Our Sangha Rocks

I grew up in an Evangelical-Fundamentalist Christian home and my father was always a church leader in one form or another, from deacon to assistant pastor. Whenever ugly politics got in the way of his ministry my mom would say, “People don't come to church because they’re healed, they come because they hurt and when a sick person goes into a room full of people with weak immune systems it becomes an infirmary. But remember, Honey, we’re all one in the Holy Spirit.”

As a Zen Buddhist I have translated my mom’s sentiment to: “We sit in the Zendo as one but after the final bell all hell can break loose when we open our mouths as we put are shoes back on in the foyer.”

This practice would be a lot easier if there were only two of the Three Treasures, the Buddha and the Dharma. I could simply meditate alone in my home every morning in front of my statue of the Buddha, read books on Buddhism at night, and live piously knowing I had life all figured out.

The problem is the pesky third treasure, the Sangha. As soon as I start sharing space with others around that Buddha statue they become a constant reminder that maybe I don't have life all figured out, but they think they do. And this becomes a battle of wills. And we find all sorts of “logical” reasons why the other is wrong and I am right.

When I was a child we called other people not of our faith, secular, and lived by the mantra, “We are to be in the world but not of it.” There was much security being within the thick granite walls of dogma, but as I grew, the lies, deceit, and hypocrisy within those walls fractured my heart into rubble. The fire of community had burned my faith to ash.

When I left home at eighteen for college in 1986, I swore I would never be part of a religious community again. By 1988 I had a double major in English literature and religious studies and shifted from the born again beliefs of my childhood, to a pushy “born again” atheist, to a polite agnostic, to a student of Eastern and Western mysticism. I started a meditation practice on my own.

I had opened space up again for spirit but kept the door of my heart locked tight on spiritual community. Religious study consumed me, but only as an academic through the tomes on my bookshelf. It never occurred to me to travel to places like India. That just seemed like a great deal of bother and diarrhea. I sat on my own and I read a lot of Thomas Merton, Allen Watts, and Trungpa Rinpoche. I preferred my teachers dead.

This was my practice for ten years until 1998 when I was hit with a crisis. It came to me in sitting one morning that I was stuck. I needed to be pushed. I needed a place where I could sit for weeks, not minutes. But that would require a support system and meant finding a religious community. It felt like I was once again entering a fire only this time to sit willingly.

I researched and eventually found Vipassana meditation as taught by S. N. Goenka and went to a 12-day retreat in North Fork, California. It was sort of a community / anti-community conveyor belt style meditation retreat complete with DVD Dharma talks. Strangers moved through a rigorous monastic schedule together alone covered with a blanket of conduct codes that included a vow of silence. I loved it. I came and went to these retreats when I wanted and was nice to everyone but knew no one. Goenka may have been alive, but he was far away as I watched the recording of him teach on TV.

Still, Sangha was beginning to warm my cool academic exterior and get back under my skin. I see now that by meditating with others I did indeed begin to enter the fire. In the middle of my first silent retreat there was a guy in my cabin that made my blood boil every time I saw him. He really pissed me off. The problem was that I had never spoken to him and we had never really had an interaction. How could I hate a guy I hadn’t even met? My projection onto this man was so obvious it hurt. With nothing to keep it attached to him, after a few days, the anger snapped back into my own heart. And that hurt even more. My heart had been cracked opened to the realization that I was using my conflicts with others as means of not dealing with the conflicts within myself.

Today, the Sanghas of Phoneix, SLC, and beyond hold a prominent role in my life and my teacher, Genpo Roshi, is very much alive and well. I find myself grounded within community once again, my heart right in the middle of those flames. At times I feel the lies and deception and hypocrisy; but more often, I feel the warmth of the Sangha, which opens me to love, the sacred beauty of awe, and the truth of vulnerability among us.

All religion, and by association, all religious communities are a combination of the divine and the absurd, but through our connection with each other, in Sangha, we can learn to live the middle way of including and transcending those extremes.

Be it Dharma brothers and sisters or brothers and sisters in Christ we are all family.

I have heard that Maezumi Roshi used to call the community within the LA Zen Center a rock tumbler where everyone bumped and crashed into each other until they became smooth and shiny. I like that metaphor.

In the past, I avoided community because I saw it as a place where eventually everyone knocks into one another, chipping and cracking each other until we break. But in life we are always smashing into each other whether we want to or not.

In a spiritual community where there is a foundation of practice, insight, and a collective orbit our inevitable collisions become part of the practice, not a reason to stop practicing. Without Sangha we just feel cracked; within Sangha we are cracked open.