Boy Meets Girl (Another Matins Service, maybe...)

He came through a gate at the Seattle Amtrak station with the rest of the crowd arriving from Portland, looking about my own age, and sat on the opposite end of my bench. It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to say Hello. The delay was mostly due to the fact that the moment I saw him I was only half-way through the ham- and sausage- and pepperoni-laden Sbarro's pizza slice that was serving as dinner and had been since three in the afternoon -- or six o'clock Eastern, which seemed more relevant at the time. And the likelihood that this kid would not be offended by those sorts of toppings was right up there with the likelihood that he'd only randomly got up and got dressed in a maroon bed sheet that morning.

I'll be the first to admit, my religious garb color identification skills are about as hot as my academic garb color identification skills -- I only really know the ones I've thought about getting in this odd, imaginary world I often drift into where things tremendously worth the getting take very little effort to get. But I do know that garb in the first place often equals ascetic equals ham-doesn't-go-on-your-pizza. And so I finished eating on my end of the bench, and in the mean time this boy I was trying to keep steady in my peripheral vision had pulled out a long loop of prayer beads and looked like he'd gone to sleep and I almost, almost rolled my eyes.

I suppose I was so impatient to talk to him because he had this visible stamp of a religious community about him. Here I live in a religious community, and some folks know how I feel about that, but there's nothing of it that's visible on my person. My clothes don't give me away, and neither do any particular mannerisms -- I don't own prayer beads, for example, and I didn't exactly duck my head in prayer over that pizza slice, either. None of that was going to stop me from figuring out what else this kid and I had in common.

I finally got up and walked over to where he had his feet tucked under him on the bench and said, "Hello."

"Hello," he replied serenely. Of course he would reply serenely.

And with nothing else coming to mind as a conversation starter, I heard myself say, "What...religious order are you?"

He laughed, maybe because it had sounded like I'd asked what his Halloween costume was. And then he said, "I'm a Buddhist monk," and I, because I have no check on ignorance, impudence or outright stupidity, ever, when I'm nervous, rejoined, "Oh. I thought they wore orange."

Now one thing about Buddhist monks: they are patient. We're talking, Treasury of Merits, unpack-that-bad-boy-and-let-the-whole-world-pass-Purgatory-on-a-whim level of patience. I still do not recommend questioning whether they've got on the right color bedsheet. Tibetan Buddhist monks wear maroon. Now I know, now you know, let's not do this again.

His name was Jampel. We got to that very late in the conversation. That's not the name his parents gave him, but he hasn't used his birth name in years, and neither have they. (I asked.) That's one of the things that was part of his "ordination" -- the clothing, the new name, and shaving his head. He was on his way back to his community in Spokane, after an "out". I'm pretty sure I put in almost immediately something like, "I live in a religious community, and I'm on an 'out' too!" Jampel's comment was something like, "It's good to live in community. It makes you a good person very quickly, living so close to people you like...and don't like." I laughed, and shut down the little voice that actually wanted me to wonder aloud whether he meant ontologically good, and we went from there.

Big differences:

Holden is around population 80 right now, which is small. We hold four or five hundred over the summer. Jampel's community? Population 10. His is a community that's just for getting apart, pursuit of holiness and the like. Holden has a bit of that flavor (I am two days, minimum, from every other place and person I care about, so it's fair to say we're apart), but the long-term residents all have jobs: we're a retreat center. We retreat, too, but when you retreat, we do your laundry, hooray... There are Buddhist communities like that, too, where the monks have jobs. Jampel just doesn't live at one.

I am staying until the coming summer. This shocked Jampel, and I'm on the high end for length of stay at Holden. Some people stay a few months, a few weeks -- in response to the expression on his face I did not tell him there are folks who stay just a few days. I asked Jampel how long he meant to stay at his community in Spokane. He said either until his teacher moved on, or until he started to enjoy himself. He literally said that, "enjoy" himself. But he meant he would move on when the disciplines started to get easy. When three hours a day of prayer are easy and enjoyable, you might want to start looking elsewhere for holiness.

Oh, that was another thing, daily prayer. In Spokane they're spending an hour and a half in the morning and an hour and a half in the evening in prayer. By the time Jampel revealed those lengths, I had already divulged we share a morning and evening prayer practice at Holden, so back-pedalling was out, but I still had room to save face by fudging the numbers. I rounded up. Somewhere there's a Tibetan Buddhist monk running around who thinks we spend fifteen whole minutes a day at Matins and thirty to forty-five in worship each evening, with Eucharist going to an hour and a half, even though that only happened once and it was the week Fred Niedner was leading it.

But the big thing we couldn't get over was length of stay. The reason I don't know how a Benedictine dresses is I would never, ever become one: one of their vows is obedience, and that can mean staying in one monastery, one place their whole life. If that was what God wanted of me, you know -- I wouldn't want to know. Jampel will be in Spokane for years, and he really doesn't understand the unwritten three year rule of Holden. He wanted to know if we had anything like a teacher, and I told him about Erik, the village pastor. But then that was just a scandal: Erik's only been at Holden for two years, and he'll be there all of three. This was just not computing for my new friend. How was our community on anybody's map? What gave it any sense of authority, or continuity, as a religious community or anything? Whatever's going on up there in those Cascade Mountains, you can't step into that same river twice. You just can't. (Funny how you don't realize how weird you are until you see yourself through the eyes of a chap wearing a bedsheet.)

But I suppose he's right. There is no stepping into Lower Railroad Creek twice. And yet the thing to remember is, out here, really, we're not even stepping into that same river once. There's nothing we're out here trying to accomplish, I don't think, no matter how much ruckus folks raise about keeping internet usage down and cell phones out -- purifying ourselves in any way -- we're just here, obeying the realities that attend our being here, and busily not realizing the ideals. You can say we're learning from the great teacher Jesus, and that's what provides continuity out here. You can say we're his church and we are connected to the church throughout time and history in a sprawling, "small-c" catholic sense, and that's what provides continuity out here. But we don't need continuity. Just cite Kierkegaard for this whole paragraph: all we need is repetition. All we need is that moment of Jesus' last breath on the cross and those words, "It is finished." Because it's that moment, it's that death we're baptized into -- it happened but it happens and we experience it now. It's that moment, it's that body and that blood we participate in here in our worship -- it happened but it happens and we experience it now. It's in that moment that we had and have the forgiveness of our sins -- it happened but it happens, and if I have anybody's attention at the moment I just want to take it and say, you have forgiveness for your sins. Have a nice day.