Rev. Danny Fisher

Addiction, a 14-part documentary series that serves as the “centerpiece” of a larger project to raise awareness about addiction, treatment and recovery, premieres tonight, March 15th, at 9 p.m. on HBO.

HBO’s website for the production states:

Over 23 million Americans struggle with addition, yet fewer than 10 percent are receiving treatment…The ADDICTION project is an unprecedented multi-platform campaign aimed at helping Americans understand addiction as a chronic but treatable brain disease.

Filmmakers behind the documentary series portion of the project include Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight); Oscar nominees Chris Hegedus (Startup.com) and D.A. Pennebaker (The War Room); Academy Award winners Alan and Susan Raymond (I Am a Promise: The Children of Stanton Elementary School); two-time Academy Award winner Barbara Kopple (Harlan County U.S.A.); and fifteen-time Emmy Award winner Jon Alpert (Baghdad E.R.).

Produced by HBO, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the ADDICTION project also includes the publication of a companion book, a DVD set of the films and supplemental material, a website, and “a major 30-city nationwide community outreach campaign, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and coordinated by Join Together, Faces and Voices of Recovery, and Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America…[that] will create town hall meetings, house parties, briefings and other community-wide events in cities across the country.”

The project and especially the films sound very exciting–like something that might be effective in creating greater awareness of and understanding about addiction. I look forward to seeing for myself what the entire ADDICTION project has to offer.

[This post has been revised and expanded as of 3.24.2007.]

The world lost one of the most revered and important figures in twentieth and twenty-first century Buddhism when Semdech Preah Maha Ghosananda, Supreme Patriarch of Cambodian Buddhism and a six-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, died at Cooley Dickinson Hospital, Northampton, MA, early on the morning of March 12th. Less an advocate for nonviolence than the very embodiment of it, he was often referred to in the media as the “Gandhi of Cambodia”—a fitting moniker for a man who modestly described his quite astonishing form of socially-engaged Buddhism in this way: “I was making peace with myself…I was making peace with myself…When you make peace with yourself, you make peace with the world.”

Maha Ghosananda was ordained in the Cambodian Buddhist Order of Theravāda Buddhism at the age of fourteen. As a young monk, he studied with such luminaries as Samdech Preah Sangha Raja Chuon Noth, Bhikkhu Buddhadhasa, and Nichidatsu Fujii, and also earned a doctorate in Buddhist Studies from India’s Nalanda University. He was studying with Ajahn Dhammadaro at his forest hermitage in Thailand when refugees from his country first began to flee from the horrors of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime. By the mid-1970s, he had left the hermitage completely and was serving full-time in the refugee communities along the Thai-Cambodian border. Among other activities, he established temples in many of the camps, ordained new monks, and distributed tracts to survivors with a quote from the Dhammapada: “Hatred can never be appeased by hatred, hatred can only be appeased by love.”

As one of relatively few Buddhist monks to survive the Cambodian genocide, he was instrumental in preserving the country’s unique Buddhist heritage. (The New York Times estimates that of the 60,000 Buddhist monks practicing in Cambodia before the Khmer Rouge, only about 3,000 were alive by the time the Vietnamese captured Phnom Penh.) Almost immediately following the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, he had returned to begin teaching, establishing temples, and revitalizing Buddhism in Cambodia. In the years that followed, he would also establish temples and train monastic practitioners in immigrant communities throughout North America, Europe, and Australia.

The late 1980s and early 1990s saw tremendous changes for Maha Ghosananda on several fronts. In 1988, he was elected Supreme Patriarch of Cambodian Buddhism by his peers in the sangha. At around the same time, he moved to Leverett, MA, at the request of a Cambodian community there. (He would divide time between Cambodia, Leverett, and Providence, RI, until his death.) With the publication of an exquisite book, Step by Step: Meditations on Wisdom and Compassion (published by Parallax Press and still in print), his distinctive, powerfully elegiac and enormously compelling teachings became available to a much wider audience. Speaking to Tricycle: The Buddhist Review on the occasion of their first issue in the fall of 1991, he said:

[What is Buddhism?] Knowing how to eat. Why to eat and where to eat and what to eat. And with whom to eat. And for whom. Life is a process of eating. We try to eat other people but do not let them eat us. And the Buddha cries when he sees this suffering.

That same year, amidst the civil war that followed the signing of a peace treaty in Cambodia, Maha Ghosananda led a march through the country—a walk that gathered more and more participants as he continued. This was the first of many Dhammayietra Walks for Peace and Reconciliation, which simply sought to promote peace and nonviolence. Speaking about the Dhammayietra, he said:

It is a law of the universe that retaliation, hatred, and revenge only continue the cycle and never stop it…Reconciliation does not mean that we surrender rights and conditions, but rather that we use love. Our wisdom and our compassion must walk together. Having one without the other is like walking on one foot; you will fall. Balancing the two, you will walk very well, step by step.

The walks have continued every year, and have sometimes sought to bring awareness to particularly pressing issues in Cambodia. In 1995, for example, the Dhammayietra raised awareness about the (still) very serious problem of un-cleared landmines in the country. (It is noteworthy, though, that Maha Ghosananda and the Dhammayietra walkers marched through areas littered with un-cleared mines each year.) In 1996, responding to the problem of deforestation in Cambodia, he and the other walkers planted trees along the path of their walk.

As the walks continued and drew attention from the international media, Maha Ghosananda was honored with both Japan’s Niwano Peace Prize and Norway’s Rafto Human Rights Award for his work. In addition, as mentioned above, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize six times. Among those who cited him for the honor were U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell (who nominated him twice), the American Friends Services Committee, and an anonymous Nobel Peace laureate.

Commenting on his death in a post to the Buddhist_Chaplaincy Yahoo! Group, Beth Goldring of the Brahmavihara/Cambodia AIDS Project, wrote that Maha Ghosananda’s death is “the kind of loss that cannot be measured.” Indeed, we’ve lost a living Buddha…

I’m a big fan of a blog very cleverly titled Velveteen Rabbi and authored by rabbinic student Rachel Barenblat.

Almost a year ago, Rachel published a chapbook of poetry called chaplainbook. It is the third collection of poetry released by the author, who holds an M.F.A. from Bennington College.

chaplainbook is unique among Rachel’s other works, however, in that the poems in it are all based on her nine-month extended unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (C.P.E.) at Albany Medical Center in Albany, NY. She writes:

This is my third chapbook of poems, and it came together faster than either of the others, maybe because these are poems of a particular nine-month-long experience rather than the top handful of poems from several years’ worth of work. These poems arose out of the crucible of Albany Medical Center. I feel profoundly blessed to have spent these months working there, and profoundly changed by the experience of learning to find blessing in such a difficult place. I hope these poems will speak to people engaged in pastoral care work of various kinds — clergy, chaplains, therapists and nurses and social workers and doctors — but also to lovers of words, and to anyone who engages with the messy blessings of this embodied existence.

I finally had a moment to take a look at chaplainbook, and I have to say, I think Rachel succeeds brilliantly at speaking to those engaged in pastoral care work. As one who has completed a unit of C.P.E., I was moved by just how beautifully she articulates the range of experiences and feelings that a hospital chaplain faces. I was especially affected by “First Night”, “On-Call Prayer” (which you can read here), “Benediction”, “Sea of Reeds”, and “Birth”.

Anyway, chaplainbook is a masterwork. My copy is coming with me wherever I go. I highly recommend it to fellow chaplains, and I would say that it is a must-read for anyone considering work as a chaplain.

You can order a copy online here.

Vodcast #2 is here.

After watching Dr. Robert A.F. Thurman’s contribution to the series of “Question” videos exhibited by dropping knowledge: The Global Dialog Platform at YouTube recently, I was inspired to create a sort of reply in vodcast form.

Although dropping knowledge accepts submissions, I decided not to make a video tailored for them. Bowing to my contrarian streak, I chose instead to eschew some of the stylistic “musts” for acceptable submissions and do my own thing. Whether this was a good decision or not is an open question, as I fear that the result is perhaps much less interesting in its finished form than it was as an idea.

As before, you can watch the vodcast here (below), at iTunes, or at YouTube.

Following my interview with Jeff Wilson, which was posted a couple weeks back, he and I exchanged a couple of emails. In one, Jeff remarked further on the topic of my second interview question. I thought what he had to say ought to be shared, so I asked him if I might add the email material at the end of his response to the second question. He very graciously agreed.

You can read the updated interview here.