All Apologies
2016
I’ve had a twitter account for 8 years or so. I don’t have any other active social media accounts and only one twitter profile. I am by no means a power user as the following will affirm. Until recently I kept on bumping up against a 2000 ‘following’ limit which has something to do with the amount of my followers and how often I post, etc. My ‘followings’ are an eclectic bunch of tech, cycling, left and right wing US politics and a group which I think of as anti prohibition.
I largely use twitter from my phone so really haven’t explored much the making of lists etc. Recently I resurrected a tweetdeck account and started using it on my Macbook. Also I signed up for a free list management thing - Twitlistmanager. It is fairy straightforward - click boxes to ad to a list. I went through and pruned out about 500 nonactive accounts and tried to but the remaining in sensible lists. In doing so I put a few folks intended for “SocialIssues” into “Buddhism”. One person with an East Asian surname tweeted me back curious as to why I would put them in “Buddhism” when they in no way tweet about the subject. The exchange was very light-hearted, she was kind and made jokes about it but I felt like crap. She asked ‘why Buddhism?’’ and explained she was if anything nominally Catholic. I fumbled an idiotic response.
She is somebody who I have never met but really respect from what I have gathered from her writing and podcasts. A person who speaks truth or at least a truth. And is brave. I cringed and thought about my mistake through dinner. Concocting an imaginary conversation with someone who I in no way knew.
Honestly, I have no association with them as Buddhist. It was a case of clicking boxes in the the wrong row on this app.
One idea I have absorbed from twitter over the past year or so is the idea that one needs to acknowledge racism/sexism/etc even if it is unintentional. So I am sorry for not being more careful in setting up my lists and making a dumb association. I cringe thinking about how stupid that is. I try explicitly not to act or think in such ways…
And yet by intentionally trying hard to avoid such ugliness sometimes you back right into it.
I am a ‘nominal Catholic’ as well. My interest in Buddhism is through that lens. I grew up first reading Thomas Merton on the lessons to be learned from Buddhist monastics. Then I read just about anything I could find on the subject. Suzuki, Watts, translations of Sutras, then Taoist works, later Tibetan Book of the Dead. I found records of Zen temple bells and chants.
I read Buddhist texts in part as a rebellious thing to do in my all boys catholic high school. A Benedictine monk sat me down with my list of library books and asked me about my interest, not so much in a threatening way, more curious. In truth such an interest, bred in suburban northern Jersey, was full of fuzzy orientalism and mashed up with other distortions.
It is an old story of growing up in suburban splendor and dying to get as diametrically opposite as you can.
I have been lucky to travel some in Vietnam and Mongolia and live for a few years in Korea. I am in no way an expert on Buddhism, or any culture other than American though.
And certainly, Buddhist temples and shrines were memorable. Many times in Korea I climbed mountains with friends knowing that there would be dwengjang chigae, kimchi and rice for lunch at a temple. More recently I spent a few days at a temple in the very south of Korea with my family. And in Mongolia very different and beautiful temples - closer in style to Tibetan buddhism.
So I have a real affection for Buddhism. This summer I read one of Rinpoche’s books on meditation and it really struck me. I started meditating alone or with my boys (and one in a while my wife). It has been good on a number of levels.
But as even a lapsed Catholic might agree, it never quite leaves you. When I try to still my mind to meditate the old Catholic prayers from childhood come to mind. So I love aspects of Buddhism and have internalized some of its lessons but am Catholic deep down. For better or for worse.
I have a lot of associations with Catholicism in Asia - mostly in Korea (but I spent a lovely afternoon in and around the Notre Dame Basilica in HoChiMin City).
In Korea I got mixed up with a group of Brothers and Sisters of Charity in Seoul served by priests of the Columban order. I loved the place and got to know my wife in the context of that place. It was residence for folks with serious mental and physical issues. We’d go on Sunday and help get things ready for mass. And then have lunch and volunteer around the place in the afternoon. I loved how everything happened in the same place, the same room was used for sleeping, eating, bathing and mass. It felt so simple and elementally true. I realized at the time this was the closest thing to true Catholicism that I had ever been even peripherally attached to. I knew some people part of the Catholic Worker in the east village and they do great stuff too. This little community in north Seoul was doing a similar ministry quietly and directly.
I don’t automatically associate ‘Asian’ with ‘Buddhist’ nor from living in NYC area associating all buddhists as being Asian.
So where does the guilty impulse come from? Why do I feel an urgency to explain, contextualize? Mansplain… Feck.
“Thinking of a key/ Each in his prison/ Thinking of a key/ Each confirms the prison…”
It is the same mechanism for other sources of guilt and behaviour which reinforces the guilt.
It is hard to let go and that is something the Catholic can learn from Buddhism. I read somewhere in the past few days how a Buddhist ethic is not so much hung up on right and wrong as much as avoiding actions which impede enlightenmnet. I am saying it wrong but the idea is more or less right.