Rev. Danny Fisher

Yesterday I went to Pomona College to hear a lecture by Huimin Bhikṣu, President of Taiwan’s Dharma Drum Buddhist College and abbot of Seeland Monastery. The topic was, “What Happens to the Consciousness of the Dying?: A Buddhist Perspective on the Last 48 Hours in Hospice Care.”

For the last nine years, Venerable Huimin has been involved in an “indigenous spiritual care” study overseen by Dr. Ching-Yu Chen of the Department of Family Medicine at the National Taiwan University Medical Center. Primarily, the study has focused on the role of hospice patients’ Buddhist beliefs and culture in their care. Venerable Huimin’s role has been as a Buddhist chaplain, visiting the hospice patients participating in the study.

Unfortunately, Venerable Huimin had a limited time to speak and was not able to go through his entire presentation. (A fairly meaty-looking section concerning the Yogācāra teachings on the eight consciousnesses was left out completely.) Much of the presentation was spent discussing hospice patients’ physical conditions and symptoms in the last forty-eight hours of life, based on both his own experience as a chaplain and the findings of I. Lichter and E. Hunt in the Journal of Palliative Care. He also talked about the Buddhist understanding of the “intermediate states” between death and dying, called antarā-bhava in Sanskrit and bardo states in Tibetan. In addition, Venerable Huimin offered his suggestions for the components of a “good death”:

1. awareness of death
   
2. acceptance of death
   
3. propriety
   
4. timeliness
   
5. comfort

Here’s hoping karma allows for all of those things in our deaths, Venerable!

You can see more of Huimin Bhikṣu while he is stateside tomorrow evening: he will be at the Stanford Center for Buddhist Studies, speaking on the topic of “Issues and Challenges in Buddhist Higher Education in Asia.”

In some ways, I’m very organized. In other ways, not so much. Somehow, I consisently drop the ball on writing blog posts in time for certain important events. Last month was a new low in this respect: I missed both Pastoral Care Week and, perhaps more importantly, G.L.B.T. History Month.

If it’s possible, I’d like to make up for that latter error now with a special post about the traditional October observance.

First, here’s what the G.L.B.T. History Month website says about the event:

In 1994, Rodney Wilson, a Missouri high school teacher, believed a month should be dedicated to the celebration and teaching of G.L.B.T. history, and gathered together other teachers and community leaders. They selected October because public schools are in session and existing traditions, such as Coming Out Day (October 11), occur then.

G.L.B.T. History Month was endorsed by G.L.A.A.D., HRC, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and other national organizations. Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber declared October 1995 to be Lesbian and Gay History Month; and in July 1995, the National Education Association voted to support the concept. In 1996, the governors of Massachusetts and Connecticut and the mayors of Boston and Chicago also proclaimed October G.L.B.T. History Month.

In 2006, Equality Forum’s Board of Directors and National Board of Governors voted unanimously to coordinate G.L.B.T. History Month, modeling it on Black History Month and Women’s History Month.

For the last couple of years, the Equality Forum has identified thirty-one G.L.B.T. icons for each of the thirty-one days of October. This year, those icons include everyone from Leonardo da Vinci to Gertrude Stein to Florence Nightingale to Cary Grant.

Today, though, in recognition of G.L.B.T. History Month, I’d like to reflect on one of last year‘s icons: Fr. Mychal Judge.

(Regular readers of this blog might remember two past posts–this one and this one–about Glenn Holsten’s wonderful Judge documentary Saint of 9/11.)

Fr. Mychal Judge was the gay Franciscan monk and New York City Fire Department chaplain who became the first officially recorded victim of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Fr. Judge refused Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s personal request to leave “Ground Zero” with him, saying that he had to remain with the firefighters and those being evacuated from the towers. His selfless act of heroism–offering his empathetic, prayful presence to those who could not be saved and those who tried against all odds to save them–was immortalized when Reuters photographer Shannon Stapleton captured the image of an anguished group of firefighters carrying Fr. Judge’s body away from the wreckage of the towers. (That photograph is just above and to the right.) The picture is known today as “American Pietà” because of its striking resemblance to Michelangelo’s Pietà, a sculpture that depicts the lifeless body of Jesus held by his mother Mary.

Before the events of September 11, 2001, Fr. Judge had distinguished himself in his service to addicts, the homeless, AIDS patients, students, and the gay Catholic community. By all accounts, he was indeed a saint.

I am proud to share the same job title as Fr. Judge. In the same way that so many other members of the G.L.B.T. community have left lasting impressions on their respective fields, he is an example for all of us who serve as chaplains in his absence.

In honor of G.L.B.T. History Month, I encourage you to learn more about Fr. Judge and some of our other G.L.B.T. sisters and brothers. You can start here.

The New York Times recently ran a pair of articles about Emory University and my graduate alma mater Naropa University, respectively. The first piece talks about the wholly unique Emory-Tibet Partnership, which includes His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s recent appointment as a professor at the distinguished university. (He is the third Nobel Peace laureate to join the faculty, after Archbishop Desmond Tutu and President Jimmy Carter.) The second article, about Naropa, mainly touches on the university’s commitment to contemplative education.

Contemplative education has defined this Boulder, Colo., college since it began life as the Naropa Institute in 1974. That summer, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche–a Tibetan Buddhist teacher who made his way to the United States by way of Oxford–founded the institute to integrate Eastern and Western studies. He invited artists from all over the country; the artists invited their buddies, and the gathering ended up with a head count of 2,500. Many of the participants decided to stay in Boulder, including the poet Allen Ginsberg. He was co-founder of Naropa’s writing program, the elegiacally named Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, later that year.

The college has gone through transformations since then. It was awarded top-level accreditation in 1986. It now charges $20,738 in tuition and has a student body of 1,083, in three locations. The original campus, in downtown Boulder, is a shady green square where students–some barefoot, some dreadlocked, many proudly scruffy–attend classes in a cluster of buildings that includes wooden clapboard cottages. Two campuses sit on the outskirts of town in office-park-like settings, slightly mitigated by prayer flags rippling in the breeze and students meditating on the front lawns.

One thing has never changed, though: the emphasis on contemplation. In addition to fulfilling the traditional requirements of a major, students participate in Eastern practices like yoga, sitting meditation, Japanese flower arrangement, tai chi, Chinese brush painting and aikido.

Anyway, they’re both good articles about very special educational opportunities. Take a look.

This past spring, I did a video interview the Ven. Dr. Yifa, who is a Taiwanese nun of the Fo Guang Shan Buddhist Order, Yale-educated professor, and popular author (among other things). In the interview, we talked exclusively about the book she was just finishing at the time, which was then to be called Junk and set for a summertime release. (Please do take a look at the interview if you have not already: Ven. Dr. Yifa’s enthusiasm for the topic is very apparent in the video, and I think it makes for terrific viewing.) In the interim, the book title has changed to Authenticity: Clearing the Junk: A Buddhist Perspective, and it has just been made available for order from both publisher Lantern Books and Amazon.com. To find out more about the book, visit Lantern’s page for the title here. (You can also read sample content there, including the introduction and first chapter.)

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Very recently, I presented an interview with my friend Ravenna Michalsen, the Shambhala Buddhist meditation instructor and acclaimed singer-songwriter. In that interview, Ravenna and I talked about her new album Dharmasong, a record comprised of eight tracks of devotional songs–six of them penned by her, the other two interpretations of Milarepa songs. Dharmasong was released on Thursday and can be order from either Ravenna’s official site or her Myspace page. Be sure to pick one up!

Last week, I read Sarah Hampson’s interview with Leonard Cohen, the appropriately legendary folk singer and former Rinzai Zen monk, for the most recent issue of the Shambhala Sun. Seven days later, I’m still thinking about it.

Poetry seems to pour spontaneously out of Cohen–there isn’t a thing he says that isn’t intriguing or affecting. And hats off to Hampson for crafting an article that truly makes the reader feel like a fly on the wall. Like Lian Lunson’s wonderful film from last year, Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, her work goes a long way in terms of giving us a sense of the real person behind the “Ladies’ Man.”

I’m something of a Leonard Cohen super-fan, so I suppose I was predisposed to appreciate this interview. But, really, it’s something special. Do take a look at the piece if you have a chance.

A number of snippets in particular have stayed with me, such as his riff on relationships, desire, and practice:

“Have you learned a lot from women?”

“Oh, yeah. You learn everything from women.”

“Everything?”

He leans in. “It is where you move into uncharted territory.” He shrugs slightly, his small, neat hands held in front of him. “The rest is just reinforcing wisdom or folly that you have inherited. But nobody can prepare anybody for an encounter with the opposite sex. Much has been written about it. You can read self-help books, but the actual confrontation as a young person with desire, this appetite for completion, well, that is the education.”

“And what a ruse that desire for completion is,” you suggest, “because ultimately, you’re still left with yourself.”

“What’s left of it,” he puts in, laughing.

Cohen sits back in his chair, his ideas as well-worn and familiar as old sweaters. “Of course, women are the content of men, and men are the content of women, and most people are dealing with this–whatever version of that longing there is. You know, of completion. It can be spiritual, romantic, erotic. Everybody is involved in that activity.”

Hampson also asks about the seemingly incongruous decision of this “sexual bad boy” to ordain as a monk. His reply:

“I always felt it was of one piece. I never felt I was going off on a tangent. Mainly because I think we develop images of ourselves quite early on, and certainly one of the images I had of myself came from reading Chinese poetry at a very young age. There was a kind of solitary figure in some of those poems by Li Po and Tu Fu. A monk sitting by a stream. There was a notion of solitude, a notion of deep appreciation for personal relationships, friendships, not just love, not just sensual or erotic or the love of a man or a woman, but a deep longing to experience and to describe friendship and loss and the consequences of distance. So those images in those poems had their effect, and thirty years later, I found myself in robes and a shaved head sitting in a meditation hall. It just seemed completely natural,” he says in a quiet manner.

On being a monk and his experience of monastic community:

“They’re not saints, and you aren’t either,” he says of his fellow monks. “A monastery is rehab for people who have been traumatized, hurt, destroyed, maimed by daily life that they simply couldn’t master…”

And, finally, on meditation:

…You run through your top ten erotic fantasies, ambition fantasies, revenge fantasies, global ratification fantasies. You run through them all until you bore yourself to death, basically, and the faculty that produces opinions and snap judgments and unrealistic scenarios for your own prominence, after you run through them for a number of years, they cease to have charge. They bore themselves into non-existence. You see them as diversions from another kind of intimacy that you become more interested in–and that is what Socrates said: Know Thyself.