After their eighth child my parents ran out of names, so they gave me over for naming to the monks at the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani, located a crow's mile across the Kentucky hills. By this point -- the early 1950s -- the monks had become regulars at our dining table. Through various subterfuges they slipped from the abbey to make their ways to our house, managing to arrive just before supper. They got pork chops, we got fried baloney, but still as children we adored their company. For the most part they were educated men, Yankees from impossibly exotic places (Ohio, New Jersey), who stayed late into the evening drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, watching football on television, and talking, talking, talking.
In 1996 I was invited by one of the Trappists to attend the Gethsemani Encounter, an international convocation of Buddhist and Christian contemplatives, with the Dalai Lama of Tibet and the abbot of Gethesmani presiding. From that experience I resolved to write a book about what it means to a skeptic to have and keep faith, little suspecting that by the book’s end I would embrace both Zen meditation and the Christian faith of my childhood.
I spent five years reading in both traditions. At various points I lived in community with both the Trappists of Gethsemani and the Buddhists at the San Francisco Zen Center’s three locations, as well as visiting monasteries of other traditions. I began writing the book as a scholar-in-residence at the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at St. John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, foremost research facility for monasticism in the Western Hemisphere and setting of Kathleen Norris' Cloister Walk. In the course of my research I interviewed well over two hundred monks, contemplatives, theologians, scholars, and lay people. The book distills that research into a narrative of what it means to a skeptic to have and keep faith.
Keeping Faith weaves a tapestry from three strands of nonfiction writing:
Through memoir I write of growing up with Trappist monks, rejecting institutionalized religion as an adult, then turning back to it in midlife as a result of learning Buddhist meditation.
In reportage the book presents the personal stories of monks from both traditions. Through my childhood connections with Trappists and my visits as an adult to the San Francisco Zen Center, I received permission to live as a member of both communities, working, sleeping, eating, praying, and meditating as a monk both at the Abbey of Gethsemani and at each of the three branches of the Zen Center. Because of those connections, I was able to present the monks' view of their life and of faith in their own words, offering an intimate portrait of the contemplative life, West and East.
The book's historical chapters trace Western contemplative life to its roots in India and with the earliest Greek philosophers. I show how monasticism was central to the growth of Christianity but was later relegated to the sidelines as the Christian church became a political and military power. I chronicle the shift in Christianity from its roots in the egalitarian ideals of Jesus to the patriarchal political and military institutions of the Middle Ages and beyond. I trace the evolution of the Western notion of a separation between mind and body, spirit and flesh from its origins in Plato to its expression in popular culture.
The historical scholarship takes on a poignant dimension when men and women of my rural hometown, hearing that I am writing about the Church, approach me to tell their stories of sexual abuse by Trappist monks. Their stories provide a springboard for an exploration of the complex relationship between faith and desire.
Keeping Faith makes a case for the interior journey, and provides a foundation from which readers -- Christians or Buddhists or simply searchers, skeptics or believers or somewhere in between -- may undertake their own journeys. It provides its reader with the means to understand how the egalitarian teachings of Jesus evolved into the patriarchal, institutionalized Church, and the ways in which the regulation of sex and desire was instrumental in that evolution. My hope is that it will push farther the dialogue over how to bring our religious institutions to a place where they concern themselves with the ways and means of virtue rather than with the accumulation and exercise of power. I hope, too, that Keeping Faith will help readers address and perhaps to heal the wound, so deeply imbedded in Western culture, between flesh and the spirit, the body and the soul, desire and faith.