Saturday, December 31, 2005
ALL YOU NEED IS ZEN ACCORDING TO CATHOLIC NUN
who is teaching Zen to prisoners with considerable success:
Toronto - Few people can turn as many religious stereotypes on their head the way Elaine MacInnes does.
No ordinary Roman Catholic nun, as she freely, even gleefully, concedes, the 81-year-old MacInnes is an accomplished classical musician and a prison activist in the mold of her American friend, Sister Helen Prejean, the Louisiana nun portrayed in the film "Dead Man Walking."
And unlike the unfair but still prevalent image of the brittle and stern nun clad in a severe black habit, Sister Elaine, as she's widely known, is quick with a hearty laugh as she wears slacks and sports a bright flower brooch.
The next part of her myth-busting requires a leap of faith. Mac- Innes is a Zen Buddhist roshi (master) - the first Canadian, among a few Westerners - and certainly the only Catholic nun to be invested into Zen's highest echelon.
Is the unusual combination a conflict in an era when the Catholic church is caught up in a lot of soul-searching and housecleaning?
Hardly, Sister Elaine says in an interview in Toronto, where she shares a small house with six other members of Our Lady's Missionaries, an order of Roman Catholic nuns founded in Canada in 1949. If anything, she says, Zen has made her a better Catholic, and vice versa. She says Zen is a tool that has enriched her Christian spirituality without compromising it.
"The word 'spirit' means in Buddhism, as far as I can tell, pretty much what it means in Christianity: the presence of the sacred within," says MacInnes. "And that presence expresses itself in power. You can call it chi or qi, but it's power."
Zen, according to MacInnes, empowers you, apparently in some way that Catholicism does not, because if it did, what would be the need for Zen? If Zen enhances the Catholic faith as MacInnes says it does, why did Jesus withhold this tool from His followers?
She admits she's practicing another religion and does recognize that there might be a conflict of interest involved in her Zen:
MacInnes says she receives no flak from Catholic higher-ups for embracing another religion. "Thank God they've kept silent," she says with a laugh. And while equating aspects of Buddhism with Christian spirituality "is clear to me," she adds that "I'd have my head cut off by Rome, I'm sure, if I came out and said that the Buddhist spiritual ideal is the same as the Christian one."
In essence, though, that is just what she has said. Buddhism and Catholic spirituality are cut from the same cloth, and so we can practice both.
"Thank God they've kept silent." Doesn't that pretty much sum up the situation in the Roman Catholic Church? Silence. Silence on sexual abuse. Silence on heresy in our midst. Silence in meditation. It's all about keeping silent and doing your own thing. Make it up as you go along in response to your own perception of God. That's what this nun is doing, and she's quite happy about it. That's the plight of a contemporary Catholic who believes in the Tradition. That's the requirement placed on the homosexual priest and the priest who has abused the laity's children, and the bishop who enabled him. Just keep silent and everything will be fine. Just don't make any waves and don't invite any scrutiny. Just don't see sin and heresy and apostasy where it exists. Just keep silent--as Zen teaches--and all will be well because then you are empowered.
Empowered to do what, exactly, isn't specified. Maybe we don't want to know. Maybe no one cares because the silence is the goal and not just the method, forcing God to retreat into the vast unknown and stop bothering us.
