On Messiahs and Monkey Gods: A Mapping of Me

Two spiritual questions, like lines of latitude and longitude, currently crisscross to trace a “you are here star” in the mapped-out newness of now. One deals with appropriating wisdom, the other with the distance inherent in love.

Regarding wisdom: At worst I'm a fraud, at best I'm one little insight away from my bodhisattva badge.  And because longing for God is the infinite sinkhole in the center of all satisfaction, I am often, most accurately, somewhere in between: grasping at happiness, juggling discontent, painting a facade on the whole mess.

Fraudulence at first.  When I was new to the spiritual path, I’d have said: interbeing and the present moment are concepts that express the truest reality.  Everything is a part of everything else and there is no past or future. Separateness is an illusion that leads us to hate.  Past and future produce in us anxiety (in the case of too much future) and remorse (in the case of too much past).  But they’re illusions too.  On the level of God, sorrow and joy contain one another as well....

I stole the bejesus out of all of that.  Some of it’s Thich Nhat Hanh.  Some of it’s Ekhart Tolle.  The last sentence is the Trappist priest Thomas Keating.  Even when I was a monk, I was not immune to Trappist-on-Trappist intellectual thievery. 

If I'm caught up in my falseness, I can attribute it to deep wounds in the psyche that stem from early childhood insecurities.  It is certainly true that I have a family inside of me that is to varying degrees functional and dysfunctional...

But here again I am ripping insights off from other sources.  In this case, from the literature of adult children of alcoholics.

It is certainly true that I've had insights of my own. I could say “There is a presence within absence. Behind nothing there is something.  Until you listen for nothing you will not listen to anything.” I could say “The opposite of checking out isn't clueing in.  That would be to bring as much force to presence as I brought to absence.  My goal is to deprive both presence and absence of force so that wherever I am, I can be there gently.”

In the monastery we used to call this “spending our spiritual cash.”  It's seen as a bit of a douchebag maneuver: a way to be seen as a great teacher without being involved in the realities of practice.  In the end, to spend my spiritual cash is to allow my ego to steal insights from myself. The fact is, silence increases as preaching becomes practice. Anything else is egotism. 

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I paused as I wrote that last sentence.  Perhaps I overstate things.  Perhaps it’s more accurate to say “Engaging my own pious noise is practice.  Ignoring it, or actively dulling it, is not.”  I rephrase things because I know that, sometimes for me, chewing the cud of others’ wisdom is the only way to progress through spirituality’s four stomachs, toward a sacred cow-pie that feels like my own.  Sometimes people benefit from that, and I don’t want to discount it.

So its important to look at love and service as well.  Particularly, the quantity of distance it implies.  Let’s keep a tension before us, embodied in three statements: 1: We’re not God.  2: A short definition of “Sin” is “distance from God.”  And 3: We’re made to be with God.  In the humblest sense of “Divinization” we’re made to “become God.”  The echoes of divine love in the human situation easily make the pitfalls of this tension clear: how often do we misuse the word “love” at the service of ennobling codependence, and worse, abuse?  Recovering codependents, accustomed to lovingly smothering one another, laugh about “love songs” because of the amount of un-individuated need their melodies mask.

Even our most pious concepts of love are warped.  We “suffer in silence” to imitate Christ and we end up enabling dysfunction.  Christ’s suffering is rarely seen as a reason for healthy self-care or for clear limits.

Scant indeed are love’s healthier paradigms.  Before proceeding I need to restate something that’s fallen prey to cultural amnesia, something it’s taken me 38 years even to begin to address. To wit: sin is not the only reason for distance from God and each-other. 

This realization began to set in when I took my monastic name. “Dismas,” my namesake, was crucified next to Christ.  The person who most intimately shared Christ’s most difficult moment never, in this life, shook Christ’s hand.  He never walked around Jerusalem with his arm around Christ’s shoulder.  Nails and crosses marked and modified their communal intimacy, real though it was.  Their experiences were the same, though their lives were different.

In the journey of prayer, God sometimes seems distant. With varying intensities and at different times, most monastics have experienced this distance.  One of the brothers was the first to point it out:  the Gerasene demoniac’s entire vocation was one of separateness from Christ.  This is the bloke in Mark 5, from whom a legion of demons had been exorcised.  The text says “As [Jesus] was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed by demons begged [Jesus] that he might be with him. But Jesus refused, and said to him, ‘Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you.’ And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him.”  After it was pointed out, this became Gospel for me: many valid vocations involve nothing more than a communion of wills.

One day, feeling my distance from the brothers with particular force, and with the romance of the medieval mystics on my mind, I yelled an objection into the abyss: “Monastic Life is supposed to feel like a marriage!”  The abyss implied an answer: “Well, if you’re looking for something that feels like a marriage, there’s a lifestyle for that.”

It’s called marriage.  I began to adjust my paradigm, ultimately leaving the monastery.  I threw myself into the study of other faiths, into professional life and dating.  Nowadays, I entertain something that feels like belief for the Catholic God, the Muslim God and at least one Hindu God.  I still count two of the men who lived in the monastery as brothers, and we speak of all of this often.  Through them, I’ve gained a passing acquaintance with Buddhism, the yoga of relationships—taught by Ram Dass— and the Hindu God Hanuman.  Hanuman, FYI, is portrayed as a big monkey, who delights in his separateness from Ram—he knows, see, that his service brings Ram happiness.

My girlfriend is my guru.  She serves the same function as the Brothers once did: that is, she is a mirror, reflecting back to me the conflictedness or placidity of my mind.  I don’t say these words lightly.  Not every person I’ve dated has been able to fulfill the function so clearly.  My girlfriend, as a person who processes things entirely in silence, echoes God more than most.  That is, she speaks when she speaks, and she’s quiet when she’s quiet, and my part is to trust that silence doesn’t denote crisis.

When I began wanting our relationship to become more intense, I wanted that to look a certain way.  Mostly I wanted to live closer to her: currently, a 45 minute negotiation of I-90 separated us, and it made seeing each other on week nights prohibitive.  I felt like we were in elementary school, friends separated by distance whose parents could only drive to each other’s houses on the weekends.  I wanted to see her on a Tuesday, for Christsakes.

Then one day, walking into a Chili’s for what was unfortunately the most lavish date night I could afford at the time, the question became an answer.  Quite simply, the ways I’d envisioned of moving forward with her seemed increasingly inaccessible.  I watched their remoteness grow, then I consciously gave them up.  After that moment, when I opened the door to Chili’s for her, I knew I didn’t have to make up the way forward, that it would reveal itself to us, and we’d negotiate it together.

About 6 months after that—by this time we were living in a small apartment in a Northwest suburb of Chicago,  She was ill and I ran out for essentials: sprite and ice cream, and other “sicky foods” that are, by now, standards shopping list items in a time of illness.  I was tired from the work day, and was feeling more needy than I would have liked.  As I walked into the Jewel, a thought formed clearly in my head.  Hanuman revels in his separateness from Ram.  And getting ice cream for my girlfriend was temporarily a little bit less warm and fuzzy than normal, but the distance was part of love, and I felt it no less intensely for the miles.

As I paid for the sicky foods, my memory was brought back to the Gerasene Demoniac.  Hanuman and Ram had conspired to help me remember Jesus. And Hanuman and Ram had conspired to form in me something that Christianity, on its own, had not: the understanding, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote, that “Union Individuates.”  Love makes romantics more placidly separate, even as it brings them together.

These days, the love undergirding my words is green-eyes incarnate; she’s quiet and kind and much funnier than I.  It took Ram, one Monkey God, one Messiah, and 38 years of patience to realize that, if God is everywhere, no distance can stray outside that love.  What the days come from and return to, I try to find the right words for. All will be well, in the end: see, as preaching becomes practice, quiet has green eyes as well.

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The Rights to Being Right: Religious Belief Versus Being with God

I can remember the day:  it was sunny, and windy enough for the long ends of my scapular, the hood that formed my habit’s outermost component, to whip around like a wind sock.  I was making my way along the sidewalk that abuts Mepkin Abbey's senior wing, stewing on a difference of opinion I was having with one of the brothers.  I don’t remember what it was about.  Only that I was troubled by it.

Suddenly I was confronted by a capital-T Truth.  To this day it guides my choices:  At some point, I realized, holding exclusive rights to the Truth and living with others are mutually exclusive.  Those who are totally right, I saw, usually end up alone.  And so would I, if I wasn’t careful.  I will always remember the words of Brother Vincent:  “Everyone is right, and everyone is wrong.”  If we think anything else, he said, we’ll drive ourselves nuts.

Belief is permanently filtered, for me, through the lens of prayer.  The prayer journey is self-emptying, as life itself is.  The apostles failed, Jesus failed, and prevailing messianic hopes failed before Christianity found its footing in earnest.  I have failed in the name of religious zeal, and it modifies the strength of my intellectual adherence to any particular creed.  As a person with mild tendencies to obsessive-compulsive thought patterns, my own forcefulness has exhausted me, turned belief in selfish, self-protective directions.  This cuts me off from God and others, as often as I let it have its head.

Robin Williams, the only celebrity whose death I ever truly mourned, said “I used to think that the worst thing in life was to end up alone. It's not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel alone.”  That’s true, and I have taken it a step further.  The worst-est thing, I would argue, is to believe things that isolate me, then believe that isolation to be God’s will. 

Since realizing this, I found it to be true of both individual and corporate belief.  So I am over-sensitive, I think, to any form of organizational coercion.  In former times Church has been strong in proclaiming not only that Christ is the definitive revelation, but that its own way is a privileged, if not the exclusive way to God.  

One day, during a period of early morning class prep, I had a thought about this that scrambled my perspective: there may be one path for me, I mused, but there are certainly many paths for God.  If we acknowledge that it’s not our job to force God’s will on another, we can assert the primacy of Christ while remaining pluralist enough to share the sandbox well with others.  We can say there’s one way for us without, on God’s behalf, trying to demean another person’s way.  

To see things from this divine flip-side puts my own beliefs on their heads.  Ghandi said something like “I used to believe that God is love.  Now I believe Love is God.”  I’ve experienced something like that.  Before I entered the monastery, I believed Jesus saved me.  Now I believe that what saves me is Jesus.

This stands to reason.  In architecture, form follows function.  So, too, for the living stones that comprise God’s building: what began as a love of cruciform buildings gets internalized.  A helpful term here is “Cathexis—” in short, the process of internalization. What was once a being or a maxim outside of us, moves inside us and becomes something self-knowledge alone can unlock.  In the evolution of the soul, God becomes the love he gives.  In our life with others, Christ becomes what saves.  

The Church’s beliefs are evolving in a similarly more inclusive direction too.  “Outside the church there is no salvation” used to mean you had to be Catholic to go to heaven.  The second Vatican council flipped it on its head.  If someone has been saved, it’s because of Christ.  The only further move I would make is to equate Christ with “conscience.”  If slippery slopes are a concern, Christians could avoid concerns of relativism by saying that Christ is anything that conscience reveals that serves a good and unitive purpose.  It would explain why both salvation and revelation are opening up to the wisdom of other traditions.  The catechism says that “non-believers” can be saved by following their consciences.  It also says paying attention to the bits of wisdom in other traditions is, for Catholics, compulsory.  I hold this precept close to my heart. Without Buddhism, I’d never have learned the strains of Catholicism that led me to the monastery.

I was raised Catholic. To be a Catholic, there are about 5 beliefs with which one has to be on board. (Belief in the Father, The Son, The Spirit, The Church, and a catch-all clause about baptism, sin, resurrection and everlasting life).  

I still count myself a Catholic.  A gluten allergy has relativized the importance of the Eucharist and my years of consistent prayer practice have interrupted my need to equate self with belief.  As I live in less and less denial of the fear that drives egotism, some of the energy belief supplied has diminished too.  Who I am depends less and less on markedly Catholic thought processes; being involves believing, but doesn’t depend on it.  

Brad Warner, author of “There is no God, and He is Always with You” says something like “People ask me if I believe in God.  That depends what they mean by words like ‘I’ and 'believe' and ‘God’”  For my part: I don’t know who I am.  And I’ve wrecked belief by divinizing my Ego, and doing so till recognizing true divinity would be difficult at best.  I agree: it also depends on what people mean by belief.  I intellectually buy many of the things said about God in Catholicism.  But I intellectually buy many of the things said about God in Judaism and Islam.  I intellectually buy many of the things said about the transcendent causes that drive Buddhism and membership in AA.  Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, AA and Buddhism have all impacted the direction of my life significantly.  I will admit not knowing what belief truly is, and how the intellectual adherence I give to Catholicism is different than that I give to Buddhism and Islam.  I openly doubt intellectual adherence to be the most important part of faith.

My journey has led me to a single assertion: that religious belief is one thing, trust in God another.  It has made me an anthropological absolutist: that is, it’s true that there are basic life-facts, universal human truths.  This, in my view, is true for all: when seen through the stained glass window of the human condition, questions of being are questions of transcendence.  Of the many paths in which God could potentially come to us, each of us will progress toward God in only one circuitous way.   But it’s not true that one way is better for all people.  The movement mentioned above, in which the “form” of a belief is determined and eclipsed by its “function,” is true here too.  God calls me to serve him and others in a particular way.  Not responding will make me miserable.  And if I don’t know what God calls me to, it will suffice simply not to do or believe things that make me miserable.

These days I believe in humility, mercy and non-attachment.  I cherish religious content that conveys that message, regardless of the tradition through which it comes.

Humility marks the life of one who trusts God.  Trust is formed when teachers, disciples and philosophies fail, and the disciple still has to wake up the next morning, put on his pants one leg at a time, and continue the business of living.  To the humble, God supplies more right-questions than he does right-answers.  There’s an egotistical security that’s lost there.  I have  often wished wholesale denial of my pride was still possible for me.  As it is, I am aware enough of my pride to make me unsure of myself, oblivious enough to occasionally have to eat my hat.

Mercy's a disposition of the religiously healthy.  To say I believe, or to argue about the finer points of religious practice certainly suffices the human need for ego-stroking.  In order to convince me it also serves the purpose of the Transcendent,  since a tree is known by its fruit, religious belief would have to lead to mercy and arguing would have to bring about visible good.  Evil is as slippery a pitfall to a saint as to a bodhisattva.  Through mercy, God uses our well formed consciences to break down the false distinctions we’ve made about God, others and ourselves.  

Non-attachment is the identifying characteristic of one upon whom prayer has done its work.  I know the visible good that deep meditation causes, but to me those benefits are just as available or avoidable to a Catholic as they are a Buddhist.  It was a Buddhist who taught me that a man whose steps are heavy experiences his beliefs as heavy too.  It was buddhism that taught me: a Catholic who slams doors has not yet experienced the quiet of contemplation.

I would rather be wrong in community than right and alone.  I believe in God, but I don’t know who I am, who God is or whether the mechanics of belief are really working in me.   Pundits and saints have said a supplicants’ prayers eventually yield to God: God prays in our hearts, and we listen.  I hope that he’s the one driving what belief I have left, that I listen well, that we can sit together in the end, laughing.

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I think, therefore I am who I'm not: A Pageantry of Useless Answers

At its most chaotic, life is a contest. And if the “world’s shittiest buddhist” contest were anything like “Miss America,” Descartes would win.  Yeah, definitely Descartes.  In the portion of the pageant when he stood, evening gowned and answering questions, when Steve Harvey asked him about the meaning of life, Descartes would say “I think therefore I am.”  As the next contestant, I’d have thrown shade at Descartes from the wings.  

In my earlier days, I’d have agreed with him.  I couldn’t dance or field a baseball to save my life, so I identified with my mind.  If being and reason were synonymous, at least I knew I existed.  By and by, my intellect became a liability though: I entered the monastery complaining that “I lived in my head” and earned the Abbot’s praise for my self-knowledge.  While monking it up, my growing acquaintance with Buddism changed my tune: wielding the few bits of Eastern wisdom at my disposal, I’d have asserted the proper response was “I think therefore I think.”  It turns out, though, to be still more complicated. 

Descartes was right about the tendency to equate a certain kind of being with thought, but he was wrong to think it anything but perilous.  I know this because I built, nourished,  and named a persona, who wore my scent, who used my words, who kept my face expressionless.  His name was Brother M. Dismas Warner, OCSO.  I know Dismas.  I watched him die.

One of my jobs in the monastery was assisting in the palliative care of dying monks.  This  ranks as one of the greatest graces of my life.  Francis, Laurence, Luke, Leonard, blessed Eddie, and Holy Greg—they all prepared the way.  When they died, they did it with unvarnished panache, and we buried them as Trappists are buried: straight in the dirt, no coffin.  For a Trappist, precious little stands between life and death, and they’re formed to know that from the word “go.”

When my turn came to let go, albeit in a different way, I did.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  

Let me talk about how “Brother Dismas” came to be.  I grew up with a mild disability, which left me mildly socially outcast, and mildly at odds with my body.  I acquired the nervous ticks of mild PTSD and a mild axe to grind.  I felt my feelings in rare, cathartic bursts and acted impulsively.  My upbringing was not shitty, but the needle on my security-ometer read “empty” just often enough, and it taught me to manipulate people to get my needs met.  I was—nay, I am—an affirmation slut.  

What I lacked in affirmation, God supplied, at first.  Prayer left me with insight after insight, and like a lonely little lab rat choosing crack over food, I kept pressing the buttons.  Insights gained in prayer were my gateway drug.  By the time I was 32, when I identified as an addict, I saw what I’d done.  I’d ridden a tide of alternating insight and resentment, identifying myself with the high points.  It was a maneuver prevailing spiritual wisdom reinforced.  Don’t make decisions in times of desolation, it says.  Follow your consolation, it says.

I did.  The flow of insights, and the occasional, paltry, altered-state of consciousness redirected my life.  I went from high point to high point, so consistent and confident in the practice that I assumed the name of one now-deceased.  “Brother M. Dismas Warner, OCSO.”

What I’d done was spiritualize my ego, then give it a name.  I followed a pattern many had followed before me.  St. Paul is chief among them. God had left him Torah-drunk and so attached to his own rectitude that he’d persecuted those who believed differently.  For Paul, Jesus solved self-deception.

Adult Children of alcoholics borrows a cautionary tale from AA:  don’t try to understand the reasons why you drink—or, in ACA: act impulsively, or manipulate to get your needs met—rather, just ask your higher power’s help in renouncing self-will.  This is a different narrative, one that, at the time I heard it, I sorely needed.  It argues that “admitting what we’re powerless over” is a healthier starting point than our mountain-top moments.  Whether “the bottle” masquerades as self-will or resentment, as manipulating or drinking or drugging, remembering I’m an addict is the key to not picking it up.  What the first step of ACA did for me, Jesus did for St. Paul: that is, deprive egotism of its religious clothing.  

Not until I’d been seven years a monk did I see that the identity was shot through with self-will: not until my abbot challenged my desire to profess solemn vows did the effort I spent on reinforcing my identity become apparent.  I decided, in short order, to stop making that effort.

I remember the moment it happened.  After the talk with the Abbot, I was in the monastic church.  In a blink of my mind’s-eye, I saw how all of the high points I’d used to build my identity had led me here.  I saw how I’d let go of everything that wasn’t a high point: my identity depended, more and more, on a continual rejection—even of everything good, when it didn’t play into my little narrative.  No one was in church with me, and I wasn’t privy to a blinding theophany.  There was simply a moment when I turned to face the abyss of doubt inside myself, then spoke to it: “If I let Dismas go, what will you use to guide me?”  

The “you” to whom I’d spoken must have had a capital “Y” because his answer came, and in a form I could recognize as transcendent.  But for a single thought, my head was quiet, and that single thought rang with wisdom.  Like Job, but in my own words, I had addressed whirlwind.  “What will you use to guide me?” I'd asked.  And the whirlwind had answered back, over and over: “EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING.  EVERYTHING.”

In the months that followed, I took off my monastic habit for good.  I left the monastery shortly thereafter.  Upon more closely examining the events of my leaving, I find a few things to be true.  I believed in, and we sometimes believe, as a people, in a god who isn’t God, but an idol of our own making.  I reduced belief, and perhaps we corporately reduce belief in God to the ability to analyze him.  And lastly, the person think I am, the person I think you are, neither of us is exactly as he seems to be.    

Nor is life a contest, as it seems to be.  But even if it is, Steve Harvey is instructive here.  All who hazard answering his questions are contenders for shittiest Buddhist.  At the point in my life when I would have agreed with Descartes, I was ignoring half the data of my life. These days, when I’m being pretentious, I would answer Steve’s question like this: “I think, therefore I am who i am not.  When I’m not thinking, I am.” I suppose, though, that this proves I’m no competition for Descartes, I’m just more verbose.  Probably there is no Tiara.  If life is a contest, I  might have to content myself with “Ms. Congeniality” at best.  Who knows, though?  In the end, even when life is the most illusory of pageants, sometimes Steve misreads the envelope.

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One Hand Clapping: A Round of Applause from a Teacher Who Became a Student

All teachers, perhaps to shore up their secret insecurities as educators, maintain a private list of favorite students.  My list includes, but isn’t limited to: the first student I ever had a secret handshake with, the only student ever to have his own “cheer”—his class and I did it with gusto—and the only section of freshman theology ever to declare themselves an autonomous planet, elect a president and secede from their north chicago high school.  We stopped short of armed rebellion.

I have another list: a list of students who became teachers to themselves, and in so doing, if only briefly, became teachers to me as well.  This post is the story of how that list began.

I went into education already frustrated with the field’s inadequacies.  Clinton-era educational reforms had reduced mastery to regurgitation of facts.  In the discipline of theology, they had reduced faith to knowledge of the articles of faith.  They had reduced "trust in God" to recalling orthodox tidbits about him, to be scribbled in blue books in exchange for red, chicken-scratched A’s.

With a healthy dose of guidance from sympathetic colleagues, I decided to teach Koans.  The unit's general subject was "conversion," and I wanted to teach my students that transformational process by guiding them through it.  I’d been a flunky as a monk, and knew only a bit about buddhism, but I needed to teach what happens when life gets hard and faith defies logic.  Koans could do that better than most western resources.  I settled on a "Koan" definition palatable to 9th graders: they’d be “illogical riddles that, in order to be answered, require the person attempting them to change.”

After a week of hammering out the particulars, I put a tempting prospect before the students.  There’s a way to get a perfect score on the unit's test without studying or taking a single note, I said.  A student could take it two ways: straight up, where correct answers would earn them points, or “as a koan.”  There was a “correct” way to answer the test as a Koan, and it would earn them an effortless 100 percent.  Incorrect answers to “the Koan” would earn them an immediate zero, and the burn of the risk blowing up in their faces. 

To my knowledge, I have, in my lifetime, answered two and a half Koans correctly.  From this experience I was able to identify steps of solving Koans, which might, if followed, yield results.

“Remember,” I told them, “Koans are illogical.  You cannot use logic to answer them.  Western people are so addicted to logic that they go absolutely deer-in-the-headlights in the face of Koans.  We’re actually afraid when things are illogical.  Can anyone tell me why that is?”

When Devin Murray spoke, it was without raising her hand and in open prediction of her future for the coming weeks.  “We’re afraid of illogical stuff” she said, “because we fear being wrong.”

For the first, and not the only time during the teaching of that unit, I was aghast at the speed with which the truth had vacated a cake-hole. “Absolutely, Devin, we’re afraid of being wrong.  So the first step of answering koans is, ‘admit your fear.’”

Then I introduced a Koan: “What is the sound of one hand, clapping?”  No one moved.  I called Tara Hagerty to the front of the room.  “Tara, the question I just asked you—please ask it to me.”

“Mr. Warner,” she said, “what is the sound of one hand, clapping?”

Careful with my body language, I raised a hand between us.  I gave it a moment to sink in.  Then I asked “What level of certainty, high or low, did my body language reflect?”  

“High” the class replied.

“Tara, how would my body language have changed if I was uncertain?”

“You would have raised your hand more tentatively.  There would have been a look on your face that showed doubt.”

“Except, if I get it wrong, I know y'all are gonna think I'm an idiot.  I’m just as afraid of being wrong as the next guy.  What was different?”  In the distance, crickets chirped.  “The second step is ‘make a decision to accept your fear.’”

I sent Tara to her seat, and called Jimmy Oddo to the front of the room, holding my open hand eye-level with his face.  “Jimmy, what do you hear?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he replied.

“Everyone always says that.  It’s because you’re trying to think of a logical answer.  The working of your mind is closing your ears.  Don’t let it do that.  I’m gonna hold up my hand again, this time tell me what you hear.”

He paused, briefly closing his eyes. “I hear the sound of traffic outside school, the vents in the classroom, and people shuffling at their desks.”

“Good” I said. “You just stopped listening with your mind, and started listening with your ears.  The third step to answering Koans is ‘answer with your body, not your mind.’”  I sent Jimmy to his seat.  “Now for the last step, I just have a question.  If I’m on the phone and I want to tell someone how to get to chicago, what do I use to do that?

Two guys in unison: “Words.”

“If they followed those instructions, it makes sense that they’d end up where?”

Three people, sporadic: “Chicago.”

“So answers with words are answers that make sense.  But Koans are illogical questions, with illogical answers.  What, then, can’t you use in the answer?”

Tara Hagerty: “You can’t use words” 

“The fourth step is ‘make a nonverbal response.’  When I was asked what ‘one hand clapping’ sounds like, raising my hand confidently was a nonverbal response.”

To end the day, we wrote the steps in our notebooks.  Treating the test as a koan would have to conform to the steps to be considered correct.

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I was not telling them this, but I had, in the back of my mind, an ideal response for “taking the test as a Koan” .  I never told them what it was.  We simply began equipping each class with the pieces they’d need to put it together themselves.  I showed the courtyard scene from Dead Poet’s Society.  This was the one where everyone goofy-walked, to buck the tendency to conform.  My students eventually pointed out that, by not “finding his own way to walk” as Robin Williams’ character instructed, the character Knox Overstreet had to overcome a fear of being wrong.

I played the Dead Poet’s Scene where they ripped up the textbooks because the introduction had tried to measure poems in words.  Poetry was like God, I said.  My students eventually got it: God could not be measured in words.

I read a buddhist master’s answer to a five year old, asking where her dead kitten went.  He struck the floor on which they sat cross-legged, teaching her to do the same at each deep question he posed.  My students eventually recognized: the five year old was making a nonverbal response.  

Signs of struggle and insight began to emerge.  Devin Murray had a small meltdown overflowing with transitional angst about how confused she was.  One day, I posed a Koan.  I said to the class “Every time you open your mouth, you’re wrong.”  Tara Hagerty, thoughtful but confident, opened her mouth.  I simply pointed.  “There!  Tara accepted her fear of being wrong, and made a non-verbal response!  Admitting your fear of being wrong, in this case, leads to correct answers.”  The students were making my job easy.

For homework, I’d told them to meditate 10 minutes each night.  Jimmy Oddo came to me one day and said “Mr. Warner, last night, I was meditating.  I realized it’s like listening to myself.  I haven’t figured out the Koan but I think I’m gonna keep doing this meditation thing.”

One day I gave a class about John of the Cross and the Cloud of Unknowing author, how they’d taught we wouldn’t get close to God by understanding him.  Mid lecture, Devin Murray yelped. “I GET IT!”

After class, I called her over, “What do you think the answer is, Devin?”  She told me.  I didn’t confirm it, I just told her to follow the steps and trust herself.  “Illogical questions,” I said, “aren’t answered by reason.  They’re answered by realization.”

On the day of the test, students entered the room abuzz with nerves.  There were a range of responses, all of which placed the serenity of the confident alongside the fidgeting of the doubtful.  Not all attempted the test as a Koan, and some of those who did received zeros.

There wasn’t one answer. Everyone who followed the steps, passed the test as a Koan.  Jimmy Oddo, Tara Hagerty and Devin Murray all took the route that risked grand and spectacular failure, and received immediate full points for their responses.  I could not have been prouder, and probably wore too much of that pride on my face, despite myself.   Everyone who didn’t follow the steps, after the big “reveal” later that week, was given the opportunity to correct their answers.

Tara Hagerty, after the test, said “This is the first unit you’ve taught us where absolutely everything made sense.”  I thanked her, secretly abashed that my presentations of more logical content were missing the mark that often.

To this day, I have no stronger example of students looking inside themselves, and facing their fear to find answers.  And to this day, I have never been more grateful for the questions I found in myself. 

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