Monday, May 27, 2013

New Seeds Priory...in a nutshell.


This past Sunday at New Seeds Priory, we were visited by two gentlemen (a couple), who stayed after the conclusion of our Contemplative Celtic Eucharist service and shared some conversation with me.  I had met one member of this couple when I stopped by a local dharma center to introduce myself and share information about the Priory.  After visiting the Priory website, he and his partner decided to join us for services.  During our after-Eucharist conversation, the second member of this couple asked some very weighty, insightful questions…I felt a little as if I were being interrogated.  But I took it all as an opportunity to clarify and articulate just what it is this New Seeds Priory is all about with someone who was perhaps genuinely seeking a meaningful community in which to participate and find place and have a voice.  It was a good conversation.  It wasn’t until the end of this conversation that this fellow revealed himself to be a retired episcopal priest!

He emailed me today to thank me for sharing service and for entertaining his salvo of questions.  (I think I passed the test!)  

What follows is an excerpt from my email reply to this retired priest.  I share it with you because it offers what I hope is a clear and concise explanation of what I want New Seeds Priory to be about…

“One thing I would like to share with you about my Christian-Buddhist practice that didn’t segue into our conversation is my understanding of the Diamond Sutra, or at least one portion of the Diamond Sutra.  The sutra is a dialogue of question and responses between Buddha and the disciple Subhuti (much like our exchange on Sunday!).  In one exchange, Buddha explains to Subhuti, ‘That which you call the Highest Truth, may not be the Highest Truth.  It is only what you conceive of as the Highest Truth, therefore you call it the Highest Truth.’

“In a nutshell, I take this to mean that no matter what we think of as the highest truth, it is still only our conceptualization of what the highest truth is.  As a Christian, I see that this teaching is true of almost everything the Church has offered me as “the truth”.  As Christians, we have a two thousand year inheritance of other people’s conceptualization of “the highest truth”, from Paul to the Gospel Authors all the way to today, with each author or commentator interjecting their own political, theological, or societal agendas.  I’ve come to see that no matter how much authoritative weight one wishes to throw behind biblical scripture, it’s still just someone else’s conceptualization of God and of the teachings of Jesus.  If I’ve learned anything in my few years of study and experiment, it is that God is ineffable and well beyond my finite conceptualization, and that my conceptualizations are a means of putting God in a neat little box.  How can God fit in my box or anyone else’s box?  (For our sharing on Easter Sunday here at the Priory, I offered my point of view on the Easter story as an allegory for how God, no matter how we may try to conceptualize God, will not be contained by our boxes!)  

“The practice of Buddhism, Zen in particular, is to have an experience; a direct, clear, awake, experience.  Mindfulness training is about becoming fully awake and fully present with the reality of each moment, without conceptualization, without agenda, without a preconceived meaning or outcome.  In this regard, the practice of Zen is not a ‘religion’, but rather a practice of empirical spirituality.

“So what I hope I’m doing is creating a space at the Priory where people can feel free and comfortable in letting go of their theological boxes and move beyond the theological conceptualization they were given by ‘the church’.  I want people to feel free to drop their doctrinal conditioning and engage in an experiment and have their own direct, empirical experience of ‘the highest truth’.  To do this, I hope to open a door for people to participate with Christianity not as a list of doctrinal ‘beliefs’, but as a spiritual practice.  A practice grounded in humility, love, service, forgiveness, and mercy.  I like to think that Dietrich Bonhoeffer was headed in this direction when he speaks of ‘New Monasticism’ and ‘Religion-less Christianity’.  Participating as a ‘New Monastic’ with the Lindisfarne Community is my way of experimenting and hopefully making a small contribution to continuing some of his work.” 
 
I am wishing you a pleasant and cool evening,

fr. Scott+ 

 

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Reeboot: May 2013


It’s certainly been a while since I last posted a blog…but I have gone through some good changes lately that have opened up some time for me to get back into the habit.  So starting today I begin cultivating a discipline of making regular entries.

So let me begin by briefly getting you updated on current goings-on…

I met a wonderful woman to share my life with.  Her name is Emma Churchman.  She is a Quaker by tradition of origin and continues to practice in that community.  She very happily graduated from seminary in May of this year with her M.Div. from Earlham School of Religion, a Quaker seminary in Indiana.  She completed her first unit of CPE at Rutherford Hospital and is now in her first leg of a CPE Chaplain Residency at the hospital in Johnson City, TN.  Emma is also a Shaman, and works with clients and groups in spiritual direction as “the Quaker Shaman”.  Emma is awesome and I am happy to share life together with her.

We have a small farm cottage in Black Mountain, NC where we care for our two dogs: Noah, Emma’s older Black Lab/Rottweiler mix, and our young rascal Eadmünd, who is half Dachshund half bunny rabbit.  Very cute, but very obstinate.

We are trying our hand a gardening this year for the first time.  It’s still early to report on, but the radishes seem to be doing very well.

As for myself, I am very, very happy and content.  I bailed on that chaplain residency in Spartanburg, SC.  Being a chaplain in the rural south just isn’t a paradigm in which I feel supported or empowered.  I had a really hard time in Spartanburg trying to orient myself and discover my pastoral identity in that community.  Ultimately, because I am neither Baptist nor Pentecostal, I could not.  So I left.  Which was a difficult decision to make, breaking a commitment, abandoning my 3 other residents; but the experience there was really sucking the life out of me (financially and spiritually), and I felt it was necessary for my personal, emotional and spiritual survival that I extricate myself form the environment.  In the end, the decision was a good one.

I left the hospital and took a job at a doctor’s office starting off as a phlebotomist and winding up as the Clinical Coordinator for the practice.  I like it…I’m relied upon, I’m respected, I like the work that I do, and the best part is I’m only there three days per week.  Dropping to part time was another good decision.  The only bad part was the significant decrease in take-home pay which give cause for some creative budgeting.  But I am significantly less stressed.  I rest well, I have time to do more self-care and maintain our country cottage and property.  But most importantly, I have adequate time for ministry…meditating, networking, reading, blogging (as you can see), and specifically the ministry of cultivating a Christian-Buddhist contemplative practice community, the seeds of which I planted last year with my Abbot +Andy at my Lindisfarne Community retreat in June 2012. 

I call the community “New Seeds Priory” in homage to Thomas Merton, my monastic hero.  We are just getting started.  I have been slowly spreading the word about the community with flyers, word-of-mouth, free ads in community newspapers, etc.  Earlier this week I gave an interview on a local independent radio station for a program about spirituality.  And I am stepping up efforts at networking with local Episcopal clergy, exploring opportunities to lead retreats or workshops, or just let folks know I exist.  It is slow work, and the challenge is to resist the natural feelings of discouragement and simply keep practicing and letting go of conceptualizations of how things “ought” to be.

New Seeds Priory has a website:   www.newseedspriory.weebly.com     Please visit. 

And please do me a favor and help spread the word if you know anyone who is interested.

One last important thing to share is my “official” transition to practicing Zen as my primary meditation & spiritual practice.  Just before the Lindisfarne Retreat I mentioned earlier, I paid a visit to my Tibetan Buddhist teacher and explained to him what was going on in my life and how I had discovered that Zen Buddhist training was a much better practice for me.  He agreed and encouraged me to take up the practice of Zen.  My Spiritual Director, himself a former Carthusian Monastic and also a Zen teacher encouraged me in the same way.  I am happy to have found Jules Shuzen Harris Sensei, director of Soji Zen Center in Lansdowne, PA, and he has taken me as a formal student.  I am engaging in Koan study and making trips to visit Shuzen sensei and the Soji Sangha as often as I can.  This practice is good for me.

So that’s about it for today.  I just wanted to get the world updated to the goings-on of ol’ Scott Elliott.

I will be posting more in the near future and hope a few people will be interested in tuning in.

Be well,

Scott+