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Rev. Zenshin Florence Caplow isn’t half Buddhist and half Unitarian Universalist — she’s utterly each.
Picture by Jens Lelie.
I’m an ordained Zen priest and an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister. I would give the Sunday sermon from the pulpit of an outdated stone UU church in central Illinois, carrying a gown and a colourful stole, and the subsequent evening an internet dharma speak for a Soto Zen heart in Chicago or Santa Fe, carrying black koromo and rakusu. On any given day I would meet with a member of my UU congregation to speak by a thorny household battle, and later I would sit with a Zen pupil to debate residing the precepts.
I’m a sixth-generation Unitarian, down a line of girls from my Iowan great-great-great-grandmother, Jane Potter, to me. Jane Potter’s obituary, from 1901, reads, “Mrs. Potter grew to become a constitution member of the Unitarian church in Cherokee when it was organized ten years in the past. It was a second of uncommon pleasure to her when, together with her husband, youngsters, and older grandchildren standing beside her, all pledged their loyalty to the upper life of spiritual beliefs and strivings.” The ladies of my household requested essentially the most well-known lady minister of their time, the Rev. Mary Safford, to assist them discovered their church.
I discover that folks of all ages, and plenty of beliefs, are eager for methods of understanding that may present a help in these stormy occasions.
Unitarian Universalism is almost distinctive amongst American denominations as a result of it’s “noncreedal,” that means there’s no obligation to a shared theological creed or understanding. An individual could be an atheist UU, a Christian UU, a pagan UU, and sure, a Buddhist UU. I’m on the board of the nationwide UU Buddhist Fellowship, and we estimate that no less than one in ten UU congregations have a Buddhist group related to the congregation.
What UUs do have in frequent are commitments to human dignity, to caring for each other and others, and to responding to the injustices on the earth. Unitarian Universalists have all the time been a tiny fraction of the American inhabitants, however have had an outsized position in most of the nice progressive actions, from abolition and ladies’s suffrage within the nineteenth century to the Civil Rights and homosexual rights actions of the 20 th century.
I’ve come to understand that I’m not alone in being “transreligious.” Methodist pagans, Catholic Zen college students, Jewish Sufis, Vajrayana practitioners who additionally apply African spirituality—there may be practically each mixture of custom and apply that may be imagined. I’m not talking right here of people that have a dilettante’s curiosity in multiple custom, however of people who find themselves deeply dedicated to and engaged in several religious traditions. I consider the dharma instructor Jan Willis, who wrote the e book Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist, and Buddhist, or the time I visited a tiny, distant Catholic monastery within the mountains of Italy, the place within the crypt under the chapel there have been, mysteriously, Zen cushions lined up neatly on the traditional, marble ground.
As a UU minister and neighborhood chief, I discover that folks of all ages, and plenty of beliefs, are eager for methods of understanding that may present a help in these stormy occasions, no matter these methods are known as and no matter custom they hail from. The Buddha himself stated that the dharma was medication, and the Lotus Sutra teaches that, by “skillful means,” the dharma can heal and liberate in hundreds of how.
Generally I consider Zen as being a couple of totally different set of questions than the nice theological problems with the West, particularly the query of God versus no God. Within the West we divide individuals into those that imagine in God, in no matter kind, and name them theists, and people who don’t imagine in God, and name them atheists. I consider Zen as neither theistic nor atheistic, however somewhat nontheistic. The questions Zen addresses are in a unique realm than beliefs about God. So, no less than for some Christian Zen practitioners, there’s no battle between Zen and Christianity.
I grew up within the seventies, with the true and current risks of nuclear warfare and environmental degradation. Studying about genocide and racism, the Holocaust and the Vietnam Battle, made me despair about people and their doings. As a UU, I knew I used to be purported to roll up my sleeves and do my half to make a greater world, but it surely was overwhelming for my younger spirit.
For me, the religion and values of my mom’s honest, midcentury Unitarian Universalism weren’t sufficient to maintain me. When at age eleven or twelve, I discovered the books of Alan Watts, I stated to myself, with aid, “Ah ha—right here’s somebody telling it prefer it actually is!”
I won’t have survived adolescence and younger maturity with out the highly effective teachings and practices of Buddhism. I realized meditation in my teenagers, started training Vipassana in my early twenties, and located Soto Zen in my late twenties, once I grew to become a pupil of Zoketsu Norman Fischer (a transreligious Jewish Zen Buddhist). My gratitude for the dharma is as broad because the ocean, and that gratitude led me to ordination and educating inside Soto Zen.
Nevertheless, the spirit of the feminist Unitarian ladies in my household made me painfully conscious that the liberatory teachings of Buddhism appeared to have sprung from just one half of humanity—the male half—and there was no means this was the entire fact. Within the monastery we chanted the names of greater than ninety generations of ancestors from the Buddha to now, and all had been male. I started searching for the teachings of Buddhist ladies, and from that search got here the e book The Hidden Lamp: Tales from Twenty-5 Centuries of Woke up Girls, a group of girls’s highly effective phrases and apply I edited with Reigetsu Susan Moon. I credit score my Iowan ladies ancestors for giving me the readability and braveness to carry these tales out of hiding.
In my forties, I walked right into a UU fellowship in Flagstaff, Arizona. Homosexual marriage was unlawful in every single place besides in a couple of states, and longtime homosexual {couples} within the congregation had been going to California and getting married, after which asserting the information to their non secular neighborhood to cheers and tears of pleasure. I cried, too, moved to my bones by a spiritual custom that affirms “love is love” with out hesitation. In that second, I started contemplating UU ministry, though already ordained as a Zen priest. I hoped that my a long time of dharma apply could be a present I might carry to the individuals I’d serve.
After I was coaching for the ministry, a seminary good friend requested me what share I considered myself as Zen Buddhist versus UU. “Sixty-forty?” she requested. “Fifty-fifty?” I laughed and instantly stated, “100–100!” I meant that I noticed my two practices and traditions as utterly interrelated, interpenetrating, and interdependent. Over time the image has grow to be subtler and extra complicated, however I’d nonetheless reply in the identical means.
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