Photo credits go to our own Lenny Reed. Thanks Lenny!

http://www.inquiringmind.com/Articles/SelfaholicsAnonymous.html

The Program for the event (subject to change) can be viewed at http://www.plummountain.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/PDC2010-Program-Draft052510.doc

The registration form may be downloaded at http://www.plummountain.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/PrisonDharmaConfReg-2010.pdf .

We’ve compiled a list of reasonable lodging options at http://www.plummountain.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/PortlandLodging.pdf.

Kevin Griffin:

Start Date: 2010-06-04
Start Time: 17:00
End Date: 2010-06-06
End Time: 13:00

At first glance, Christianity does not seem too helpful. For instance, Joseph is portrayed as a nice-enough older man who promises to fulfill his betrothal contract to a younger woman-even after discovering that she’s pregnant out of wedlock. Is Joseph Jesus’ father? Or foster father? Or step father?  He plays an ambiguous role, and it’s not much help for those of us trying to be good fathers.

In patriarchal societies it’s not surprising that God would be portrayed as the ultimate Father Figure. But this old testament God sometimes seems irritable and capricious, putting favorite sons like Abraham through hell by-among other things-asking him to kill his own beloved son, Issac (Genesis 22:1-19). Saved at the last moment, Isaac goes on to father the people of Israel and Abraham is still considered the Patriarch of all the monotheisms. But the Hebrew scripture is littered with dysfunctional father-son relations: Solomon and David, David and Absalom, Nun and Joshua are just a few that come to mind. So is all this religious history proving James Joyce right?

Not quite.

In Islam, Abraham is considered the first one to submit (islam) to the One God. But Muhammad himself is an orphan who is taken under the patronage of one of his uncles and goes on to marry a wealthy, older business woman-always a good strategy for an orphan. He becomes her business partner as well as her husband. And it is here that we get a hint of the kind of ad hoc fathering or mentoring that we see in many religious traditions. For example, Joshua is mentored by the aging Moses, who is not his biological father. They were so important to each other that Jewish tradition says “the face of Moses was as the face of the sun, and the face of Joshua as the face of the moon.”

There are examples of this ad hoc fathering or mentoring from other religious traditions. The Buddha pardoned and ordained the serial killer known as Angulimala, whose name means “finger bone necklace,” referring to the rosary of human finger bones he wore around his neck. The other monks in the Order were furious at the Buddha for doing this. But Buddha went against their wishes, renaming Angulimala as Ahimsa (“Harmless”). But what’s interesting to me is that the Venerable Ahimsa was the only monk in the order that the Buddha addressed as “My Son”-even though his own biological son, Rahula, was also a monk.

In my own youth, which coincided with the early years of television, we had media fathers like Robert Young in Father Knows Best, Ozzie Nelson in Ozzie and Harriet or Ward Cleaver in Leave it to Beaver. All these media father figures were sensible, even-tempered and well dressed men who were kind to children and animals and who kept their hands to themselves by sleeping in separate beds from their lovely, even-tempered, well-dressed wives. But they little resembled the fathers who populated our block when I was young. These men got drunk quite often; they yelled at their wives and children, they chain smoked and watched boxing on the Friday nights.

My own father was nothing like Ozzie or Ward either. His own father and grandfather and great-grandfather had all been alcoholics. He was packed off to Episcopal boarding schools when he was very young. I don’t mean to be spilling all the family secrets, it’s just that I know I was not the only one in my generation who was not living under the gentle reign of Ward Cleaver.

The poet Robert Bly has written about what he calls the “male mother,” that is, a male figure in a young man’s life who can be nurturing and supportive, a male who the young man does not have to compete against or overthrow, as in the classical Oedipal paradigm. I can think of older men who did this for me: professors or work supervisors who encouraged me, appreciated me and showed me the ropes of the worlds of university and career. I loved some of these men as much, or more, than I did my biological father, and I would not have survived vocationally or spiritually without them.

We desperately need men to start acting as mentors and nurturing guides to the young men among us. As fathers some of us have not done so well with our biological children, but there is always grandparenthood and the spirit-infused role of male mother, a force that young men need in their lives if they are to become warriors in the deep spiritual sense of that word. Native American wisdom can have the last word on this: “A young man who can’t dance is a savage; an old man who can’t laugh is a fool.”

By Kobai Scott Whitney

One of the things Berry recalled was the ironic fact that both slaves and slave owners were of the same faith, and sometimes sat in the same small rural churches attending the same services-though seated separately, of course. “How do you get to heaven?” Berry asks rhetorically, “Well, … you get there by obeying the moral imperatives of the Scripture, by loving one another ‘in deed and in truth.’ But the churches, with their strong ties to the pocketbooks of racists, felt obliged to see it another way: the way to heaven was by faith; one got there by believing.

“When the ministers of these churches turned their attention to the world,” Berry adds, “they did so with the puritanical passion of St. Paul, violently opposing such ’sins’ as drinking, failure to attend church and ‘immorality’-sins of somewhat questionable status in the first place, and which the church found it easy enough both to condemn and to live with.”

This fury for belief is one of the core properties of fundamentalism, whether we are talking about Muslims or Catholics, Buddhists or Baptists. Remember that the conservative Romans considered the early Christians to be atheists, because they did not honor the Roman gods. But even the Romans did not require belief, just a few bows and scrapes toward the gods of Rome. The Greeks were sometimes openly skeptical about their own gods, yet they went on inventing them and borrowing them from neighboring cultures. For them, any force that had more power than a human being and that outlasted a human lifetime was a god. So there were gods of storms and of love, of the sea and of the sun.

The monotheisms took the opposite tack, beginning first with the idea that there is only One God and, if there are any good qualities in the world, then He (He’s always a He) has them. Thus we get formulas like “God is love.” But each monotheism saw this Supreme He as belonging only to them and condemned those who were outside their fold. We are chosen; you are not! Among some, this still goes on today.

Yet we need to find it within ourselves to respect the values of those who do not believe. Many kind and thoughtful people do not believe in God. In fact, a recent poll shows 15% of Americans having no religion at all and another 12% who say they believe in a “higher power,” but not the personal, creator God of the monotheisms.

A very simple study done close to home points at a curious fact. The Oregon Department of Corrections did a study to evaluate the effectiveness of religious programming in its prisons. They compared the religious preference declared by inmates on entry into the system. Then they looked at the number of disciplinary infractions these prisoners incurred over a period of several years.

Now, which religious preference would you guess had the least behavioral problems? It was not the Quakers or the Buddhists, not the Lutherans or the Native Americans, it was-drum roll please-the atheists.

What on earth can this mean? This is only a guess, but it might be that atheists and agnostics have spent a lot more time thinking about metaphysical and ethical issues. It may mean that they have realized-as have some believers-that we are most likely to survive as a species only if we stop considering those who do not believe as we do to be the Enemy. It’s just my guess, but perhaps the non-believers have re-discovered in their own lives the ethical imperatives that our churches turned their backs on in the wounding times of slavery.
By Kobai Scott Whitney

This column first appeared in the “Faces of Faith” section of the The Daily World on 21 March 2009

Mindfulness & Busy-ness

A Half-Day Seminar/Retreat

9:30 a.m. to 2:00 p.m.

1519 E. Cataldo, #1

Spokane, WA 99202

The workshop is focused on how we can apply the Buddhist practices of mindfulness to our over-committed, stressed-out lifestyles.

The facilitator is Kobai Scott Whitney, a long-time Buddhist meditation teacher, writer and chaplain. Kobai is the author of numerous articles in Buddhist publications such as Tricycle, Buddhadharma and Shambhala Sun. He is also author of the book, Sitting Inside: Buddhist Practice in American Prisons

The seminar will include an introduction to the context and techniques of applying mindfulness to daily life. Kobai will demonstrate several forms of sitting, walking and movement meditation that can become part of a daily contemplative practice.

Experience in Buddhist meditation is not required and people of any faith (or no faith) are welcome to attend.

There is no fee, however, there will be an opportunity for dana, or free-will offering, at the end of the day.

For further information, email: kobai@plummountain.org. Or you may call Kobai for further information at 360.590.4535.