy magazine, alongside a bunch of hardcore wonks. They had no clue what life was like for ordinary people out in the heartland. None whatsoever. They even looked at me, to a certain extent, as a country bumpkin, having grown up surrounded by corn fields in rural Michigan. In short, those inside the Beltway scoff at the uneducated rubes out in flyover country. Those condescending people make up the political establishment in D.C., and they're the reason the GOP has lost control of its own party. Working-class Americans are sick of being ignored. They're sick of the elites in their ivory towers who pander to them every four years but then take money from powerful corporate and special interests and repay those interests with policies that further gut the working class. The jig is up.

Now, is Trump the answer to their problems? Of course not. But he knows how to tap into their anger, fear, and sense of hopelessness and alienation. It doesn't matter that he's a billionaire who sends his own manufacturing overseas and could buy politicians to gain favor. It doesn't matter if he speaks in the vaguest generalities about his policy positions. He's an avatar that his followers can pin all their hopes on. They're desperate for someone to listen to them, and now they feel like someone in power is finally doing just that. If you're Trump, you can exploit their patriotism and find scapegoats for them to focus their anger on, and you create an unstoppable political force. Criticize Trump or his followers, and they just double down, because they see you as part of the problem -- part of the system that's been eviscerating them for two decades.

Pat Buchanan was also a social conservative, and we've seen the evangelical wing of the GOP take up many of his causes. But even those policies aren't getting a great deal of traction in this election cycle. The left-right paradigm is breaking down. People don't want to hear about liberal versus conservative. They don't want to hear about how the benefits of capitalism are going to trickle down to them. They don't even care so much about social issues, which is why Trump can be socially liberal and it doesn't matter to his followers. To them, this is about survival, about "taking their country back" so they can feel as if they have some sense of control over their own lives and destinies again.

Right or wrong, they see a country being taken over by ideas, beliefs, and people who are alien to them and their way of thinking. They see a society that expresses concern over government violence toward minorities in the Black Lives Matter movement, but when a group of fed-up ranchers stage a protest to bring attention to their own grievances, the Trump supporters suddenly don't see anyone expressing concern anymore -- instead, they see the people who supported BLM wishing that the same heavy-handed state would storm in and mow down the ranchers.

They feel singled out. Their hegemony is slipping away.

So what do we do about it? Ignoring these people, laughing at them, or insulting and dismissing them has given us Trump. And even if he doesn't win the election, the concerns of his followers aren't going away. If it's not Trump, someone else will take up their banner.

I don't think there are any easy answers. I do think, however, that embracing an economic system that takes the concerns of the poor and middle class into consideration would provide a solid foundation for building a better system going forward. That doesn't mean just more welfare and food stamps, although those who need public assistance should be able to get it and should not be shamed for it. Those are Band-Aids. What it means is doing things like rebuilding our manufacturing base, offering living wages, and providing good benefits. Stop looking at human beings as no more than costs to be minimized so that corporate executives can placate their shareholders with a few more dollars in profits. Working people should never have to feel anxious about whether they can feed their families, what they'll do if they have a major medical expense, or what happens if their jobs get shipped off to be done cheaper by someone in China.

To that end, we need business leaders who balance the needs of all their stakeholders -- not just shareholders, but also their employees, their customers, their suppliers, and the communities they exist in. B Corps are doing a good job setting this trend in motion, but we have a long way to go. When the CEO-to-employee compensation ratio has widened from 20:1 in 1965 to nearly 300:1 in 2013, and when executive pay has gone up nearly 1,000% since 1978 while worker pay has increased by around 11%, it's clear that there's a massive problem.

We also need to examine both the quality and cost of our education. Education, of course, breeds tolerance, and it gives people the tools they need to better themselves. But if young people are leaving college buried in debt because the cost of higher education is spiraling out of control, while all they can find after graduation is a job that barely pays enough to cover rent and food, they've been stymied before they even get a chance. And our current system won't even allow student-loan debt to be dismissed in bankruptcy, whose entire purpose is supposed to be to give overburdened people a fresh start. It's telling that we always have enough money to fight wars, and our system won't think twice about bailing out the same megabanks that nearly destroyed our economy -- but helping ordinary people manage rising costs on shrinking wages is just unthinkable.

Again, this is why Donald Trump is so popular.

So as I said, we can scoff and shake our heads, or we can address the very real anxieties these people have. It's our choice.

Why Trump's supporters don't see the appeal of Bernie Sanders, and his plan for education and healthcare that's affordable and accessible to everyone, is something I'm at a loss to explain. The same goes for the Green Party. Maybe the raw us-versus-them emotions that Trump exploits are too powerful to overcome. (Sanders has made a point of saying that we're all in this together, and I truly believe that. Divisiveness will get us nowhere.) Maybe people are still so conditioned by decades of capitalist propaganda that they see so-called socialism as an un-American threat, even if those so-called socialist policies would benefit them.

What I do know is that the Democrats are eventually going to face a similar reckoning in their party. The Democratic establishment is forcing Hillary Clinton on its voters, despite her high negatives, despite her hawkishness, despite her deep ties to corporate America. When she talks about incrementalism, when she says the policies Sanders wants to enact are impossible to achieve, you can be sure that that's her way of saying she's going to take care of her corporate benefactors first, and that means protecting the establishment status quo. It's not that what Sanders wants to achieve can't be done. (When has the American spirit ever taken "it can't be done" for an answer?) It's that Clinton is too politically compromised to be able to enact policies that would dramatically alter the system we have in place. 

That, in a nutshell, is why the optimism of Barack Obama's "Yes We Can" campaign has given way to a defeatist "No We Can't" campaign eight years later. Sanders offers voters a more appealing alternative, and it backs Clinton and the establishment into a corner -- they have nothing to refute him with, other than to say "it can't be done." And that's also why a Clinton presidency is guaranteed to give us more of the same: more wars, more surveillance, more compromised civil liberties, more trade deals that further gut the American working class, more money for the 1% and less for everyone else. Nothing will change.

Republican voters have rejected that. They've told their party establishment that they've had enough. They're tired of having their out-of-touch party elites worry more about their corporate donors than about ordinary working people. They're tired of being bought off with empty promises every four years. 

Trump has tapped into that frustration on the right. Sanders is doing it on the left. Even Mitt Romney -- rightly seen as an out-of-touch elite in 2012 -- now claims to understand that we're "just mad as hell" across the board. So the Democratic National Committee may well succeed in shutting down Sanders this time -- just as the Republican National Committee managed to squelch Ron Paul's campaign in 2012 -- but if it's not Sanders who brings his issues to the fore, it will just be someone else in the next election cycle. It could be Elizabeth Warren. Whoever it is, Democrats can rest assured that voter anger and frustration with the status quo is not going to go away.

They can do something about it now, or they can watch the masses with their torches and pitchforks wrest control of the party away from them.

The ball is in their court.

Becoming a Quaker: The First Step

After a year of attending Quaker meetings, I've decided to take the next step and apply for membership. For me, this is a big undertaking. I don't join things, in general. But I feel at home with the Quakers in a way I haven't with any other spiritual community.

I read from others about what to put in a letter requesting membership, and there really was no consensus. Some people said they wrote three pages, while others said they wrote three sentences. I suppose it comes down to how much of yourself you want to introduce ahead of time versus how much you want the clearness committee to handle. For me, I thought it was be wise to give a deeper overview of myself, since I really don't know anyone at the meeting very well. My letter, when it's read at the next meeting for business, will give everyone a chance to find out who I am.

When I handed my letter to the clerk, he reminded me of the process, including the committee I'll meet with. He said they'd ask me "the tough questions" before any decision was made on my joining. I'm not sure what to expect, and I halfway anticipate that my request will be rejected, but I at least have to try.

Here's the text of my letter.

~ ~ ~

Dear [clerk],

I would like to apply for membership at University Friends Meeting.

I’ve rewritten this letter several times. I finally decided to focus on how I came to admire the Quaker way, in the context of what I’ve been seeking in a spiritual tradition. I hope it offers some insight into what led me here and conveys my sincerity about wanting to become a member of UFM and the larger family of Friends.

Following are a few points explaining what I’ve been seeking in a spiritual path:

One that is rooted in the Christian tradition but allows people the room to draw inspiration from other spiritual traditions and practices. I've been a spiritual seeker for most of my adult life. My journey has been influenced by Buddhism, Taoism, the Transcendentalists, Alan Watts, Indian thinkers such as Jiddu Krishnamurti and Paramhansa Yogananda, Catholic social activists such as Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day, and the great peacemakers of our age, including Gandhi and Dr. King. Those influences, along with other life experiences, have caused my views to evolve to the point that I could no longer return to the Christianity of my youth. Yet I began to feel a strong pull, about a year ago, to reconnect in some way with my spiritual roots.

In his book Living Buddha, Living Christ, Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh encourages spiritual seekers to practice in a way that could reconnect them with their original faith traditions. I thought about those words often through the years, wondering how that would ever be possible for me. I visited a UU church, but it wasn’t what I was looking for, even though I found myself largely in accordance with the UUs’ guiding principles. Finally, everything changed when I discovered the Quakers. The inclusiveness, silent worship, absence of clergy, and commitment to equality and peace were what immediately drew me in, and as I learned more about the Quakers, I became more convinced that I’d found where I belong.

That was a little more than a year ago. In my eagerness to find the spiritual community that felt like the best fit for me, I attended five different meetings in the area (UFM, Salmon Bay, South Seattle, Eastside, and Tacoma) and visited two Quaker churches (North Seattle, and East Hill in Kent), in what I jokingly called my Puget Sound Quaker Tour. The churches were not for me, but I felt at home in unprogrammed worship. Each meeting had its own particular dynamic, but UFM was where I felt the most comfortable.

One that, instead of providing me with ready-made answers, invites me to ask questions, giving my spiritual understanding room to grow, mature, and change as needed, rather than stifling it with dogma. I was raised Catholic, but whenever I had questions about what I was told to believe — and there were many — those questions were discouraged and I was told to take things on faith. That didn't work for me then, and it doesn't now. I want to be challenged. I want the freedom to sit with a question and explore its meaning and ramifications. I'm not even so interested in finding the answer as I am in what doors the question may open, and I find the space to do that in the quiet of Quaker worship. To that end, I find that Quaker queries are a bit like Zen koans, in that they force me out of my comfort zone and make me confront my beliefs and assumptions, lest I grow complacent in thinking I have all the answers. I’ve found that whenever I think I have all the answers is exactly when I need to start asking questions again.

Over the past year, I’ve immersed myself in Quaker reading: George Fox’s journal, John Woolman’s journal, the writings of William Penn, and even contemporary authors such as Philip Gulley. I’m also a subscriber to Friends Journal. I have a copy of North Pacific Yearly Meeting’s Faith and Practice, and my sister in England, knowing I was interested in the Quakers, sent me a copy of the Britain Yearly Meeting’s Quaker Faith and Practice. I’ve learned much over the past year, and I look forward to learning more from all here who are longtime Friends.

One that promotes the equality of all people and endeavors to make the world we live in a better, more peaceful place. I’m often dismayed when all around me I see people who are so focused on their belief in another world that they forget to live in this one, or when I see people promoting anger, hatred, divisiveness, and violence in the name of their god, such that they forget to love their neighbors and their enemies, to help the broken, and to do as they would wish to have done to them.

Radical equality, a commitment to peace, and an abiding belief in human goodness are values that resonate with my own worldview, and I see them reflected in the Quaker family. I also believe in the power of love, kindness, humility, and forgiveness. I think those values are sorely lacking in today’s world, and I find myself attracted to people and groups that support and promote them.

As domestic and global events began to take a dark turn recently, I thought about George Fox’s ocean of light and love that flowed over the ocean of darkness. I feel we desperately need to find that ocean of light and love today, but I don’t think we can find it without putting in the work ourselves to make it happen. A cartoon I read recently had a man looking around in despair at the state of the world, and he said he almost asked God why he allowed so much pain and suffering. But then he decided not to ask, because he was afraid God would ask him the same question. In other words, it’s up to us to make things better.

I know that it’s incumbent on me to at the very least set an example for others to follow, and ideally to actively be the change I wish to see in the world. I have a 4-year-old girl, and I want to be an example for her, as well as leave her a world that’s a little bit better than how I found it. So I’m doing all of this as much for her as I am for myself or anyone else. But I’m aware that I can do more. My service work has consisted mostly of making financial and material contributions to charity, including monthly donations to the American Friends Service Committee and Doctors Without Borders. Though that may not be much, it’s something I can build upon, and I hope it speaks to my commitment to do what I can to help build a better world.

I don’t know in what ways I can contribute to the life of the meeting. I do know, however, that I want to, in whatever way possible. I’ve come a long way from my Midwestern Catholic upbringing, and it’s been a long journey looking for my spiritual home. I feel happy and fortunate to have finally found that home among the Religious Society of Friends. 

There’s much more I could say, but for now I hope this is enough. I’m happy to share more about myself and answer any questions you may have.

I look forward to getting to know the members of the meeting, and I hope you will consider allowing me to join as a member of UFM.

Thank you.

George Fox, Meet Siddhartha Gautama

Long before I fell in with the Quakers, I was attracted to Buddhism. I have stacks of books on Buddhism, from scriptures to commentaries to descriptions of the various sects and how they practice. After growing up with a very rigid Catholicism, Buddhism felt liberating, and I wanted to learn all I could. I devoured information on the tradition in all its forms. Buddhism explained to me why humanity suffers, and what we can do about it. It taught me the value of kindness, not just for its own sake but for how dramatically it can change us and the world. In short, it put the power for transformation directly in my own hands.

I wanted to dedicate myself to the Buddhist path. I tried many, many times to dedicate myself to a regular meditation practice, understanding that going within oneself to cultivate mindfulness was the key that unlocked everything else. Once you can find peace within yourself, you can begin to radiate that peace out to the world around you.

But it never really stuck. I think I simply lacked the discipline and the courage to stick with a meditation practice. And I say "courage" because when you're sitting silently with yourself, you eventually begin to unearth things about yourself that the noise of the world has allowed you to shut out and ignore. Self-examination is not always a pleasant endeavor, to say the least. But beyond that, there was the physical discomfort of maintaining a meditation posture for a prolonged amount of time, and there was the constant battle with what the Buddhists call one's "monkey mind," that part of your brain that jumps incessantly from idea to idea, like a monkey swinging from one branch to the next. Your monkey mind often gets louder the more you try to quiet yourself down. When all you want to do is count your breaths and let your mind relax, Monkey Mind reminds you that you have to take the trash out, or it replays that conversation you had with your child yesterday.

Aside from all that, though, there was always something that felt distancing about Buddhism. I never really felt it was something I could claim as my own. It felt like something exotic that I was borrowing from another culture. It didn't belong to me. Right or wrong, I always felt as if I was appropriating something not intended for a Western Caucasian.

But I continued to read about Buddhism as a philosophy, and over the years I drifted away from putting the teachings into everyday practice. I accumulated more spiritual influences along the way, including Taoism and Confucianism, and the teachings of Gurdjieff and Paramhansa Yogananda and Alan Watts, among others. But as fascinating as I found all that I read, I never really embraced any of it as a guidepost for living. The Tao Te Ching probably came the closest. But in the end, I was left feeling frustrated, and my agnosticism grew into atheism and a feeling of apathy toward spirituality.

That's pretty much where I was when I stumbled across the Quakers in 2014. My spiritual life began to open up again as I found something that in a way felt like Buddhism, in its quiet, contemplative meetings for worship, but was rooted in the Christianity I grew up in. It felt more familiar. I finally felt as if I belonged in a spiritual community.

And now, as fate would have it, Buddhism makes a re-entry into my life.

It all began around this time last year, when I saw that the Seattle Insight Meditation Society was offering a refuge and precepts ceremony for anyone who wished to come. Though lacking formal rites of passage such as baptism and confirmation, Buddhism does offer the taking of refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma (teachings), and the Sangha (community). Once you've taken that vow, you can hold yourself out as a Buddhist if you wish. The ceremony for taking refuge usually also includes vowing to hold to the Five Precepts: not to kill, not to steal, not to engage in sexual misconduct (which is to say that we avoid using sex to harm ourselves or others, not that we agree to a list of moral shalts and shalt-nots), not to use harmful speech, and not to use intoxicants that can compromise our mindfulness. (The Quakers aren't keen on reminding people these days that they were instrumental in the temperance and prohibition movement. Their hearts were in the right place, though -- like the Buddhists, they desired for people to maintain a clarity of mind.)

I thought about going to that ceremony last year. I was thinking that maybe making my Buddhism "official," so to speak, would help me warm up to the teachings, embracing them and bringing them alive in my life, rather than admiring them at arm's length but never engaging in them. Ultimately, I decided not to go.

But the ceremony came around again this year, and I decided I'd give it a try this time. Even as I'm immersing myself in Quakerism, I thought it could only enhance my spiritual life to try to welcome in once more this tradition that's been a part of my life for over a decade, in varying degrees of importance. If I went to the ceremony and it still didn't feel right, maybe I could finally put Buddhism behind me. But maybe something would click and I could incorporate it into my spiritual path.

There were probably about 200 people at the ceremony. I dusted off my neglected zafu at home, thinking I may need to sit on it for meditation, but as it turned out, most of the seating area consisted of chairs, with only a small section near the lecturer set aside for those who wished to perch on a meditation cushion. So I returned my zafu to the car, settled in to a chair, and quieted myself for 40 minutes of meditation.

Almost immediately, the old feeling I used to get when I sat down to meditate washed over me. It's not a particularly pleasant feeling. Part of me feels very anxious -- and it's not even an anxiety I consciously work myself into. It feels as if it rises up all on its own, as if my mind is going into a defensive fight-or-flight mode, trying to fend me off from digging into whatever it's trying to keep suppressed. Yet another part of me feels open and receptive. After I meditate, I always come away with kind of a light-headed, fuzzy, floaty feeling, as if I'm being transported off to another dimension. And these two opposing forces do battle inside me, when all I'm trying to do is count my breaths and calm the monkey mind.

I was also reminded of how different meditation is from Quaker silence. Meditation is a much more solitary, inward-focused pursuit, whose goal is self-cultivation. Quaker silence is more active and more communal in nature. We sit quietly as a group, allowing ourselves to be receptive to any messages that we feel the spirit may be trying to communicate through us. There is no disciplined posture to maintain, and there are no mantras or counting of breaths -- just a calm, receptive, contemplative silence.

After the meditation, the lecturer, Rodney, gave a talk on the importance of sangha in growing on our spiritual path. He emphasized that he himself downplayed for a long time the crucial role that a spiritual community plays in our personal growth, and he eventually came to see that it's nearly impossible to carry on a spiritual path as a solitary pursuit, pointing out that even Jesus in the Bible talked about how he was there in spirit with his followers whenever two or more people were gathered in his name.

That was a point that stuck with me. Ever since leaving the Catholicism of my youth, I've been a solitary spiritual path, with nobody to share it with me. I had a friend once who was involved pretty heavily in Buddhism, but he eventually abandoned his Buddhist path, leaving me again on my own. That was hard for me, because I know I do better when I'm surrounded by like-minded people. When I get away from that community, I easily get derailed. Cynicism tends to swallow me up, and I get short-tempered, intolerant, and judgmental. Some people need a support community to keep them focused; I seem to be one of them.

So I wondered: If I did come back to Buddhism, would I try to pick a community to belong to somewhere in or around Seattle, the same way I've settled in with one particular Friends meeting? I couldn't make this community mine, because Rodney's talks are on Tuesday night, and I work on Tuesday night -- I had to take the night off to go to this particular gathering. But I could do this, right? I'm a hardcore introvert with severe social anxiety, but I can do this. I can do this.

Rodney went on to talk about how seriously following a spiritual path is never easy, because if you expect to grow, you have to walk toward your problems and confront them. Yeah, that spoke to my whole meditation practice. If I stick with this, it won't be easy. But then again, as I always say, nothing worthwhile is ever easy.

Before we got to the ceremony itself, Rodney made another comment that resonated with me. Knowing a lot of people had probably come for the evening to profess a new faith, he explicitly told us, "Don't become a Buddhist. In fact, don't become anything. That just makes everything harder." That statement would probably leave a lot of people perplexed if they didn't understand Buddhism's spirit of testing things out to see if they work for you, and its emphasis on not getting so caught up in the teachings that we lose sight of the fact that the teachings are merely tools for self-cultivation, not an end in themselves. As the Zen folks are fond of saying, keep your eyes on the moon, not the finger pointing at the moon. Or as some of the more provocative Zen practitioners like to say, "If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him." Don't get hung up on the Buddha as an object of worship and lose sight of what you're setting out to do. The Buddha's only purpose, in effect, was to impart the teachings that we could then use ourselves.

Then came the time to recite the vows and take refuge. Rodney led us, chanting in Pali, the language of the Buddha, and then in English. We recited the vows three times:

Buddham saranam gacchami (to the Buddha I go for refuge).
Dhammam saranam gacchami (to the Dharma I go for refuge).
Sangham saranam gacchami (to the Sangha I go for refuge).

Dutiyampi ... (for the second time ...).

Tatiyampi ... (for the third time ...).

After that we chanted and recited the precepts, first in Pali, then in two different forms in English -- once in their more negative form, and then once in a more affirming language:

Panatipata veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami
(I undertake the precept to refrain from killing.
I vow to cultivate boundless compassion toward all beings.)

Adinnadana veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami 
(I undertake the precept to refrain from taking that which is not given.
I vow to practice generosity.)

Kamesu micchacara veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami 
(I undertake the precept to refrain from sexual harm.
I vow to cultivate responsibility.)

Musav ada veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami 
(I undertake the precept to refrain from harmful speech.
I vow to cultivate loving speech and deep listening.)

Sura meraya majja pamadatthana veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami 
(I undertake the precept to refrain from intoxicating liquors and drugs that lead to carelessness.
I vow to ingest only items that preserve peace, well-being, and joy.)

Finally, to seal the ceremony, we were all given a simple red string, which Rodney called an "intention cord." We were all asked to have a neighbor fasten the cord for us (I put mine on my wrist, as most did), while we helped our neighbor do the same. Sitting in silence, he asked us to think of an intention we wish to focus on for the year ahead, with the vows from the refuge and precepts ceremony still fresh in our minds. He encouraged us to focus on a single word, and to imbue the cord with that word, so that it might serve as a reminder for us as we go about our days.

And that was it. We all went our separate ways. I went home with a renewed sense of purpose, not certain I'll jump back into a Buddhist practice, but determined to do my best to live by the vows I took. In all these years, I never "officially" became a Buddhist, and maybe having done so will help keep me more focused on the teachings. I feel a sense of obligation now to represent the Buddha well with those I interact with.

After all, anyone can recite some words, but they don't mean much if you don't put them into action. And the wonderful thing about the precepts in particular is that they aren't rules you have to follow to appease a deity or dodge hellfire. They're a promise you make to yourself, to cultivate mindfulness and loving-kindness, helping to foster a more harmonious mind and a more peaceful world. They're rooted in love, not fear. And that is a wonderful thing indeed.

This path won't replace my Quaker journey, but it may well supplement it. I may end up becoming a Quddhist by the time everything is said and done. 

The Value of Silence

One of the enriching things I've discovered about the Quaker tradition is that when people rise to speak in meeting, their words are often imbued with great depth, even if the deeper meaning isn't always immediately apparent. It's often in the quiet that follows, when the rest of us have time to absorb the message, that the words reveal their full import.

That's been the case for me, in any event, going all the way back to my first Quaker meeting. I remember on that day that a few people rose to express opinions that I didn't completely agree with. My gut reaction was to rise and counter with my own view, but being brand new to Quakerism at the time, I wasn't about to do that.

That's not the purpose of vocal ministry, anyway. The point is not to debate. The point is to allow yourself to be led by the spirit, actively listening for the "still, small voice" to guide you and your words.

And if somebody rises and says something we take issue with, sometimes our egos jump right in, wanting to launch a verbal defensive. That we are not to rise immediately after another person has just spoken in meeting, especially if the intention is to debate, cuts off the ego before it gets a chance to make us say something we may regret. In the silence that follows, we can sit with those challenging words, asking ourselves what it is about them that unsettles us. Do the words perhaps reveal an uncomfortable truth about ourselves that we don't want to confront? Is there a lesson to be learned?

That's the value of silence in Quaker meeting. It can be transformative. Little wonder that the Sufi mystic Rumi once wrote, "Silence is the language of God; all else is poor translation." Imagine how different the world at large would be if we observed that same kind of behavior -- stopping to listen to what someone has to say and meeting it with thoughtful silence, rather than instantly retaliating, perhaps with a defensive knee-jerk response, which then easily escalates into rancorous argument.

A woman at this past weekend's Quaker meeting expressed some of these same thoughts. The meetinghouse I attend has two services. The earlier 9:30 meeting is usually completely silent, while the 11:00 meeting is generally a bit more talkative. I attend both when I can, because I like both the contemplative mood of the 9:30 service and the spoken ministry of the 11:00 service. This woman said she'd shifted from the 11:00 service to the 9:30 one because she too often found herself disagreeing with what someone else said and felt the urge to debate, or she would want to add on to someone else's thoughts if she thought it was incomplete. It was hard for her to sit in the silence and say nothing. Now she's coming back to the 11:00 service, having found enough peace within herself to allow others' thoughts to come and go without needing to react to them.

To that end, a man rose a while later to say that after another recent meeting, he'd asked a friend whether he should have risen to speak when he did. The friend responded by giving him an acronym to use: WAIT, or Why Am I Talking? I think something as simple as that can help us discern whether the spirit is really moving us to speak on a matter of substance, or whether we're just sharing an anecdote or an opinion that really doesn't rise to the level of vocal ministry.

Not surprisingly, the remainder of the meeting after he spoke was completely silent. I was half-tempted to rise and add my opinion that one should speak only if it improves upon the silence. But since I didn't think saying that would actually improve upon the silence, I stayed in my seat.

A few people I've spoken with at Quaker meeting have commented on the similarities between Quakerism and Buddhism. As one person put it, "Quakerism is Buddhism without the vocabulary." Given the emphasis both place on contemplation, it's not surprising to me that the Quaker approach to ministry would involve an element of non-attachment. Instead of letting our egos clutch on to the words of another, driving us to add our own commentary, we draw what lesson we can from the words, and then we let them go. If they've served their purpose, there's no reason to hold on to them.

An old Buddhist story tells of two monks who met a woman at the river bank, trying to get across but fearful she'd be swept away by the powerful current. The monks were forbidden from making physical contact with women, but deciding that helping her was more important than following a rule, one of the monks picked her up and carried her across the river. He set her down on the other bank, and the monks continued on their way. Much later, as the monks were still walking, the monk who picked up the woman could sense that his companion was upset. When he confronted his companion, the monk said angrily, "You know our vows prohibit us from touching a woman!" The other monk calmly replied, "I put her down on the other side of the river. Why are you still carrying her?"

And that's how it is with our words. We all hear the words of others, and often we're itching to have an instant reaction to them. But how often do we actually listen?

The beauty of the Quaker meeting is that we do just that. We engage in expectant listening. And that approach would serve us all quite well in the world outside the meetinghouse doors.

The Oregon Standoff and Selective Nonviolence

I’m taken aback by how quick many of us are to label people as terrorists and advocate the use of violence against them – especially when those calls come from the parts of the political spectrum that would otherwise consider themselves nonviolent and antiwar.

All over my Facebook feed today I’m seeing people talk about how the situation in Oregon would be different if the ranchers and militiamen had been Muslims, or a black kid with a toy gun. And I don’t disagree at all. There’s an obvious double standard. But the implication behind those statements seems to be that we should be treating the militiamen the same way – by overreacting with state-sanctioned violence, just as if they were Muslims or a black kid with a toy gun.

Does anyone else see the problem here? The militiamen claim they don't want violence (you can choose to believe them or not), and the FBI says it’s trying to come up with a peaceful ending to the incident. Should we not be approving of that? Shouldn’t this be what we actually want? Isn’t that better than seeing one side or the other rushing in with all guns blazing? I’d rather see cops trying to de-escalate situations instead of shooting first and asking questions later. I’d rather see our country adopt a foreign policy that values diplomacy over bombs and stops meddling in other nations’ affairs for its own benefit. Likewise, I’d rather see the two sides in Oregon working toward a peaceful solution, rather than turning it into another Waco or Ruby Ridge.

Moreover, it bears pointing out that while the terrorists we’re fighting overseas wouldn’t think twice about targeting civilians, the group in Oregon is directing its anger at a government that it feels has overreached its bounds. Apples and oranges. Calling them “YallQaeda” and what not is good for a laugh, but it blurs the lines between two groups of people with two completely different sets of motivations. Lest we forget, our nation was founded by people with grievances against their government, and that our own Declaration of Independence defends the right of the people to alter or abolish governments that they believe have become abusive of their rights. Would we call Thomas Jefferson and George Washington terrorists for rebelling against Britain? What about Russell Means and the American Indian Movement when they staged a standoff at Wounded Knee, or when they occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in D.C., both actions in protest of the government’s treatment of the Indians? There’s a big difference between resisting your government and the wanton slaughter of innocent people. It’s the difference between Henry David Thoreau and Tim McVeigh.

I also think we risk dehumanizing people and belittling what to them are important concerns, by abstracting them into words that distance them from ourselves as an “other.” This is something that’s plaguing our national discourse in general, not just in this particular incident. We look all too often as people we don’t like as enemies to be annihilated, rather than as human beings with their own concerns and grievances. Terrorists don’t become terrorists just because they enjoy killing people; most of the time they’ve been radicalized by more powerful people who terrorized them first, and seeing no other recourse, they lash out at their perceived enemies in a violent, impotent rage. That’s why simply killing more of them doesn’t get to the root of the problem and therefore won’t change anything. In the case of these ranchers in Oregon, they also feel they have legitimate grievances against their government (again, you can choose to agree or not), and to simply want to unleash the power of the state on them serves no interest, other than the short-term desire to squelch the complaints of an “other” whose views we don’t like.

An article in The Guardian today put it well: “The sad truth is that extremists – both at home and abroad – are often disaffected, frightened, and angry people desperately searching for purpose, validation, and meaning in a world they feel has left them behind. It’s a sickness that can infect almost anyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, or gender.” We would do well to remember that, and try to address the root causes of why they feel so disaffected, before we urge someone to pull a trigger.

As an anarchist, I feel no compulsion to take the state’s side in this or any other incident. But as a pacifist, I want to see a peaceful solution, to this and all conflicts. I realize that not all share my views, but I would hope that all of us would prefer to see peaceful solutions to our differences, rather than committing violence that only breeds ever more violence.  

Upon Us All, a Little Rain Must Fall

In the silence of Quaker meeting last week, I listened to a steady rain patter down on the roof. As I sat there, a verse from the book of Matthew kept rolling through my head and wouldn’t leave: “The rain falls on the just and the unjust.” The idea in Quaker meeting is that we can all minister to each other, and all are free to rise and address the meeting as the spirit moves us. There is no clergy. But I’m not a member there, just an attender, so I kept quiet. I’m also a big believer that one shouldn’t speak unless it improves upon the silence. I’ve never risen to give vocal ministry during meeting, and I really doubt that I ever will.

But the thought stuck with me on the drive home, so I let myself ponder what it meant. And I think for me it’s a call to check our own tendency to think we’re always right, and to also try to find a little bit of goodness in the people we find the most challenging and infuriating. Quakers believe that every person has “that of God” within them, a concept I find similar to the idea of Buddha-nature. We all have a kernel of goodness in us, and some of us have it buried more deeply than others. The image it brings to mind for me is the Chinese tai-chi symbol, or what we call yin and yang. Black and white, two opposites, swirl around each other to create a unified whole -- one could not exist without the other. And in the deepest part of each half of the yin and yang, there’s a circle of the opposite color. I explained the meaning of the symbol once to my 4-year-old, and her simplified takeaway of those dots in the opposing colors was “Every good person has a little bit of bad, and every bad person has a little bit of good.” And that’s basically right.

So when I thought about how the rain falls on the just and unjust, it made me think about how we’re all in this together here on Earth, even if we don’t want to be sometimes. It’s easy to decide we’re the good guys and the “other” is the bad guy, but how good are we, really? Do we not often fall short of the standards we set for ourselves? Does our own sense of having to be right prevent us from seeing someone else’s point of view? Are we too quick to demonize those who are different, or whose views offend us? We may find other people unpleasant, but do we ask why they’re like that? Or what it is about them that bothers us so much? Do we ask if there’s anything we can do to help ourselves see compassionately why somebody is perhaps judgmental and angry -- what made them that way? And is there anything we can do to remedy it, while also looking at ourselves to see if anything within us also needs remedying? To bring this back around to scripture, can we see the log in our own eye before noticing the speck in our neighbor’s eye?

In other words, who really are the "just" and "unjust"? We probably think we know, but on deeper reflection, do we really? Aren't we all a little bit of both? And isn't that the essential point of the verse?

So I think that verse rolling around in my head was a call for me to act with more tolerance and humility -- calling out injustice in the world when I see it, certainly, but maybe with more of an eye toward what I, or what any of us, can do to fix things. Complaining is easy. Self-righteousness is easy. Actually doing something to change the world for the better, and cultivating harmony and understanding between people, is a lot harder.

But certainly, no one ever said doing the right thing was easy.