leaving the motel this morning (and sweaty, as usual, after packing!)

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Jesus and politics

Many of you may be aware that there exists a small but vocal school of thought that claims that Jesus of Nazareth never existed. The basic argument is simple: there is no direct evidence that Jesus walked the earth-- no hair, no bones, no clothing (unless you consider the Shroud of Turin authentic), no writing directly from his hand.

It's easy to see why such a school of thought might form: the ancient evidence for Jesus' existence boils down to the canonical gospels, the Pauline epistles, and a few other canonical and non-canonical writings. Two other ancient extra-biblical authorities are known to have mentioned Jesus: the Jewish historian Josephus and the Roman historian Tacitus. Neither spends much time on the man from Nazareth.

The writings of Paul are, chronologically speaking, the earliest writings of the New Testament. Most or all of the Pauline epistles would have been written late in Paul's life, putting them generally in the 50s-- that is, about two decades or more after Jesus' death. This makes it very unlikely that anything written about Jesus was actually written by eyewitnesses.

My point in mentioning all this isn't to agree with the "Jesus didn't exist" school of thought; it's simply to reinforce the fact that over two billion people base their faith in Jesus on almost no historical support (doxastic practices will have to be a subject for another post; much of the current debate in philosophy of religion focuses on epistemological issues related to belief-formation). Given what we know about human psychology, it seems natural, to me at least, that we might try to fill in the gaps of Jesus' life and, as often happens when humans approach the divine, to re-create him in our own image.

This point was reinforced recently when I heard two interesting claims while at the Metanoia Peace House. One claim was that Jesus preached socialism (a claim I've heard several times before); the other was that Jesus preached against capital punishment.

I'm a bit leery of seeing Jesus as the advocate of or spokesman for a socioeconomic theory, especially in light of the general tenor of his preaching, the dominant theme of which was the coming Kingdom of God (or "the KOG," as it was joshingly called in a christology class I took in grad school). We have far too little evidence to say for certain what economic system Jesus would have been partial to, so I'm equally leery of the "Jesus was a capitalist" crowd. In both cases, I sense an effort to remake Christ in the image of the theorists.

I do, however, find it at least somewhat plausible that Jesus would have had trouble with capital punishment. It was this past Monday morning, during the Peace House prayer session that included a reading from the beginning of Chapter 8 of the gospel of John, that I heard the claim put forth that Jesus, in the story about the condemned woman saved from stoning ("let the one without sin cast the first stone"), was essentially saying that, because none of us is sinless, none of us has the right to condemn another to death. It was noted that Jesus, who was being tested by his detractors, had cleverly given an answer that remained consistent with Mosaic law while also providing what was, effectively, a compassionate solution to the woman's situation.*

But the Jesus of the scriptures isn't easily reducible to Gandhi-style pacifism. If the scriptures are to be trusted, Jesus spoke casually about hellfire and famously said he had come not to bring peace, but the sword. This isn't consistent with the Indian notion of ahimsa, nonviolence or no-killing. The Christus Victor of the Book of Revelation also strikes me as far removed from the pacifistic image we normally have of Jesus. Here, too, as with the socialism issue, scripture will be interpreted by different people according to their different orientations.

I suppose the meta-issue here, that of creating God in our own image, is tied to the axiological issue of whether it's good or bad that we do so. Is it necessarily a bad thing that we see what we want to see when we look at Jesus or the Buddha or Krsna or Allah? I have no quick or easy answer to that, and I leave the issue on the table as something for my readers to dwell on.

But before I sign off, I should note that great things sometimes happen when we see those we love the way we want to see them; it's not always a matter of self-delusion when we view others resolutely through the prism of our own perspective. After all, what other perspective is truly available to us, yes?** Imagine a relationship in which both partners took a crisply realistic and harshly pragmatic view of each other. How long do you suppose such a relationship would last?

---

*One person at the session astutely noted that the woman was a pawn in the proceedings, as the real point of the confrontation between Jesus and hoi iudaioi was that hoi iudaioi wanted to snare Jesus and thereby find a reason to condemn him).

**Remind me to write more about Nick Rescher's concept of orientational pluralism sometime. This concept informs the fascinating (and, to me, frustrating) work of S. Mark Heim, an evangelical Protestant who has been a prominent critic of John Hick's more classical philosophical model of religious pluralism. Heim, riffing off Rescher, takes seriously the idea that perspectives are "one to a customer." Or if you'd rather read thoughts I've written on Heim's work, go buy my book (see this blog's sidebar), which devotes a good deal of space to examining and critiquing Heim.


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one big-ass dawg

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shower... or teleportation booth? let's find out, shall we?

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only as far as Troutdale

I checked out of the Portland Super 8 a little after noon yesterday; the motel's shuttle bus driver saw me and exclaimed when he saw the size of my backpack. "How much does it weigh?" he asked. I told him it was about fifty pounds, and he said, "I remember back when I was a Marine, and we had to march thirty-five miles with seventy-five pounds on our backs." I told him I didn't envy him. I don't.

Front-desk staffers started to involve themselves in the conversation, asking what I was doing, and what my walk was all about. I told them I was visiting various homes and religious centers to talk with people about interreligious issues, and one staffer, also named Kevin, asked, "So are you trying to find your own religion?"

"Nah, I know who I am," I said with a smile. "This is more about finding out where other people stand."

I've discussed before my hesitancy in using the word "pilgrimage" to describe what I'm doing, and as time goes on, the more right I think I am. You see, a religious pilgrimage is a focused act of devotion, not a willy-nilly exploration. Perhaps the term can be used in a whimsically metaphorical way to describe any long trek done on foot (are there biking or driving pilgrimages? how about sailing pilgrimages? how relevant are the seafaring pilgrims, who landed in the New World purportedly in search of the freedom to practice their religions, to this discussion?), but in the strictest sense of the phrase, I'm not dropping everything to walk an immense distance to a specific point in order to venerate an object of worship and/or participate in some sort of ceremony that caps off the journey. That, I think, would be a true pilgrimage in the religious sense, distinct from other forms of pilgrimage, and distinct from what I'm doing.

So I left the motel and started the next leg of my non-pilgrimage, starting off on Airport Way and walking east along Marine, the riverside drive.

I didn't get far, though. I called the only hotel in Corbett, the one whose address I had used to plot my MapQuest route, and made a rude discovery: the hotel was a bed and breakfast that would have cost me a whopping $350 a night. So I changed plans then and there: it was around 5 o'clock and my knee wasn't feeling so hot, so I decided to stop in the town of Troutdale, where I found a Motel 6 ($45/night before tax) and opted to hole up for two nights while I figured out how best to proceed. I'm typing this entry from a surprisingly comfortable bed.

For the time being, it appears I'm going to have to take it easy on the knee, keeping my walks to ten miles or less. What's funny is that my manager Alan had privately recommended exactly this strategy a while back, and I'd said no. Well, Alan, it looks as though you were right all along. Lessons in humility never cease. Guess I need more of them than the average person.

So where do we go from here? Alan wrote up a 19-day itinerary to get me to Lewiston, Idaho, and I'm going to try to follow it, but I'm also going to have to listen to my body and stop each day before any problems become too severe. I suspect the itinerary will stretch to at least a month.

I'm going to slap Alan's proposed route up on the blog, and in subsequent posts I hope to give everyone a clearer idea of the overall path this walk will take. Several people have, over the past two months, written in to volunteer their homes; I hope to plot those points and use them as markers for the larger itinerary. I further hope this will make it easier for readers of this blog to anticipate where I'll be and to help us figure out how to "fill in" the huge spaces between those points (as always, I strongly recommend that you click on the "How Can I Help?" link on the sidebar).

More in a bit.


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the worst of Kevin's face rash (NB: the dark blotch is NOT a scab)

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view of the Columbia River from Monday's walk

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cotton almost all GONE

Along with mailing back my dead BlackBerry (data recovery didn't happen; a rant about AT&T may be in the works), I also mailed back a few pounds' worth of clothing and paperwork. Among the clothing items were my bulky blue jeans and my bulky sweatpants, both of which had served me well, but had also taken up a lot of space in my backpack. In their place is a pair of lightweight "convertible" pants made from synthetics (thank you, REI); I also now own a pair of shorts to "wear around the house," so to speak.

My dry-food errand was unsuccessful; the local outdoors shop says it doesn't open until 10AM, but despite hitting Metanoia for the final goodbye at 7:20AM (I attended the prayer service) and waiting downtown until the store's purported opening time, I saw, when I got to the store's entrance, that it was still closed. I have to check out of Super 8 by noon, so I'm now on the Max's Red Line, on my way back to the motel. Not a big deal; I can order food packs online... the next time I'm near a computer.


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thank you, Portland!

I've been in Portland for thirteen days, and while my right knee still isn't fully recovered, the time has come to forge ahead.

Very early tomorrow morning, I'll be heading to the Metanoia Peace House to say a final goodbye to the good folks there, after which I have one shopping errand to do before going back to the hotel, packing up, and heading off to a hotel in Corbett, a little more than a 17-mile walk away.

I'm impatient to be moving eastward. Staying at motels is a major drain on the finances, and barring a significant cash windfall, it appears I'll be stopping at some point and finding work for a few months to make up for the drainage. I have cash for the moment, but plotting the graph of my expenses is a rather depressing exercise.

Aside from lodging, another major expense is eating. I normally eat just one meal a day, either lunch or dinner, and often add a cheap snack to that. When I eat, I'm not shy about gobbling carbs, so my one main meal is usually large: it's where most of my daily calories come from.

The problem, though, is that I generally eat this meal at a sit-down restaurant, which makes it hard to cut costs. I'm not the type to order the top-rank menu items; in general, what I do is order an appetizer and a modest main course, one that includes veggies where possible. Unfortunately, with appetizers running anywhere from $4 to about $10, the final cost of my single meal of the day often approaches or slightly exceeds $20, once we figure in the tip. That's a cash hemorrhage in itself: if I do this over thirty days, that comes to $600-- way too much for a single person to be paying for food.

The solution-- and this accounts for my morning errand tomorrow-- is to bite the bullet. A single dry food pack from the camp store, containing a meal that serves two normal people, costs about $8 or $9 at the local stores here (cheaper single-serving meals are available, just so you know, but they're pretty puny); spending $8-9/day for a meal, and staying disciplined about it, means paying only $240-270/month as opposed to $600. If possible (and much depends on the availability of camp stores), that's the new plan.

I wish I could shop for fresh ingredients and save even more money, but storage then becomes an issue, as does time: how much time should I spend departing from my route to shop for food? Where am I supposed to keep these bulky goods, storing them in such a way that they don't spoil?

I have moments where I wonder whether it might not be better to strip down to the barest essentials: a single change of clothing, my toiletries, my wallet, however much drinking water I require-- and simply chuck the rest, hoping that fortune will favor the foolish. Such moments are, at least for me, akin to the temptation we feel when leaning over the edge of a precipice: we know we mustn't jump, but some basic urge is tickling and goading our rational mind.

Anyway, it's time to leave. I've enjoyed Portland and have started to familiarize myself with its "TriMet" public transportation system (a bit reminiscent of some European cities, what with the light rail system that passes trolley-style through the downtown streets). I've come to like Lewis and Clark College, whose law library I used for transcription of the Genjo dialogue you saw in the previous post. I've also come to enjoy the people who, although they lean way too leftward for my politically centrist tastes, are generally very open and very friendly.

I'm happy to be BlackBerrying again (still a lot to do on that front), but worry that this new phone will also conk out on me. The warranty replacement policy stipulates that AT&T has the right to send a refurbished phone as a replacement, and that's exactly what I got. Having had nothing but bad luck with refurbished equipment in the past, my policy is Buy new. Keep your fingers and tentacles crossed in the hopes that my luck with refurbished equipment will change. At the very least, I hope this BlackBerry lasts longer than six weeks before dying.

And with that, it's time for bed.


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TRANSCRIPT: my talk with Genjo Marinello (Seattle)

The following is a transcript of a talk I had with Genjo Marinello, who heads up Choboji, a Rinzai Zen temple in Seattle, Washington. I was at Choboji in mid-June, and felt very welcome at the temple, even though I was a mess during meditation the following morning (as I've written before, the Japanese way of handling zazen is markedly different from the Korean way of approaching ch'am-seon). The transcript has been edited for style and content. The original recording is not currently available online.

KEVIN: I think we're go.

GENJO: All right!

KEVIN: OK. Well, first off, I'm acquainted with the Korean pronunciation of a lot of Chinese characters, but "Genjo" means what?

GENJO: It could mean several things. The two characters in my name, given to me by my ordination teacher quite some time ago now, back in 1979, are the characters gen and jo. Gen, in this case, is the character sometimes translated as "heavenly silence"; it could be translated as "essential mystery"; the most literal translation is "the black before black before black."

KEVIN: Huh. Interesting.

GENJO: And gen-cha, in Japanese, is very black tea. And jo is the character for "realize." So: "realizing the black before black before black" is my name.

KEVIN: So then, having put those two characters together, "realizing the black before black before black," what does that mean?

GENJO: A dharma name is something you aspire to, and in this case, I aspire to the realization of what is the mystery of the universe, and he [i.e., the ordination teacher] saw some potential in me back then, that I would be able to experience in an intuitive way and relate with the mystery of the universe. So that was his dharma name for me-- that I would be someone who not only could intuit what the black before black before black was, but share it with others.

KEVIN: OK. How does one share something like that?

GENJO: We're doing it right now. You know, it doesn't have to be through words; just through the presence of one's ordinary activity would be best. But certainly, and also in dharma talks, trying to explain the ancient dialogues between masters and disciples, and making, say, ancient Chinese poetry accessible to modern American idiom.

KEVIN: Is that part of what happens here at your community?

GENJO: [nods]

KEVIN: I notice you're wearing an aikido shirt. [NB: I don't want to give the impression that Genjo was sitting on his front porch while wearing a full-dress aikido uniform, which might be a breach of aikidoka etiquette; he was, instead, wearing a shirt with some sort of aikido logo on it, and this had caught my eye.] When I was walking up here, I saw there was an aikido--

GENJO: Dojo.

KEVIN: Dojo. And when I was in Bellingham, there was an aikido dojo very close to the Red Cedar Zen Center. It's just a random connection, but it makes me wonder: do you have any connections with those communities?

GENJO: I do. Morihei Ueshiba O Sensei was the founder of aikido in Japan, of that particular martial art form, which [essentially] blends judo and kendo, which is sword. And he very much was taken with Zen, and didn't insist, but invited his senior students to also practice Zen. And most of the major art forms in Japan, anyway, turned to Zen as an augmentation of that art form, so whether it's martial arts or the high arts of calligraphy or painting or pottery-making or flower-arranging or whisking tea, they all turned to Zen as a way to augment or nurture their art form, and this was no exception when it came to O-Sensei [and] aikido; some of his senior students in the West have followed that, and I'm sort of the aikido-- I'm the Zen master that the aikidoists use, at least with a particular branch. There are many branches of aikido, in the same way that there are many branches of Zen. But there's something called the Birankai International branch of aikido, and I'm their Zen teacher.

KEVIN: Oh, OK. So does that mean that you visit the dojo and do your teaching there, or do they come here?

GENJO: Both. Our most intensive retreat is in the winter, and at our winter retreat, very often, senior students and instructors from Birinkai International will travel from all over the world to come to our retreat here in Seattle. It's also true that I go to Michigan, Pennsylvania, San Diego, Birmingham, England, and Strasbourg, France, and teach Zen to aikidoists in those locations.

KEVIN: Oh, wow! Fantastic! In France... you speak French?

GENJO: No, but I have good translators.

KEVIN: Oh, that's good. I was reading a book that came out in [French] first, and then it came out in English maybe a year or so later. It's called The Monk and the Philosopher. It was a dialogue between father and son: Jean-François Revel, the French humanist philosopher, and Mathieu Ricard, his son, who became a monk in the Tibetan tradition, and is the Dalai Lama's French interpreter whenever the Dalai Lama goes to France.

GENJO: Oh, how interesting!

KEVIN: I think the dialogue was mainly about how the father couldn't really understand why his son, who had been on a path toward science, suddenly switched gears and went into Buddhism. For you, what-- are you a cradle Buddhist, or--

GENJO: I'm a cradle nothing. My parents were both fallen-away Catholics, as they were married to other people when I was born, so that didn't sit too well with the Catholic Church on either side of that family, and my mother was afraid that if she let me too close to the Church, I would've been a priest, so the standard joke in my family, from my mother, is: "I shoulda' let you become a priest. At least then, you'd have hair!" And--

KEVIN: So in your strain of Zen here, you can't have hair.

GENJO: We shave our heads.

KEVIN: You do that, like, every two weeks or so, or--

GENJO: Oh, no; every few days.

KEVIN: Every few days. [At] many Korean temples, they do it every two weeks, like a big shaving event.

GENJO: Yeah, in Japan, it's on any day that has a 4 or a 7. I don't know why, but any day-- so the 4th, the 7th--

KEVIN: The 24th--

GENJO: Right. The 14th, the 17th...

KEVIN: Interesting. So, here, what-- would I call this building that we're sitting at now... would you consider this a temple, or what should I call this?

GENJO: We call it a temple. It's really more like a city center. It's not formally a temple, it doesn't look like a temple, it doesn't act formally like a temple would in Japan or Korea or Vietnam, but it's a little bit more on the temple side than it is on the center side. Basically, this is the Zen house, where my wife and I and the two dogs live, and there's one student who lives here, too, and then the group comes every day to sit, and four times a year, we do a week-long retreat.

KEVIN: This group is the one I'll be meeting tomorrow?

GENJO: Correct.

KEVIN: OK. How big is the group?

GENJO: Our mailing list is a hundred; our active paying membership is about forty; the number of people who will be here tomorrow morning, on any given morning-- about a dozen.

KEVIN: You told me about your aikido affiliation, but your strain, uh... how would you describe that affiliation?

GENJO: My sect of Buddhism?

KEVIN: Well, yeah, I guess that, and any specific organizations you belong to.

GENJO: Well, this temple, as I am, [is] in the Rinzai form, which would be Lin Chi in Chinese--

KEVIN: Im-jae in Korean.

GENJO: Right. So we're in that sect of Buddhism. And then within the Japanese stream, we're subsection Hakuin, so we're a Rinzai-Hakuin line. We're loosely affiliated-- we're definitely associated and loosely affiliated, though there isn't a direct financial link or directorial link, but we're associated with one of two Hakuin-Rinzai monasteries in the United States. There's an active one in Los Angeles and another active one in New York. And there is one on Whidbey Island that's also Rinzai Zen, but the teacher comes only twice a year. There are residential teachers in New York and Los Angeles: Joshu Sasaki-roshi in Los Angeles and Eido Shimano-roshi in New York. And of those two mother temples here in the United States of the Japanese Hakuin-Rinzai line, I'm most closely associated with the New York Zendo.

KEVIN: OK. So "Genjo" is how I should address you? You say it's your dharma name--

GENJO: The complete title would be "Genjo Osho"; "Genjo Osho-san" would be the most formal.

KEVIN: (repeating) Genjo Osho-san.

GENJO: Hai.

KEVIN: You speak Japanese? You trained in Japan?

GENJO: I was trained in Japan, briefly, and I speak a little Japanese. (speaks in Japanese)-- which means, "I humbly beseech you, I really don't speak much Japanese at all."

KEVIN: I caught the "ma-sen"-- "don't," "not," negation.

GENJO: That's right.

KEVIN: And "nihongo"-- I caught that part, too. I don't speak any Japanese at all. When I went to Japan [once], I had to stay for a day. I was in Fukuoka because I was changing my visa status. I don't know very many kanji, and I don't speak a lick of Japanese, so it was the first time I'd ever felt totally lost. I'd been in Korea, and so, going to Japan, I saw a lot of things that looked similar, but it was really a cool feeling to just kind of realize: "I can't say anything to anybody!"

GENJO: Of course, they looked at you and probably thought that you might be able to say something.

KEVIN: That's-- that's possible. Well, actually, in Korea, though, they don't look at me and see a Korean. They usually just see an American.* Whereas when I was in France, they saw: "Vous avez l'air asiatique," you know-- "You look Asian." That was the first thing they caught on [to].

GENJO: Clearly, you speak French.

KEVIN: Yeah, I was a French teacher.

GENJO: Ah.

KEVIN: So, all right, let's turn a little bit to interreligious issues, because I have a feeling tomorrow, in a half-hour, I'm not gonna be able to get much substance in that [time]. Your background is very interesting.

GENJO: Pretty unchurched.

KEVIN: "A cradle nothing," as you said. "Pretty unchurched"... oh, so you're familiar with that term! I thought that only Christians tossed that around.

GENJO: Well, I still grew up in the Judeo-Christian tradition, so I understand the things, and about the same time I found Zen, or a few years after, I found Quakers. So I'm also a Quaker.

KEVIN: OK.

GENJO: And I'm a member of the University Friends Meeting here in town.

KEVIN: You do self-identify as a Quaker--

GENJO: Correct--

KEVIN: As well as a Zen master?

GENJO: Correct. And there are a number of Quakers from the University Friends Meeting who sit here at the temple. So there's definitely a crosscurrent there. There's also a UCC minister, who'll probably be here tomorrow morning; an Episcopal priest, a woman, who comes here to sit; there's people who have a Jewish background who come here to sit...

KEVIN: What do you think these people are doing this for? These people coming from very specific traditions, they sit zazen here. Why are they doing that?

GENJO: You know, meditation, whether it's called "centering prayer," or it's called "contemplation," or it's called "meditation"... my attitude is that it all gets to the same place.

In many Christian traditions, prayer or contemplation or centering prayer is not terribly strong-- not nearly as strong as it's been handed off in the Buddhist tradition. And even Quakers, who are used to having an hour in silence, sort of once or twice a week... you know, we do an hour of silence every single day. So even for Quakers, who are a contemplative branch of Christianity, it's not as sharply honed.

So I think a number of people who want a contemplative part of their religious spiritual life can turn to Zen, and either identify as Buddhists or not, but use the tools that have been handed off from the Zen tradition as a way to deepen their spirituality, period. And whether that spirituality is Christian-based or Buddhist-based doesn't much matter to the people who come. It's deepening their sense of touching the divine, however they define it-- spirit, Ground of Being, however they define it.

And we're not so tightly wound up in words or definitions, especially in the Zen tradition; we're much more interested in the experience, and the commonality of the experience, at least from my reading and my cross-religious endeavors. The genuineness and universality of the experience seems to be anywhere and everywhere. Zen just happens to have the tools that appeal most to me, that help me, speaking for myself, go the deepest quickest, or more solidly, in a rooted way. I obviously am a Buddhist in the sense that I'm a Zen Buddhist priest, but I don't really cling to definitions of what "-ist" I am-- Christian or Buddhist or... that seems so, to me, superficial, and I think [that's true for] many others who come here.

I think the point, at least for the people who come to this temple, is that it [i.e., Zen practice] provides a kind of-- for them-- a direct route to their own sense of the divine and spirituality, and they take that and put it into their ordinary lives, hopefully, and it augments, hopefully, whatever religious tradition they're from, if they're from any. There are many who aren't from any.

KEVIN: I've been talking with other people about that. In Korean, the label for such people is mu-gyo, mu meaning, you know, "not" or "no"--

GENJO: Yes!

KEVIN: --and gyo meaning "-ism," tradition, or whatever. You don't belong in any particular... you don't fit into one of those squares.

GENJO: So even though we do very definitely fit into a certain square in terms of tradition, we understand that the tradition is handing off tools, and the tools bring us to a place of no-religion or non-religion. So I like that character mu a lot, of course. In Zen, we use that quite a lot--

KEVIN: The very first koan, right?

GENJO: Yes, indeed. One of your questions on your essay was "What metaphor do you use for the differences between religions?", and I want to give you mine.

KEVIN: Oh, good! Yes! Please! That's a religious pluralism question. I'd love to talk about that all day.

GENJO: To me, the great religious traditions are like trees. They may be entirely different species of trees, but they've all got great trunks, great roots, and beautiful canopies. They may be very different species of tree, but they're still trees. They reach towards the same source, in terms of the water table, and they reach towards the same light. So they stretch in both directions, and they're both trees; they've got a lot more in common than what separates them, and yet they're distinctly and uniquely different. You wouldn't want to say, "Well, because I've got this tree, I don't wanna have that tree." Why can't we have an olive tree and a pine tree and a eucalyptus tree, all right here in the yard? Yeah, that makes better variety! But they do still reach toward the same water table, exactly the same water table, and exactly the same light, and to me, that's how I see different religions.

In terms of Zen and Quakerism, for me again, just speaking for myself, if you thought of two trees of different species, great trees, reaching down to the same water table and the same light, and they're on different banks of the same river-- pretty different, and yet, where their branches intermingle and just gently blend-- for me, [that's] Quakerism and Zen.

Also, people have asked me, "Well, how can you do two traditions at once?" And I say, "Well, I have two legs! I get by just fine with two legs. In fact, I walk better with two legs. You don't have to have one leg; it's perfectly fine to have two legs."

KEVIN: Um... where did I wanna go with that... The question of the same source and the same light: would you apply that to just the major religious traditions that are out there, or would you apply [that] to even some of the wackier stuff that's around? I'm being a little bit difficult on purpose, here.

GENJO: I really can't say and I don't want to venture, because there's only two traditions that I've explored. I mean, I've done reading in Taoism and Islam and Judaism, and from what I can see-- very superficially, because I haven't delved into them greatly-- the great religious traditions do all do that [i.e., reach toward the same water and light], but I haven't explored sufficiently the others to say. I have no right to say. The only ones I have experience with to some degree are Zen and Quakerism. On those two fronts, I can say, because I'm practicing both traditions.

KEVIN: So there are at least two trees in this forest.

GENJO: There are at least two; I think I see many more. And whether it's a relatively new tree, or trunk of a tree, time will tell. But unless I investigated more directly, how could I say?

KEVIN: Right. I think one of my questions, probably not a very good question for you and for this community, was about marrying outside of the community and so on...

GENJO: (chuckling) Uh, yeah; probably moot. People want me to marry them, and they're from two different traditions, I'm happy-- I've done several ceremonies where we've had a priest from both traditions, or as the priest, I've mixed in elements from two traditions. I've had many people who would normally identify as agnostic, but have some sense that there's some unifying reality, turn to Zen and to Zen priests because they want something more than just a secular union, but they don't want something with too many trappings of the religions that they grew up in, and yet they do sense some kind of unifying reality that they want to speak to in the course of this ceremony. And I'm happy to do [it] that way, too. I say, "You can have anything on the altar you want." It can be a rock, it can be a tree... I ask that there be flowers, representing compassion, and a candle, representing wisdom. But anything else they want to put on there is fine.

KEVIN: Do you do some counseling for people, whether it's couples or one-on-one?

GENJO: Mm-hm. I do.

KEVIN: How does that work, usually, I mean, you don't have to go into specific cases, but just in general...

GENJO: Well, first of all, since I am a Zen Buddhist priest, I'm not gonna marry somebody that wants an entirely secular ceremony. I say, "Hey, look: here are some kinds of ceremonies that I've done, and can you pick and choose with what I've done to make something that works for you?" And if it doesn't [work out], then it's not a good fit, and, you know, you may need to go someplace else to find someone to help you celebrate a "spiritual" ceremony. I don't care if they call it "religious." There's a place on the marriage license that says, "Is it secular or religious?" and I always check "religious" if I'm doing the marriage. But in terms of counseling, mainly I'm looking at whether or not-- I don't care what traditions they're coming from, or whether they promise to bring up their kids in the Buddhist tradition or some other tradition. I'm trying to find out whether or not, as a couple, they have some common ground when it comes to their ideas of spirituality. And also, whether or not they have common ground as a couple: are they missing something that I might be able to help them see? And is this gonna be a couple that I feel [has a] sufficient bond to celebrate? If I don't feel like there's a sufficient bond, then I wanna work with them a bit to discover whether or not there is, then [if there's no such bond] I don't wanna get involved, either.

KEVIN: You're talking mainly about up to the marriage, right? I think my question was more along the lines of, uh, afterward-- you know: conflict arises or something... have you engaged in that--

GENJO: I've done that, too, from the Buddhist perspective, but I'm also certified as a spiritual director, and I'm also a licensed mental health counselor, so I've got quite a bit of background in that way. I have a private[?]** practice, but I also see people wearing either my Zen Buddhist hat or my therapist hat or my spiritual director hat. So yes, I do do that kind of counseling.

KEVIN: I'm curious as to how that works in Korea. I know it [i.e., counseling by Buddhist clergy] happens. I've seen ads for that sort of thing-- some smiling monk, a little phone number, but I don't know how that differs or how it's similar to psychotherapy as traditionally imagined in the West...

GENJO: I suspect it's very different, but I don't know, because I haven't been to Korea, or recently to Japan, even, to know. Here's another thing: I think Buddhism-- as it's moved from its original source, India, and has moved across the Asian continent to the US-- has picked up things, especially the branch of Zen Buddhism. When it moved to China, it picked up a lot of Taoism, and when it moved to Japan, it also picked up quite a bit of the Shinto sort of animistic ancestral component. I don't know whether it [i.e., Buddhism] did that in Korea, too. And as it moves here to the West, I think it's picking up a lot of psychology. And I think that's a wonderful blending, and it says a lot for the tradition that it's kind of, "Oh! That can be added to this! We can see how that can blend." It's a big jump to blend with whatever is indigenous to that location. I really like that about Buddhism.

KEVIN: I think a lot of religions, when they move from place to place, culture to culture, whatever, they do begin to pick up some trappings from the local--

GENJO: Sure.

KEVIN: I mean, if you go to Tibet, you see a lot of shamanism inside Tibetan Buddhism--

[Editor's note: I said the above so glibly that you might get the impression I've been to Tibet. Full disclosure: the only Asian country I've visited or lived in is South Korea. I've spent a day in Fukuoka, Japan, and several hours in Osaka and the Namba shopping district, but none of that really counts; in all cases, I was merely waiting for a new visa from the Korean Consulate or on layover as I waited for a connecting flight to Seoul/Incheon. So, no: I've never been to Tibet, or to any Asian country other than South Korea.]

GENJO: Exactly. And even Christianity, when it moved to South America or Central America, picked up a lot of indigenous components--

KEVIN: Right, right. Absolutely. The question of conflict spurred by religion: what's your diagnosis? I mean, if I take something like, say, Nigeria-- Christian-Muslim [conflict]-- how would you analyze that situation?

GENJO: As Buddhism in general would: that it's ego. Ego can corrupt anything. Whether it's individualistic ego or nationalistic ego or cultural ego, ego corrupts everything. Ego's all about having enough or having more, or being better, or being best. It can take the highest teaching and easily corrupt it to its cause of being better or best or more. And whether it appears in an individualistic way, or a more sophisticated or complex social, cultural, or nationalistic way, it's still ego. From the Buddhist perspective, it is the root of all so-called evil. It's where we get most corrupted. In Zen we would also say ego is nothing but no-ego; it's just one end of a continuum, but we so often get isolated in just that end of the continuum that we become quite corrupted and can do quite a lot of harm, nationalistically or even environmentally: raping the planet, our own mother. So whether it's conflict between natural resources, or conflict between nations, or conflict between cultures, or conflict between religions, from a Buddhist perspective, it all comes back to ego.

KEVIN: That sounds a little bit similar to a dharma talk I heard in Korea. There's an American monk there named Hyeon Gak [NB: romanized spellings vary: Hyun Gak, Hyon Gak, Hyungak, Hyeongak, etc.; credit to The Marmot's Hole, where I first saw this video]-- I don't know if you've heard of him. He's got some videos on-- some people put them up on YouTube and so on. He speaks fluent Korean; he's been living there for years and years now. He was talking about flipping channels-- watching the news on one channel, and he saw the people [on TV] were really angry and holding up their holy book and-- [mimics a demonstrator screaming in anger while holding up a holy book]-- like that, neck cords out and everything... and then he flipped the channel over to a conflict in America, and it was about the Ten Commandments being put into a courtroom, and the people were standing outside, demonstrating, and they had their holy book, and they were doing this [mimics angry demonstrator again] and he was like, "You know... it's the same thing." Pretty much the same thing. So I see where you're coming from.

OK, so, uh, I don't wanna hold you much longer, but one more question: What is God?

GENJO: The lovely thing about Zen is that we can say, "No-knowing." Beyond any kind of packaging. Even to use the word "God" or "Buddha-nature" or "Tao" or "dharma" or "sunyata" or "Ground of Being"-- anytime you put a name on something, you're already conceptualizing something that can't be conceptualized, that is inconceivable. And if it's not inconceivable, you've missed it, and if it's inconceivable, it cannot be grasped. So we're quite comfortable saying, "No-knowing," and there's actually a great relief in being able to say, "Can't be known. Cannot be said." But that doesn't mean it can't be experienced. It can definitely be experienced.

KEVIN: It should be, probably, the most ordinary thing, right?

GENJO: It is the most ordinary thing, if we have the eyes to see it or ears to hear it.*** It's the most ordinary thing, clanging at us in the wind chime or the motion of the leaves or the falling rain. It's shouting at us all the time, but usually we don't see it. However, the good news is there are ways to nurture our capacity to see what we think of as the divine in the ordinary, and that's exactly what Zen is all about. And when you have that experience, that realization of the divine in the ordinary, it's not only a relief, it's a blessing. It certainly generates a great deal of compassionate open-heartedness and peace of mind at the same time. If you're feeling that, you don't need to know.

KEVIN: Again, that's very similar to what I heard from Zen Master Seung Sahn, who was the teacher of the American monk I talked about before. He [Seung Sahn] wrote a book called Only Don't Know. "You have to keep that don't-know mind!" That's how he put it.

Well, I have a thousand more questions I could ask you, but I think I'll stop here and let you go.

GENJO: I'll let you get a good rest. I think your quest and your trek are really quite admirable. Happy to host you. See you tomorrow morning.



That marks the end of the recorded exchange between Genjo and me. I hope you've enjoyed reading it. I wish I had recorded the subsequent conversation with Genjo's meditation group; I didn't take notes and can no longer rely upon my shaky memory to relay who said what during that fascinating exchange (which, unlike my prediction, did turn out to be substantive).

I'll be writing some commentaries about this exchange as time goes on; in the meantime, I'll continue to prep the transcript of the hour-long dialogue between Brother Luke and me at St. Martin's University. Can't say when that will appear, but it'll appear. Sit tight.

Oh, by the way... this post is Number 500! We're at the half-millennium mark.

---

*This was one of those regrettable racial slips that comes from hanging around Koreans, especially older-generation Korean-Americans or Koreans in Korea (i.e., Koreans who haven't been fully assimilated into American culture). The word "American" is often a substitute for "Caucasian" or "white" in the Korean mind. All other races are swept under the rug. If you find yourself hanging around Koreans, you might find yourself sucked into this same linguistic vortex... unless, of course, you're a non-white American! If you hear a 50-year-old ajumma in Annandale, Virginia say, "Yeah, my daughter's dating an American guy," that probably means, "My daughter's dating a white guy."

**I wasn't clear, in listening to the audio, on whether the word was "private" or "prior." I think "private" makes more sense in this context. Genjo...?

***Compare what Genjo says here with Hyeon Gak's Jesus quotation (I'll need to dig up a scriptural reference, but quick online research reveals one possibility to be Mark 8:18, in which Jesus seems to phrase the eyes/ears matter as a question, not a declaration) from the above-linked video of the Hyeon Gak interview.


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fortunate or unfortunate choice of words?

Headline seen on the Drudge Report:

"Passenger Strips; American Airlines Boston-LA Flight Diverted... "


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the shower curtain question

In a bathroom with poor ventilation and air circulation, what's the best thing to do with the shower curtain after you shower? Should you draw the curtain closed, thereby minimizing wrinkles and allowing more of the curtain's surface area to dry, but trapping the steamy air inside the bathtub for longer? Should you pull the curtain as open as possible, thereby risking mold and mildew inside the curtain's humid nooks and crannies, but allowing most of the steamy air to escape from the bathtub and dissipate in the bathroom as a whole? Or is a compromise solution, such as drawing the curtain only halfway closed, the best way to go?


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time to git a move on

My dad never seems to call at a good time, though it's not his fault (I do wish he'd text or email me more). Today, he called around 9:45AM, Pacific time, just as I was starting to swim upward from the depths of slumber. While I'm usually able to wake up early for morning functions (e.g., teaching my first classes at 7:40AM in Seoul), I generally revert to my nocturnal ways when no such outside pressures exist. I'm not a morning person by nature, and my body sees my time in this motel as vacation time, even though I actually have a lot to do.

Medical note: the bruised ribs seem to have healed. Now, I'm dealing with some sort of rash or swelling-- allergy? bite?-- directly under my right eye. There's always something.

Family note: my brother David had fun during the mountain bike race last week. He didn't win, but he didn't finish last, either. My parents are in Texas, spending two weeks with my aunt (Mom's big sis) and her family in their spacious new home. Especially for Mom, retirement's going to mean a lot of travel over the next few months. I hope she enjoys this new phase of life; she and Dad both had stressful jobs, and deserve some rest before they begin to focus on some large, house-related projects.


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on, but not 100%

I've activated my new new BlackBerry, but there are still a lot of issues needing resolution. One problem I've noticed is that the Blogger comments window no longer "wraps" text: the field is already narrow, and when I try to write a sentence, I end up writing right off the screen, leaving me unable to see the text.

Another problem is that I'll have to ask the AT&T folks whether they'll be able to transfer data from my old phone to this new one-- not only all the phone numbers and emails, but also the pics I had taken of my border crossing. I'm hoping the data transfer will be (1) possible and (2) free.

A third problem is that my phone is saying I've got four voice messages, but I'm unable to access the messages because the "call voice mail" number isn't programmed in, and the Setup Wizard on this phone isn't very helpful about where I can find the number. I'm racking my brains about how I accomplished the setup last time around.

I'm in the Super 8 motel not far from Airport Way; the walls are thin and I'm currently surrounded by a large family in at least two rooms. One of the kids has already dialed my room twice, and two have been banging on the adjacent door and running down the hallway, all of which makes me wish I had a baseball bat.

Tuesday was spent mostly resting; the walk to the motel on Monday was largely uphill, and I got a bit turned around when I was close to my goal, adding up to a mile to my walk. I made it to the motel around 6PM that evening, and was too tired to do much of anything. Hence the quiet Tuesday.

As for the future: Wednesday, I'll be visiting the AT&T folks, mailing off some more unnecessaries (as well as mailing off the old BlackBerry, per the conditions of the warranty), and figuring out more about this new BlackBerry. If I have time, I'll trip over to Lewis and Clark College for some serious transcription. If not tomorrow, then definitely Thursday and Friday.

I'll be visiting Metanoia one final time on Saturday before leaving Portland on Sunday morning; my first stop will be the town of Corbett, which I've been told is a fairly uphill walk.

Let me take this opportunity to respond to a criticism voiced in a recent comment re: the general lack of explicitly interreligious writing on this blog. I would like to note first that I have mentioned, several times, that transcripts of my conversations are on the way, but finding the time, energy, and actual computer resources to make commentaries happen isn't easy when you're on the road and usually moving from place to place.

I know from experience with transcription at my previous job that thirty minutes of dialogue takes about seven hours to transcribe-- that's roughly five hours to write everything out in proper format, then another two hours to edit and proofread. This is solid computer time; I'm not counting breaks.

Trying to get seven hours of computer time in a country with no real "PC-bahng" culture (I'm referring to Korean Net cafes, where you can log on to a fast computer for $1-2 an hour) is no easy task. Many public places in the States advertise "Internet," but in reality are only offering Wi-Fi access; you have to bring your own computer to the party. If I were to try transcribing dialogue on my BlackBerry (actually, I did start transcribing on the BlackBerry, but then it conked out), my typing speed would be reduced from an already-slow 65wpm to around 20wpm, i.e., about 21 hours per thirty minutes of dialogue.

My point is that the content is there-- is in fact growing-- but still needs to be put up. All I can do is ask for patience, and I'll also ask that, instead of taking time to voice disappointment (which isn't particularly useful or constructive) as this commenter did, it might be better to relax and adopt a wait-and-see attitude. Let's have faith that the desired content will appear in its own good time, OK? Disappointment often arises from attachment to a preconceived outcome; it's one of the more avoidable and unnecessary forms of suffering. Meanwhile, just enjoy the blog on its own terms, and leave its content up to the author, who needs no prodding. Thanks.


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shipping out this afternoon

More later.


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thanks

My thanks to the people who have mailed me contributions in recent weeks, and to the folks who have bought products from my CafePress site. Let me take this time to ask readers once again to keep spreading the word about this walk, and to read-- if you haven't done so-- the How Can I Help? section for further information on ways to keep this walk going on and going strong. Believe me, I need all the help I can get.


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afternoon worship

My final full day at the Peace House included the attendance of the 4PM Peace Vigil (I was a bit late for that, as I'd been out running errands) and the 4:30PM service, which offered me the chance to meet some new folks. Tonight, I'll be squaring things away; tomorrow, I'll attend the 7:20AM prayer service and will likely leave in the early afternoon, once the BlackBerry has arrived by FedEx. Because a large group is arriving at the Peace House tomorrow and will likely need my room, I'll vacate the room and leave my backpack somewhere on the grounds but out of the way.

It's been a great week of rest and recuperation, as well as a great chance not only to meet new folks but also to get a feel for a different religious rhythm than the ones I'm familiar with. My sincere thanks to the Metanoia community.


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all reserved

I've just become a proud member of the Super 8 Motels chain (and will probably become a member of quite a few other chains as well) in the hopes of saving several hundred dollars over the course of the next 12-18 months. I've reserved three nights at the Super 8 by the Columbia River, which will mean walking uphill back north. Now that I'm getting a bit better at navigating the public transportation system, it shouldn't be a problem for me to continue to access Lewis and Clark College, which is south of Portland in Clackamas County, despite the added distance.

Alas, buses are pretty expensive here in Portland: it's $2.05 for an "all zones" ticket (for a single one-way ride!), and $1.75 for an adult going one or two zones. Then again, I don't know how this compares with current transportation prices in the DC-Metro area, so perhaps I shouldn't judge; my memory is stuck in the early 2000s. Digression: I'm also curious as to how much the bus and subway fares have gone up in Seoul, which has always enjoyed rates significantly cheaper than those in most American cities (this goes for taxis, too).

So there we are. Sunday will be my final full day at the Peace House, then I'll leave late Monday morning or early in the afternoon; my new BlackBerry, which is being FedExed to the Peace House, is slated to arrive around 1PM (there was some sort of mixup, which is why it didn't arrive yesterday or today), so I might hang around downtown, get the SIMM data issue resolved, get the old phone packed up for mailing back to the warranty folks, and then schlep over to the Super 8. We'll see. Tomorrow, I'll get to see what a full Sunday service at the Peace House looks like (it'll be in the afternoon; check the website for the worship schedule); I'll also be doing laundry, testing some of my new stuff (I bought a hat and some dry food from REI today; won't be testing the food), and prepping to leave. It's been almost a week since I came here... I'm humbled by everyone's generosity, and as was the case all through Washington, I'm more than a little sad to be leaving. I've apologized several times for imposing, but Pastor John said with a smile that I've been "very unimpositional."

I do know I need to do something for these folks-- give them a gift or make a meal or I-don't-know-what. Will be working on that issue, too, while I'm at the Super 8.


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extension (bis)

I'm being allowed to stay at the Peace House until Monday morning. Incredible. Perhaps I should thank my BlackBerry, whose death is the primary reason for my current delay. (I'm still thinking of staying in Portland a few days more, though, to get some major projects done.)

One of the best things about hanging in one place is that it gives you a chance to get to know your hosts a lot better. I often regretted the fact that I was moving so quickly from place to place before now, because I've been lucky to have met a series of very good people along the way, all of whom I'd have liked to hang and chat with. Luckily, some of those people have kept in contact with me via comments and/or email.

Today is Saturday, and I plan on returning to Lewis and Clark College to use their computer. If I can, I'm going to try and get most or all of the Genjo dialogue up. Keep the fingers and tentacles crossed. Note to self: don't wait until too late to take the 35 bus back into town, or you'll be stuck on the road for an hour or more, like last time.


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transcription and other prep

It occurs to me that the next leg of my trip isn't going to allow me much time to do any major projects, like transcription of my audio recordings, so I'm seriously considering hanging in Portland until those projects are done, perhaps even looking into some way to earn money (there've been no contributions for a while, and only a few sales off CafePress) before I truly find myself in a hole. That would suck: to find myself penniless with winter on the way. Ick.

Along with transcription, I need to comb over Alan's itinerary and start generating maps, making calls, and doing whatever else I can to prepare for a trip that, as Alan said in his email, will leave little margin for error. Shipping unnecessary items home, then filling that empty backpack volume with food and water, will be a high priority in the next few days. I might need to hit REI again for food and-- since I forgot it this time around-- a cloth hat to protect my head and neck from the sun.

Did I mention how badly my ears are peeling? No? Maybe that's because I hadn't noticed the damage to my skin until just a couple days ago, when I was moved to scratch an earlobe. I scratched... and was startled when it felt as though a tiny dead insect had come off in my fingers. Given the stinging sensation that followed, I actually assumed it was an insect-- that is, until I looked in a mirror. No: what had come off was a huge mass of peeling skin and dried lymph, a horrible, chitinous crust that felt like a small cicada. Nasty. I felt my left ear and noticed almost the same problem, though not quite as bad.

So, yes: getting a hat is a high priority.

Such are my plans. But enough about me-- what're you up to these days?


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not arriving until Monday?

I got word that my new BlackBerry (yep-- Dad convinced the warranty folks simply to replace the thing; I'll have to mail back the old one) won't be arriving in Portland until Monday. I won't be staying at Metanoia Peace Community that long, though I have accepted Pastor John's kind invitation to stay until Sunday morning (I think that makes three or four extensions at this point; I'm very grateful, but also feeling very guilty).

There's an EconoLodge motel on Broadway, not far down the street from Metanoia; I'll probably move there for a few days before heading east. My knee still doesn't feel right, which isn't a good sign. I've kept my walks around town pretty much under ten miles, and have learned a tiny bit about Portland's public transportation system, but it seems my knee simply needs me not to put any weight on it for a few days. Of course, if I try the bedridden lifestyle, I'll basically have to stop eating: I've gotten into the habit of gobbling carbs like nobody's business, and I'm still losing weight: another notch will be going into the belt soon.

I went to the Portland REI today; it's about two miles from Metanoia. For those looking at Portland, Oregon via Google Maps, Metanoia is located on the corner of 18th and Tillamook; the REI is across the Willamette River: cross the Broadway Bridge, go onto Lovejoy, turn left onto 14th, and it's on the corner of 14th and NW Johnson St. I haven't calculated the actual distance, but I'm pretty sure two miles, give or take a few tenths of a mile, is a decent guess (just did the calculation; it's almost exactly 2.25 miles). A very nice staffer whose name I never learned (sorry, Mademoiselle, but I do appreciate the sage advice and great sense of humor!) helped me pick out a solar charger; I'm pretty sure it's the same charger that Rico had pointed out to me when he and I visited the REI flagship store in Seattle. I also bought new "convertible" pants (long pants with legs that zip off to make short pants) and-- finally-- a pair of shorts to wear as pajamas. Will be sending back my heavy jeans pretty soon, along with a mess of paperwork, and possibly some of the bulky bottles in my traveling medicine cabinet. I got a water purification/filtration system at a different store the other day; that may come in handy when I'm in the boonies.

Speaking of the boonies: my manager Alan (everybody along my path praises your commitment, by the way, Alan) has planned out my route all the way through to Lewiston, Idaho; he's got me doing the trek in 19 days, which may be optimistic, especially if my knee continues to be a problem. Assuming I start this leg of the journey-- which involves a ton of camping, some of which might even be illegal-- around July 15, this would put me in Idaho around July 34th, i.e., August 3rd (15 + 19 = 34, 3 days past 31... ever calculated calendar dates this way?). Let's move that to August 10th or 15th to accommodate the inevitable down time. Heck, let's just say that I'll hit Idaho in mid-August. (Then again, it doesn't seem that I'll actually be meeting anyone during this part of the journey, so I might be more motivated simply to trudge onward without taking long pauses to rest.)

If this is the case, I may be in trouble. The timing is very poor for entering the Rockies, and it's enough to make me wonder whether other people were right about heading south instead of following the cold, as I had originally wanted to do (send your opinions to Alan at the Kevin's Walk Central address: kevinswalkcentral [at] gmail [dot] com). I don't mind cold, but I do mind danger. Then again, just how dangerous would the Rockies be for someone not actually climbing the mountains? I realize many of the roads will lead to higher altitudes, but how many go that high, and how long do they stay that high? I see myself following valleys, not mountain arêtes.

Met a dude on the bus last night-- shout-out to Eric!-- who warned me about the perils of northern and southern Wyoming, respectively. It's humbling to realize how much sheer distance I have yet to cross. Eric also mentioned humidity in the Plains states, which sucks. Here's hoping I travel through those regions when it's much cooler.

A word about yesterday's bus rides: to get to and from Lewis and Clark College, I took three rides-- one was on a Number 35 bus just past Riverside Park (if you're going southward on Naito); I had wanted to walk the full distance to the college along Route 43, but the exit onto 43 had absolutely no shoulder, and the cars just kept coming and coming. When going back to Metanoia from L&C, I walked the long bike path that led to the southern entrance/exit to the campus (close to Lake Oswego) and waited from about 8:10 to 9:10PM or so for a 35 bus, which I had been told would be there-- the girl staffing the law library's front desk had told me so. I took the 35 back into town (Lewis and Clark College is actually slightly outside of Portland proper), then took the 77 to 17th Avenue.

I mention all this, not because I'm a wizard at navigation, but because in all three cases I got navigational help not only from the three bus drivers but also from various passengers who happened to overhear my conversations with the drivers. I was impressed with, for lack of a better term, the citizen involvement. It would have been hard to get the same sort of help in Korea; my conversation would almost certainly have remained exclusively between me and the driver, with strangers not wanting to involve themselves unless asked a direct question.

This issue came up, after a fashion, during the interreligious discussion of a couple nights ago, when Karl (who often has sharp insights into things) asked me a comparative question re: Koreans' "communitarian" nature. In my response, I tried to convey this notion that Koreans don't generally involve themselves with strangers-- that they have definite circles of loyalty thanks to Confucianism and the overall cultural history of the peninsula (nuclear family, relatives, friends, coworkers, classmates, etc.), but don't treat with those who fail to "fit into the picture," so to speak. This is one reason why Koreans (in Korea, I mean) aren't predisposed to greeting strangers on the street, and believe me, I've tried many times to say hello.* Otherness is hard for Koreans to handle, so in many cases they simply don't handle it.

Well, I've zigzagged over several topics when all I had wanted to do was give an update on my BlackBerry, so perhaps I'll stop here before I zig or zag again.

---

*This may be an unfair generalization based on my experience, which is largely confined to Seoul. However, one out of four Koreans lives in Seoul, so this claim might not be that unfair.


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people of the cloth never use foul language!

Uh-huh.

Folks really need to relax about the clergy. They're human, too. In my experience, they'll laugh at (and even tell) dirty jokes; some will swear like General Patton; many have a crude and salty sense of humor-- just like yours truly (and this blog shows me at my most restrained).

I don't mind that ol' Jesse muttered that he wants to cut Barack Obama's nuts off. I do hope that people can move beyond the supposed vulgarity of Jackson's utterance to the more important issue of the content of his sentiment: what does it say about the relationship between the two men? What does it imply for the country's future? Far more important issues than mere tone or style. Get over it, folks.


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a word about Metanoia's morning prayer service

Pastor John of Metanoia Peace Community holds morning prayer services Monday through Saturday at 7:20AM. While the services follow a more or less standard liturgy, one that would be familiar to a Presbyterian despite the Methodist tenor of the services, one striking (and to my mind pleasing) difference is how the community has chosen to handle the part of the liturgy normally reserved for sermons.

In a spirit that is somewhat similar to many of the dharma talks I've heard in Korean Buddhist temples in Korea and the US, Pastor John runs his "reflections" on scripture as more of a Q&A session or dialogue (the latter more than the former, in fact; come to think of if, John doesn't talk all that much during this liturgical moment). The result is reminiscent of Bill Moyer's TV miniseries about the book of Genesis, in which people of various backgrounds-- not just theologians-- were invited to converse about the meanings they teased from scripture in a manner that calls to mind a conversational version of the Jewish midrash (thus Moyers writes, I think quoting a rabbi, in the preface to the book version of the TV series). From what I've seen, conversation about the scripture reading is usually animated but polite, with people contributing their thoughts in different ways according to their personalities-- verbosely, with thoughtful deliberation, and with humor. Even after only two such sessions, I've seen plenty of disagreements, but these are handled maturely by all participants. It's obvious the group members are comfortable with each other; I'm glad.

While discussion of scripture is not in itself special, replacing a sermon with such a discussion is, at least for me, rather novel and a great change of pace. While I doubt such a format could be used with large numbers of people (the morning group seems to be around ten people, with minor fluctuations), it's not a bad idea for pastors looking to conduct smaller-scale services.

UPDATE: Pastor John tells me he doesn't deserve this much credit. I understand why he says this, and have added this update so that his objection, so to speak, will be on record, but I appreciate his project and think he and his wife deserve a great deal of credit for the good they're doing here.


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pics of Metanoia Peace Community

[NB: The photos in this post may appear to be cut off because of the text column width settings for this blog (the column width is set at about 650 pixels, while the pics themselves are often about 800 pixels wide). Simply hover your cursor over a given image, right-click, then select "view picture" or "view image" (or however it's phrased for your browser), and the entire image will come up. When done, hit the "back" arrow on your browser, scroll to the next pic, and repeat the process.]

Here's my gargantuan bedroom, which I wasn't expecting at all:

My first night in that bedroom, I had a strange dream. I don't normally tell people about my dreams, and I don't normally remember my dreams, anyway, but I do remember some of this one and find it too weird not to talk about.

While I've forgotten many of the particulars of this dream, I do remember that it was about multiplication-- not necessarily in the mathematical sense, though I suppose it necessarily had that aspect to it, but more in the visual sense of watching things multiply. I can't explain what I saw in the dream except to say it felt like events that were multiplying all around me, like new universes sprouting. Visually, the effect was like watching a thick soup as it was building to a rolling boil: a lump appears on the surface, then breaks into smaller lumps; other lumps appear, and so on. Instead of soup, imagine looking at events. That's what I was seeing. I don't know how else to explain it. Stuff was happening, then more stuff, and exponentially more stuff, and my mind's eye panned across the whole roiling mess.

Many sci-fi authors have tackled this sort of thing, so my dream could have come from that source, but what was different here was that, unlike the way it usually goes in those sci-fi scenarios, the events weren't the offspring of my choices-- the splitting was occurring for no discernible reason. The emotion that accompanied this vision was also strange, now that I think about it: I was serene in the face of this boiling, fulsome, ramifying reality.

Below: a shot toward the front door I took while sitting in front of the fireplace yesterday evening (Wednesday, July 9). It was around 7PM and I was waiting for folks to show up for our talk on interreligious issues.



Then the time for our talk rolled around, Pastor John suggested we move out to the front porch, which immediately reminded me of my talk with Genjo, which also took place on the front porch of his zendo. The following pic shows all the discussants but one, who I didn't realize had been cut off in the photo when I took it.



From left to right, we've got Steve (knee brace cap on knee); he's an avid biker and has done a trans-America bike trip), his wife Laurie, Pastor John, Jim (who spent part of the talk snoring; he'd been working on the house all day, so I certainly don't blame him for conking out), Karl (who contributes a ton of great content to the various discussions), Bruce (who adopted a Korean son who is now 30-something), Trudy (I hope I'm spelling that right; she's a yoga practitioner), Jo (I think that's her name; Jo is very sweet and very quiet); and Bruce's wife (Ann, unfortunately cut off in this picture).

The discussion was fantastic, and yielded over 90 minutes of audio. Oy. More and more transcription to be done!

Next pic: flags at the front of the house. It's a huge house, by the way; it has innumerable bedrooms and all sorts of nooks and crannies. I now think of it as America's answer to Hogwarts Castle: every time you turn a corner, there's a new room or a new set of stairs. Amazing.



Below: the front door.



A closer look at the front door's windows (1):



A closer look at the front door's windows (2):



This following pic was taken from the front steps earlier today; it shows the front garden and the stone path, which is laid out as a meditative labyrinth.



One feature of the front garden is this compelling piece of artwork done, I'm told, in a Native American tradition: a precariously balanced stone. I couldn't stop staring.



Even at a distance, the house is too big to capture entirely:



Off to the side is more greenery, along with this "Peace Pole":



In this shot, I've backed up a bit and shown off the pole's other two sides:



While walking to the public library again today, I took this shot of the Willamette River while standing on Broadway Bridge:



And last of all, here's a shot of the bridge I was on:



Portland is, like so many of the cities I visited in Washington, worth a longer visit than I'm giving it.




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at Lewis and Clark College's law library

I got to the law library (lawbrary?) of Lewis and Clark College, which is a few miles south of downtown Portland and a couple miles off Route 43 if you take the bike trail from the college's main entrance near Lake Oswego. The 'brary is open to the general public until 7PM, which gives me a bit of time to work on some things (I'll likely come back here tomorrow).

A few notes:

1. The knee brace-- and I've never worn one before-- makes a significant difference in how my right knee feels.

2. I got a haircut in Vancouver-- my last major act in the state of Washington. It wasn't that great: the barber and I suffered a communication breakdown. You see, I have Korean hair, which behaves in a typically Korean fashion, so Korean stylists and barbers know what to do with it. When I go to a salon in Seoul and ask for a regular cut, I simply tell the stylist to cut my hair "the normal way." That's usually all I need to say, even if it's a stylist I don't know; it's rare to hear someone ask for clarification. Here in the States, where everything is PERSONALIZED TO SUIT INDIVIDUAL TASTES, it would seem that stylists (I went to a salon, not to a men's barbershop) assume nothing and ask everything. But the language they use goes over my head: "So you're saying it's OK for me to use a Number Two on you?" I got a couple questions like that from my cutter, and even after asking for clarification (a Number Two is a type of razor), I still didn't get anything like the cut I would have gotten in Korea.

In America, a normal haircut would seem to be far more expensive than one in Korea.* The base charge for my cut in Vancouver was $15, plus tip, with no shampooing included; in Korea, the same cut (done better) would have cost me $8-10, and would have included not only a full shampooing but also a full wipe-down of all the clippings from my ears and neck and shirt collar (in Korea, no hair would ever have reached my shirt collar). I came away from my Vancouver experience wondering whether my stylist was a rank beginner, or whether I really didn't understand the salon/barbershop culture in the States. The latter is possible: whenever I'm home, it's usually my mother who takes care of my hair.

3. I'm thankful that, in Portland, the intersections are marked with two street signs instead of just one, as was often the case in many Washington cities. In Washington, if you're traveling on a main road, what often happens is that there'll be a sign that names the road at your entry point (assuming you've entered the road at a large intersection), but after that, you'll only see signs for the smaller cross streets. This was a navigational pain on many occasions, especially since I wasn't always sure at what point a given road changed names.

I don't want to give the impression that I'm suddenly dissing Washington now that I'm out of it-- Lord, no. Come to DC, the other Washington, and you'll see plenty of road-related irrationality! I don't make my street sign critiques from a position of superiority; I'm simply a walker noting what works and what doesn't. Knowing nothing more about Oregon than what I've learned of Portland, it'd be out of bounds for me to make sweeping Washington/Oregon comparisons, but Portland's well-marked streets are a relief.

4. Today I stopped and talked with a homeless dude named Jesus. The guy was a gringo, so he pronounced his name "JEE-zuss," not "hey, Zeus!" Jesus comes from the East Coast (North Carolina) and recently broke up with his girlfriend; he's been in Portland for the past eight years. I didn't ask what he was doing there. The fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand appear to be in some sort of arthritic spasm; I don't know whether it hurt him to shake my hand. After I talked with him, it suddenly occurred to me that I should have pointed him to the Metanoia Peace Community; welcoming folks is their entire purpose! If I see Jesus on the street tomorrow, perhaps I'll tell him about the place.

5. No go on the BlackBerry today. I went to the AT&T store on Broadway and Grand; I spoke with the warranty people (16-minute wait when I made the call from the AT&T office; yesterday, a similar call was preceded by a 13-minute hold due to "unusually high call volume"); the warranty folks repeated that I should try to do the software update myself, but the problem is that, to do the update, I need Dad's AT&T registration information (login ID, password, etc.), which I don't have. Am thinking of just sending the BlackBerry back home and letting the family deal with it; they can send it back to me when it's behaving well. It peeves me to no end that this problem occurred barely six weeks into the walk. Could weather have been the cause of the problem? My sweat (I tried very hard not to sweat on the BlackBerry, but kept it in its case, and in my chest pocket when it wasn't raining)? Isn't the thing designed to take a beating? I never dropped it, never lost it-- the handheld was working fine right up until the crash... what the hell happened?

OK-- I've uploaded some photos of the 18th Street Peace House (Metanoia's base of operations) and am about to blog them. Stay tuned.

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*I know there are exceptions. I had a $5 cut in northern Virginia... but get this: the place was run by Koreans.


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the BlackBerry has died (at least for now)

I took a mess of photos on my BlackBerry while crossing the massive Route 205 bridge that straddles the Columbia River between Washington and Oregon, but I may lose them all because the BlackBerry chose that afternoon to die. I tried calling up the pics to look at them, got the "Rotating Hourglass of Death" icon, then... nothing. So, following proper procedure, I removed the BlackBerry's battery and popped it back in, which resulted in another RHD icon, and a strange "JVM 102 Error-- Reset" message. I tried several hundred times to reset the BlackBerry by pressing either the return key or the trackball (both can be used to reset the handheld), but the BlackBerry insisted on giving me the same "JVM 102 Error" message.

Thanks to my current hosts at the Metanoia Peace Community in downtown Portland, I was able to find a nearby AT&T store, but this didn't prove very helpful: the staffers told me that that sort of error was untreatable at the store, and that I might either have to get a "warranty replacement" (which would mean waiting a while in Portland) or I could try a do-it-yourself solution. One staffer dialed the AT&T help line; I waited 13 minutes for a person to answer my call, and he ended up telling me I'd either need to do the repair myself or have an AT&T staffer talk me through the procedure. The phone was purchased by my father, and I didn't have the last four digits of his social security number handy, so the talk-you-through-it option was out.

So I find myself at the Portland Central Library with less than 30 minutes left on my computer time; Portland State University's library doesn't allow people who aren't members of the university community to use their computers (a bizarre difference with other universities I've been to on this trip), so I'm going to look up phone numbers for other universities in the city, call them up, and see whether they have better computer policies.

Pastor John Schwiebert of Metanoia, who runs his "house church" (it's a Methodist establishment) with his wife Pat, has been very gracious: he is allowing me to stay at the house until Saturday morning, which gives me time to do a slew of things that need doing, including:

1. visiting the local REI to get a water purification/filtration system (thanks, Rico, for the recommendation),

2. mailing off more non-essential items, including the accumulated paperwork that comes of staying at hotels/motels and using ATMs,

3. doing laundry (always crucial for the survival of those I meet),

4. re-walking the border crossing with my digicam so that you can see what the walk was like (pretty amazing-- the bike path, when it meets the I-205 bridge, goes between the northbound and southbound lanes, making it fairly noisy), as I'm probably going to lose most or all stored data when I finally get around to doing the software repair for the BlackBerry,

5. consulting further with Alan about the route ahead, and

6. continuing (or perhaps re-starting, given the possibility of data deletion) transcription of the Genjo Marinello and Brother Luke dialogues.

I'm excited that I'll be talking with the Metanoia group this evening about interreligious issues, but I don't know whether I'll be permitted to record the conversation. We'll see.

Portland is a fine city; not long after the bridge crossing, I hit Sandy Boulevard and noticed right away that there was a profusion of Viet-Thai restos, and also that the city seems to be divided into distinct districts. I passed through the Hollywood district at one point, and many of the shops and restos in that part of town had a Hollywood theme to them; other districts were more history-themed.

As was often true in the cities of Washington, Portland has plenty of bikers, including a large number of gorgeous women on bikes (hey, I'm human). The Pacific Northwest is, I gather, biker-friendly in general, though I do wish that some more effort would go into making roads walker-friendly. This isn't a complaint specifically about Washington and Oregon; based on what I know of my home state of Virginia, we could use help in that area as well. The country as a whole isn't pilgrim-friendly: you're either on private property or public property most of the time, and in neither case should you feel free to flop down on the roadside (or in the woods) knowing that you do so legally. A shame, that. Maybe I should lobby for a change.

Anyway, my ability to post routinely (and to receive calls and emails) is compromised until I get the BlackBerry issue resolved, which won't happen before tomorrow when I will-- we hope-- have access to a computer for more than a single hour. Wish me luck as I hunt down a friendlier university. (NB: Metanoia Peace Community has computers, but I feel guilty about spending hours and hours on them when they're needed by the house's residents.)


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speed racer

Best wishes to my brother David, who will be participating in his very first mountain bike race tomorrow.

Good luck, big boy. Rest up, stay focused, and ride hard.


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presented without comment

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

equipment failure or handkerchief mitosis?

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

not exactly goodbye

Tomorrow morning, I'll be crossing the border into the great state of Oregon, where one of my college friends (who married another of my college friends) is from.

I'll be following, more or less, the Washington/Oregon border, and might find myself occasionally straying back to the Washington side, so this isn't exactly the end of my weeks-long association with Washington, a state I'd highly recommend to anyone not familiar with it. No: I won't truly say goodbye to Washington until I've gone beyond (gate, gate, paragate) its southeastern corner.

What's significant about tomorrow's border crossing is that it marks my turn eastward: from here on, I hope to be making my way more directly for the Atlantic coast. As always, keep those fingers and tentacles crossed. Things are going to get hilly.


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brace yourself

I elected to stay an extra night at my current hotel, which has done my sore muscles and blisters some good. My right knee, however, feels as though it might need a bit more time to heal. Unfortunately, I'm leaving the hotel tomorrow morning, so today, I'm going to test out one of the knee braces my dad had the foresight to pack in my first aid kit. Hope it helps. I've never worn a brace before; ought to be interesting.

UPDATE: Did I mention that I may have bruised a rib when I fell? While I don't normally lie on my front when sleeping, I do like to do so when reading, and it was while trying to position myself on my bed to read news on the BlackBerry that I felt a strange pain right around the rib cage/diaphragm area. At first, I thought it was a cramp or something muscular, but I've become increasingly convinced that the pain is bone-related. I couldn't imagine how I might have done such a thing to myself, but then I began to suspect my sternum strap, which must have tightened-- yanked, more like-- against my chest. The day I fell, my knee buckled and I sat down hard before rolling backward thanks to the weight of my pack; I know I didn't fall on my chest, and I haven't suffered any impacts to the chest to speak of. So the cause of my bruise has to be related to my fall somehow. I didn't even notice the problem until that first attempt to lie on my stomach, so I'm pretty sure nothing's broken.


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some proper thank-yous

I never wrote a proper public thank-you to Ralph and Gay, my gracious hosts in Longview. Gay elected to pick me up when I was about four miles from her home. She and her hubby live in an amazing neighborhood, and their house sits atop a low mountain, affording them a commanding view of the surrounding countryside. Gay is a true techie; she built the computer she uses. Her slide show of a trip to Europe, which I watched while laundry was percolating, was set to music and was something to behold. I love Europe and hope to get back there again before too long. Thank you, Ralph and Gay, for your kindness and care!

My next hosts were Eric and DeAnna in Woodland (I do hope I'm spelling "DeAnna" right). I felt very guilty about the number of times I revised my arrival time-- always later and later. By the time I flopped, exhausted, into that plastic chair at the gas station, it was well after 9PM, and I'm pretty sure it was closer to 10PM when we all sat down to dinner, because E and D had elected to wait for me. Some chef or chefs had worked very hard to prepare barbecued chicken, salad, chips, potato salad, and cake, along with an irresistible lemonade; I appreciated all the effort that had gone into prepping such a fine meal, and inwardly cringed at how my delays had thrown the meal's timing off.

The couple lives out in the farming area of Woodland, away from the town proper, in a quiet, wooded area that resonates with the nighttime belches and croaks of the local frog population. Like my previous hosts, Eric and DeAnna have a marvelous house. They also have two daughters, whom I didn't have a chance to meet, though I did meet two of the family cats.

E and D describe themselves as nondenominational Christians; during dinner, we covered topics ranging from hypocrisy to interreligious dialogue. There was one part of the conversation that I wish we had had more time to cover, and that was when we were discussing the question of mission and whether Christians have (or should have) ulterior motives when engaging in formal or informal dialogue. It's a shame, sometimes, to move from house to house so quickly; I'd often love to talk for hours about these topics.

Perhaps most impressive to me about my brief stay with Eric and DeAnna was when they dropped a bombshell: they told me that I was their very first CouchSurfing guest. I was floored: they had handled my many schedule changes and various needs (laundry, computer time, etc.) with such grace and aplomb that I simply assumed they were old pros at hosting. Their roll-with-it attitude and basic cheerfulness (something I also felt while at Ralph and Gay's place) made my stay extremely comfortable. I wish I had been a better guest!

One final thank-you goes out to the awesome team at U-Neek RV at 2625 Old Pacific Highway in Kelso, where I had stopped to ask for better directions to Woodland. The entire staff was very helpful and made sure I was on the right track. I was able to spot particular landmarks and other navigational points with no problem thanks to their kind assistance.

A walk like the one I'm on can only happen with help from others. This blog serves as a kind of notepad for the journey; it's where I hope to list all the people who, singly or collectively, have helped speed me on my way. Entries like today's thank-you post are an essential part of what this blog is about.

So once again: Thanks, everyone!


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dead for a day

Sorry for the complete lack of blogging yesterday, but I spent the entire day pretty much dead, lying in a Vancouver hotel room bed (Extended Stay America again, but much cheaper than the one in Bothell, for some reason). I'm here for at least one more night before moving on. One big disappointment is that my room's TV doesn't get the Food Network. A shame.

Self-maintenance while at the hotel has involved peeling and scrubbing dead skin off my face and forearms, peeling and clipping calluses off my feet, and taking care of blisters on my pinky toes. Oh, and showering, shaving, and clipping my nails.

Saturday was all about rest. When I arrived at the hotel on Friday, I was too exhausted to think about doing anything other than flopping into bed and getting all that weight off my feet, so as you can imagine, my Fourth was spent watching the fireworks on TV. Whenever I got up from the bed, I moved about the room like an old man, and noticed that it wasn't just my feet that needed relief from the constant pressure of the backpack: my knees and lower back also began complaining once I had shed the pack and stretched out on the bed. They complained for most of Saturday, so I finally took four aspirin a few hours ago.

On Friday, I met not only Julie and Ralph-- I also met an avian assailant: a bird crapped on my head. Birds and I have a long history, so this wasn't entirely surprising. I managed to wipe most of the guano away and rinse both my hair and my wiping hand with a few mouthfuls of water from the Camelbak. No harm done, but I still marvel at how birds are able to hit what must be, from their perspective, such small moving targets. I'm not just talking about human skulls, either: the rearview mirrors of cars are another favorite target of birdy buttholes.

Got yelled at by another teen in a car on Friday. Caught something about "I hate..." and "...asshole," but didn't hear the person clearly enough to get the whole message. Part of the problem is that these people are too cowardly to pull up alongside me, say what they have to say, and wait for a response. No: the preferred M.O. seems to be a drive-by style. Very gangsta. Or maybe they think they're Special Ops, doing a strike-and-fade. Very heroic, in that case; I should admire them.

Heh.

Right-- off to bed. Again. Believe me, the legs and back need it.


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