Review: Lila by Marilynne Robinson

I have just finished reading Marilynne Robinson's last novel, Lila, and as with each of her previous novels, I am freshly and thoroughly gobsmacked.

It's a stupendously ambitious novel, wrestling with the great questions of existence - as in, Why?  What possible meaning does any of this have?  What is the point of all this?  And of course, what kind of God allows such withering suffering?

Poignantly, and with breathtaking assurance, Robinson answers these questions by telling a story about what happens when guilt meets love, grace meets dread, shame meets mercy, and a natural atheism meets a faith that precedes words or thought.  

Brilliantly, Robinson takes on these questions not from the perspective of a theologian or a preacher, but from the barely literate perspective of Lila - a neglected and abused child who manages to survive the Depression as a homeless migrant laborer, a prostitute, and finally, as the unlikely young wife of an elderly preacher.  

Robinson's genius is her ability to communicate abstract and nuanced theological ideas by eschewing abstraction almost entirely.  Her vivid poetic imagery communicates the truth beneath all words or conscious knowing.  Her Lila is not educated, but she is devastatingly insightful.  The reader is swept into her wondering world, and finally, into her understanding, with just the right amount of interpretive help given by John Calvin and her "old man" preacher/husband, John Ames - Robinson's worthy stand-in for God.

Robinson has studied Calvin deeply, and has become his modern-day apologist.  At a writer's conference I attended a few years ago, she addressed the many ways in which Calvin had been misunderstood, and argued for a fresh reading of his astonishing mystical depth.  I, and many of my companions at the conference, were surprised by her direct and unabashed apologetics.  I never studied Calvin deeply, having swallowed the liberal "party line" on him - that he was severely judgmental and rigidly dogmatic.  (I mean, after all, his most famous work was called Church Dogmatics!  Nuf said!)  But Robinson may be one of the few beings on the planet intelligent enough to drill through Calvin's abstractions to mine his great mystical treasures - and in her fiction, she communicates, through astonishing poetic imagery, not only the experience of God's grace, but a sensible representation of exactly how it all makes sense.  This is a literary and theological achievement of a very high order. I can think of no one, short of John Updike, who has translated dry theology into such powerful literature.

Students of Zen, like me, will also be moved by passages like this, which sound like nothing short of Awakening. Robinson's depth of insight suggests that, when you follow authentic spiritual experiences to their ground, great traditions merge:

"Most of the time [Lila] thought she understood things better when she didn’t try. Things happen the way they do. Why was a foolish question. In a song a note follows the one before because it is that song and not another one. Once, she and Mellie tried to count up all the songs they knew. How could there be so many? Because every one was just itself. It was eternity that let her think this way. In eternity people’s lives could be altogether what they were and had been, not just the worst things they ever did, or the best things either. So she decided that she should believe in it, or that she believed in it already."

Passages like this give us delicious material to ponder for a lifetime. I've read and re-read Robinson's two other Gilead novels, and almost like Scripture, they have returned rich meaning with every return. I'm sure that will be the case for Lila as well.

Parable of the Sower: a Zen perspective

This is a beautiful meditation on the parable of the sower, from the perspective of a Zen teacher and a Christian pastor in Santa Rosa, David Parks-Ramage.  Very nicely done, David!

A Sower, Seeds and Soil
Meditation, Wednesday, June 10, 6:30 pm

“Listen! A sower went out to sow. 4 And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path, and the birds came and ate it up. 5 Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and it sprang up quickly, since it had no depth of soil. 6 And when the sun rose, it was scorched; and since it had no root, it withered away. 7 Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain.8 Other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and  yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.” 9 And he said, “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!”


One of the great joys I have as a Christian and a Zen teacher is stumbling on parables of Jesus that read like koans.Such is the case today with Jesus’ parable of a Sower, Seeds and the Soil. Whenever Jesus spoke a parable, he was teaching folks about the realm of God or we could say he was pointing to the fullness of life, to  the way things are.  The secret to understanding this parable is hidden in plain sight.  It is this:


The crop yields that Jesus mentions in this parable, 30, 60, 100-fold, are usual, they are ordinary. They are what a farmer in Palestine in the first century might expect from her work. Nothing special. No miracle here.


Given the form of this parable, you might expect something different. The form, akin to that which you might find in a fairy tale, or proverb goes like this:  1, 2, 3, miracle. That is, there are three negative outcomes and the form of the parable begs for redemption, for something like a miracle, a supernatural happenstance, And what Jesus presents to us is ordinary.  In fact, everything about this parable is ordinary, the whole thing. Some seeds sprout and grow and for a variety of reasons others don’t.  As Jesus is showing us the realm of God he is showing us the realm of God as it appears in our everyday, real lives. How is that?


Well, s___t happens. And whenever, s__t happens, I want to discount it, downplay it as somehow not real in my life. I am really alive only through the good bits. When I am downhearted, disappointed, perhaps when an illness overcomes me or a loved one dies, I want to think that this is not what life is really all about -- that the universe/God is choosing not to smile on me. My life becomes divided -- good and bad -- right and wrong -- and I end up liking some of my life, but not all of it. But, when we look at the whole of our lives this just does not work. What we get in life is all the joy...and all the sorrow. Guaranteed.


What this parable, this teaching story of Jesus, suggests to me is that I can make friends with my life. In the course of things there will be outcomes that will be disappointing; my heart will be broken, dreams squashed. AND then quite the opposite. In the course of life, I will know joy in my relationships, I will see the beauty of the sun setting over the Sonoma coast. All this is quite ordinary, to be expected, just as some of seeds perish and others grow.   Rather than 1, 2, 3, miracle, life is like this: 1, 2, 3, 4. Sometimes like this, other times like that. No need even to compare. I can be friends with it all. And as I discover this kinship with what is, something far more wonderful than good and bad, right or wrong reveals itself.

Center of the Universe?

“You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you."  - Thomas Traherne 

"I think life is a brief, meaningless event in a random universe that doesn't care." - Dilbert

Are we, each of us, centers of our universe, as the 17th Century metaphysical poet Thomas Traherne maintained?  Or are we, as Dilbert believes, simply meaningless life forms spinning through an uncaring and random universe?  I have spent much of my life vacillating between these camps, sometimes so quickly that it seems I occupy both of them simultaneously.

The other day I was walking along a street in Manhattan with Alex, my son's girlfriend, as she fought back tears and questioned the Meaning Of It All.  She had been dealing with a series of disappointments: turned down from her "dream job"; struggling, along with my son, under a mountain of debt, their precarious financial situation growing more alarming by the day; watching her boyfriend graduate from one of the top law schools in the country without a job; and to top it off, a beautiful and affordable apartment they had fallen in love with had just gone to another couple.  

She said, "I keep thinking I'm getting a sign that things are going to get better - you know?  And then it doesn't work out. Like that apartment - it was so nice, it would have been so perfect for us; and I knew I shouldn't get my hopes up but it just felt like maybe, finally something was going to go our way, you know? I couldn't help it - I just saw us living there, so clearly." She stopped talking and wiped away the tears. "I just really need something to go right, for once."

On a basic level, she was wondering: Is the universe on my side, or not?  Does God have my back at all? Or are we just floating in a random, meaningless universe that doesn't care? Can I trust that this will get better - or is this just the beginning of the shit-storm?

I've been struggling with the same question for the past several months, as I've gone from the near-top of my profession, to being unemployed and watching my savings slowly evaporate. On the one hand, I've never felt closer to God - and yet, so far, nothing is breaking my way, and I find myself struggling to believe this will ever turn around.  I tell myself, "Just keep on trusting in God.  Trust in God and all will be well."  But the other voice cuts like a piercing scream: There's nothing to trust in!  There is no magical rescue.  The cavalry does not exist.  You are headed for bankruptcy and homelessness! Stop deluding yourself into thinking it's all going to be okay! Homeless people line the streets every day - do you think you're so special you won't end up just like them?

On some fundamental level, I think, both of those voices are true.

The day after Alex's breakdown, we were at a picnic with family and friends, celebrating my son's graduation, and I fell into a conversation with a woman whose faith in God, she said, had never wavered since her earliest memories as a child.  She was a successful attorney with the bright, sunny disposition of someone for whom everything tends to works out well.   "I don't know why; I can't explain it," she said, "but ever since I was a little kid, I've been talking to God. We talk all the time. I've been praying since before I can remember."

She can't help but think that her success has something to do with this relationship with God. And she knows that not everyone is so lucky, or has that innate trust. Her God-daughter, she told me, had lost her parents at an early age; she had gotten into drugs and was pregnant before she turned 20, and now finally, at the age of 30, she was beginning to get back into school as a single parent of two boys, with a full-time job.  Her God-daughter was struggling to keep it all together, and was often overwhelmed by the difficulties. She said, "I told her, 'Just pray to Jesus!  Pray to Jesus! I guarantee you: He will answer your prayers!'"  

I found myself thinking two contradictory things simultaneously:

1. "Yeah, right: and now explain to me why hundreds of people just died in that earthquake in Nepal, all of whom were crying out to their God."  

2.  "Yes, I've experienced the power of prayer; I have known, in humbling, unmistakable ways, the presence of God, showing up, giving me strength, getting me through tough times, and seeming to make things happen for my benefit. I know on some fundamental level that I am not abandoned."  

And yet, nothing about #2 makes any kind of sense in light of #1.  If God answered the prayers of all the desperate people in this world, we wouldn't have anyone suffering or dying.

My Catholic priest / Roshi in San Francisco told me about how, for months after his enlightenment experience, his Zen Master was very annoyed with him. It turns out to be a common experience after a powerful kensho experience: one becomes a "Zen drunk." He was filled with joy, sparkling with celestial pixie dust and thoroughly obnoxious, convinced that he was at the absolute center of the universe. "But of course, I wasn't," he said. "But it sure as hell felt like it!"

On the night before my most recent job interview - for the Job of My Dreams - I had a fantastic dream. God, in the form of Al Pacino, was looking deeply into my eyes, his hand on my shoulder, smiling broadly. "Yes," he said. "This is your time. I love your ideas. I am committed to you. I will make it happen!" I woke up dazzled and joyful. All morning, it felt like God was carrying me along with a laser-like vision for my ministry. As I made my way to the meeting, a series of bizarre coincidences unfolded, reinforcing my sense that I was "in the groove" and meant to be there.  

And then I got to the interview, and it was over before it began. My future prospective boss told me he had just found out that the funding for my Dream Job had fallen through.

So what do you do with that?

This is what I think now: there is no past. There is no future. There is only the present moment. All our efforts to read the signs, predict the future, lasso meaning from the bucking bronco of the present moment, convince ourselves that God is "on our side" and everything is going to turn out fine - these are all escape attempts - escaping from the present moment.  

In our anxiety, we want the universe to tell us that we are in some way protected from tragedy - but that desire is yet another attempt to escape from the present moment, which is guaranteed, on some days, to include tragedy and deep suffering. But in the meantime: what is happening now? Is there air enough to breathe? Can you hear the song of a distant bird? Is someone calling for your love?  Yes: this moment is calling to you. Answer it.

It is entirely possible that, five minutes from now, this building will fall on top of us, and for the love of our lives we will fight until we can fight no longer, and then with our dying breath we will hear ourselves say, "Okay." Nowhere in that scenario is there room for anxiety and fear. And so, we trust, (breathe), trust, (breathe), trust, (breathe), trust...

An Episcopal Priest in Buddha's Court

I arrived at Zen Garland like Jonah, freshly vomited from the belly of the whale. A beautiful series of catastrophes had dismantled my life back in Northern California, where for eleven years I had served as Rector (Senior Pastor) of a busy Episcopal Church in the heart of Wine Country. Now, free of responsibilities, short on money, and longing to find refuge in the Buddha/Mind of Christ, I landed here on May 3.

I am a Christian, and a student of Zen at the very beginning of what I expect to be a life-long journey into koan study, sitting, and instruction. I was first exposed to Zen 35 years ago, while at Union Theological Seminary in New York. A Japanese Zen master - probably a famous one, as he was accompanied by an entourage that included an American translator - offered an introductory course on zazen.

I had been practicing Transcendental Meditation for eight years, off and on, and I was curious, having read a bit of Thomas Merton. Something about the teaching sparked me - I'm not sure what, exactly - but soon I found myself sitting 2-4 hours a day. When I wasn't sitting, I was running (6 miles a day along the Hudson River) and attending classes filled with confident future pastors, all of whom seemed eager to assume their identities as professional answer-givers. Meanwhile, my questions were only deepening, and deepening some more, until one day I felt all of my careful theological constructions collapse like the proverbial house of cards.

Everything that I had previously thought was true about God and the cosmos suddenly seemed ridiculously vain and hollow. I had been studying Christian theology seriously, and at a high level, for five years by that point, but all of a sudden I felt like a stranger in a strange land, unable to comprehend what all of these very earnest Christians were talking about.

I left seminary, and Zen too (that encounter with emptiness just scared me too much). I moved to Boston and tried to figure out how to make a living as a 25 year-old seminary drop-out with a seemingly worthless degree in Religious Studies. I became deeply depressed, nearly homeless, and profoundly lost in a universe which, for the first time in my life, seemed absolutely uncaring and devoid of meaning.

The story of how that all turned around for me is a long one, and for another time. Suffice it to say that my suffering brought me into a deep encounter with the cross, and through that, with the risen Christ. The encounter instantly healed me of my depression and gave me a profound insight into the truth of the Christian message. Soon, I was back in seminary, and eventually ordained as an Episcopal priest.

Flash forward to the summer of 2014. I had been a priest for 24 years; I was recently divorced, in the middle of a mid-life crisis, and deeply unhappy. It was around two in the morning. I was in bed next to my beloved when a wave of self-loathing and futility came over me. "I just want to die," I said. "This ego, this personality, these thoughts, this whole little self - I just want it to go!"

My girlfriend, who is an incredibly powerful spiritual being, said, "So: go!"

With those words, I felt myself letting go, deeply, completely, unconditionally. I released as completely as I could. Everything was placed on the altar. I found myself saying, "Take it. Take it. Take it." I felt myself falling, as if I were dropping down into a well, my thoughts and ideas falling away from me, and then there was a Presence. She was hovering above me and to my right, female, seated as if on a cloud or something. Her colors were orange and green, and there was an energy coming from her, a wave of what I can only describe as Mercy. Waves of love came washing over me, on a level I had never experienced before, and I began to weep like a child out of gratitude, sheer gratitude.  

The next morning, flipping through a book on Buddhism in my girlfriend's apartment, I saw her, just as she had appeared to me. She was seated on a lotus flower, and had several arms. "That's her!" I exclaimed. "That's who visited me last night! Who is she?"

My girlfriend smiled. "Oh, that's Avalokitesvera," she said. "She's a Bodhisattva - one of the manifestations of the Buddha."

I stared at the image for some time, taking in her beauty. "Avalo...whosiewhats?" I had her repeat the strange name a number of times, trying to get a handle on it.  

"Some people call her Guanyin," she said, helpfully. I decided that would be my name for her, at least for awhile.

"Why does she have so many arms?" I asked.  

"Well, her name means, 'The one who hears the cries of those who suffer.' She has all those extra arms so she can reach all the people who are crying out. She's like the Buddhist Virgin Mary - the embodiment of Mercy."

I was, as they say, gobsmacked.

Before this, if you had asked me if saints or angels or specific deities really existed, I would have said, with great confidence, that these are projections of our subconscious mythological brain, and that they are sometimes efficacious in channeling divine energy, like a window lets in the light. But I would have also said that they are in actuality mere mirages, dreamlike phantoms, which don't actually exist as discrete spiritual beings. But after that experience, I'm not so sure. She seemed pretty darn real to me! All I know for sure is that she showed up when I needed her, and when she did, everything changed.

In a moment, I came to see why the famous First Commandment is First: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, all your mind. For me, that's all there was to it. I had to finally get to the point of handing everything over - and when I did, everything changed.

Since then, I have wanted nothing more than to dive into that emptiness - to give away everything that I habitually cling to; to let my self with a small "s" die and die and die again, so that this Source can live more fully in me. Christians call it the Mind of Christ.

Beginning that day, I started reading every book I could find on Buddhism and its relation to Christianity. My previous encounter with Zen took on a new meaning for me. My best friend, who belonged to a Zen sangha in town, invited me to join him, and so I picked up where I left off 35 years earlier.  

Before long I began to find other Christians who also had a love of Zen - mostly notably, Roshi Ruben Habito, the former Catholic priest who wrote the classic book, Living Zen, Loving God. Ruben introduced me to Roshi Gregory Mayers, a Catholic priest who leads a small Christian Zen community in the Bay Area, and he became my Roshi. Soon after that, I googled on "Christian Zen" and came across Zen Garland - a Zen community with a Zen-Christian congregation within it. Roshi Genki and Roshi Ankai connected with me over Skype, and after I babbled at them for an hour and a half, Genki suggested I come out to Zen Garland for a month. Having absolutely nothing better to do, I happily accepted, and so: I am here.

I have been deeply touched by the warm welcome I've received, and by the beautifully open hearts and deep wisdom that is alive here. It has been an incredibly good experience for me thus far, and I have no doubt this is exactly where I need to be at this time in my life.

Tonight we begin a weekend Zen retreat. I am looking forward to whatever comes up; and I have deep trust that whatever happens, whether difficult or easy, joyful or sorrowful, will be worthy of that trust.

Gone Fishing...

I've taken on a month-long residency at Zen Garland - a Zen sangha in New York that includes a Zen-Christian community.  It's proving to be a wonderful and very productive time.  But I'm not writing a whole lot - spending my time sitting, and reading, mostly.  That seems important right now - and it could change.  Stay tuned!

Mindfulness at Kaiser Permanente

A friend sent this photo, from our local hospital.  It reminds me of the mindfulness bell at Plum Village - whenever it sounds, everyone stops and breathes.  But in a hospital?!  How cool.  I wonder how many people are actually practicing it...  Thanks Chris Bell for sending this!

Best photo ever