The Benevolent Unknown

“It’s quite different the way the clouds creep across this lofty, infinite sky. How is it I haven’t seen this lofty sky before? And how happy I am that I’ve finally come to know it.”
—Prince Andrei in Tolstoy’s War and Peace

I’m not sure when we first met. It was probably the fall semester of 1969, our freshman year at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit-run school. We were taking a class together, and I remember her talking and laughing loudly at the back of the classroom and then suddenly exclaiming, “Oh, I forgot to take my pill!” My thought was, “I need to know this person.”

Soon after, we began hanging out together and then dating. The first night we went out, we returned to my dorm room and were chastely necking when I blurted out, “I love you.” I knew it was a bit weird and probably self-defeating, but I was so astonished at the feeling itself that I knew that I had to tell her because how could I not? I was feeling this powerful thing that had come flaming out, a thing that I was in no way prepared to understand. Such was my astonishment that it was as if I were saying to her, “I actually feel love, really strong love, for the first time. Can you believe it?” I wasn’t even quite sure just what exactly she had to do with it. I barely knew her! Maybe she was only an innocent bystander.

She was, naturally, skeptical. But for me it was very simple because it was simply true, even if she couldn’t understand something I myself understood not at all.

Catherine was something new for me—she was religious, a Roman Catholic. Up to then, the closest thing to religion that I had experienced was rooting for the San Francisco Giants and its patron saint Willie Mays.

But then, one beautiful, still fall evening, we were sitting together at Lone Mountain College, up the hill from USF. We had a splendacious view of the night and the city. I think we were both excited at the perfection of the moment and the atypical San Francisco weather—not a whisper of wind. We talked and we laughed. There may have been others there, but for me it was just us.

As I walked back down the hill to my dorm, my mood changed. I felt confused and troubled and in need of someone to explain something, anything, to me. So I burst into the room of Father William Wood, our resident advisor in loco parentis, our “floor father.” I liked and trusted him. Kindly, he asked me to sit, sensing that I was upset about something. I have no memory of what I said to explain my presence—whatever disturbed 19-year-olds say when they’re experiencing love for the first time, I suppose.

Anyway, after a few minutes, Father Wood began to read to me from one of the Gospels, and I began to cry. Sob is certainly the better word. He continued to read, and I could hear his voice at a distance, as through a vortex, but I didn’t understand the words. It was just a stream coming from somewhere, as if I were being baptized in a strong current. When at last he stopped reading and I stopped crying, I asked, “What just happened?”

He replied, “I don’t know, but we were not alone in this room.”

I asked, “What am I supposed to do now?”

Father Wood replied, “Spend some time alone, go for a walk, think about Jesus,” none of which “showed me the way.” It seemed to me that becoming a Christian would require walking through a door of some kind, and, in 1969, I was in no mood for joining any institution that wasn’t a university in revolt. Still, to this day, I have no articulable explanation for what happened. But in thinking about that moment in later years, it seemed to me that the best word for it was “claimed.” I had been claimed, but in what sense? And by what? Jesus? Spirit? Something unnameable?

I think that anyone who has been claimed in this way finds a semblance of the experience, and sometimes the thing itself, in music and works of art, through a kind of aesthetic mysticism. One is “held” in timelessness. It is Now. John Berger writes of it like this: “The momentary ‘holding,’ seized by the imagination through the energy of love, realizes a whole, which is outside time. It is the Benevolent Unknown.”

This sense of having been claimed was something that would have to work its way in me over many years. I did not feel a need to turn immediately to the suspect arms of the Church because I was aware of Christianity’s many deficiencies—personal, institutional, and, from the beginning, political. Ironically, the slew of scandals involving Buddhist teachers in the West has not prevented me from feeling that I am a lay Buddhist. The saving grace for both religions is that, ultimately, there is no Christianity and no Buddhism. Existentially, they are barren shelves. The most that can be said is that both Jesus and Buddha were intermediaries to something purer than religion.

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W
hatever the case, as important as he was for me in that moment, even good Father Wood lived much of his life in shadows, and in ways that we are all too familiar with now. While writing this essay, I searched his name on the internet and found this on the Horowitz Law website:

Fr. William J Wood was a Jesuit priest for 62 years. During his years of active ministry, Wood served at the University of San Francisco, Bellarmine College Preparatory, Santa Clara University, and Verbum Dei High in Los Angeles. 

According to media reports, the Diocese of Sacramento claimed that allegations were made in 2002, stating Wood sexually abused a minor that same year while at Jesuit High School in Sacramento, California. In 2018, Wood was named publicly as accused by the Jesuits West Province.

Wood died in 2014 while in the Sacred Heart Jesuit Center in Los Gatos after many years of illness.

Despite Father Wood’s failings, I had glimpsed, on that lovely San Francisco night, a reality that lives only by virtue of what Soren Kierkegaard called “the absurd.” Because what I had experienced was absurd. An illumination had come with the aid of a guide who had sexually exploited those whom it was his responsibility to protect. What’s worse than that? What kind of guide can that be?

My long-ago moment with Father Wood was also absurd in the way that every mystical encounter is absurd. I had experienced something coming out of nothing, something without a cause. The theologian Paul Tillich called this mystery “the movement of infinity.”

I am not describing my experience as one of salvation or enlightenment. I’m describing what Zen folks call an “opening.” Openings are available to all of us, on any day, through meditation, to be sure, but also through the arts, ritual, and peak experiences in nature, especially snow-capped mountain peaks, for reasons better explained by Taoist hermits in their mountain caves. But an opening needn’t appear only in heightened moments. It can be quite mundane. It can happen while looking at a teacup and realizing that it is the site of bliss in spite of its humble being. Or, in an example given by the Zen teacher Jack Haubner, seeing a flag in the wind and then feeling its flutter inside, joyful in the solar plexus, where manipura’s lustrous gem radiates.

I had been claimed, but in what sense? And by what? Jesus? Spirit? Something unnameable?

Whether the best word is claimed, held, or opened, the experience is an invitation to the possibility of something on the other side of this damaged world. After all, Buddhism’s first attraction for the West in the 1950s and ’60s was that it offered a place, a refuge, something outside of the closure of capitalism, militarism, and scientific rationality. This opening was offered as a clearing, a place we might cultivate as if we were considering the arrangement of a new garden, or of an old garden in a new year. It is a place where, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s words, “nature is never spent; / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”

I didn’t tell the story of my dorm room conversion to anyone for over fifty years. I always felt that talking about it would diminish its meaningfulness. So I simply held it close. It was my private assurance that life was something more than the feeling of empty abandonment.

I’ve long thought that this experience was my first encounter with a beyond, but I’ve remembered something else.

When I was a child, my sisters and I had a little portable record player on which we played children’s tunes, Walt Disney records or whatever they were. We also had just a few 78 rpm records, made of brittle shellac, that had once been my grandmother’s.

One of these 78s was a recording of Chopin’s “Military Polonaise.” I played it many times because there were moments where it felt to me as if I were being shown a different world. There was the world of our little suburban home, but then there was also this music, which seemed to say that there were other worlds, stranger worlds. This was not a thought but a feeling, an uncanny feeling, something like vertigo. Technically, I think this feeling came from Chopin’s modulations in key. (Any God worthy of the trouble is in a minor key.) These tonal shifts seemed to slide against each other but not smoothly. And what was this other thing that I felt? Sadness? This polonaise may be military, but there is also sorrow in it. Was Chopin revealing for me the fact that there is suffering, as in the Buddha’s first noble truth? Because this feeling wasn’t related to any experience I’d had. It was more like a visitation from the holy ghost of sadness.

I don’t want to make too much of this childhood experience. I merely think that it opened my mind to the possibility of something that I would come to know more intimately through the arts and through encounters with something “unnameable.” Intimidating though it was, I looked forward to learning more about Chopin and his mysterious music. Because mysteries protect the sacred.

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A
nd then fifty years after my experience with Father Wood, I had a bookend experience.

In 2021, I was doing a five-day virtual meditation retreat led by Kittisaro and Thanissara of Sacred Mountain Sangha. During long periods of meditation, over the course of a few days, the “monkey mind” that wants to dodge and dart on anything other than the meditative task at hand . . . gives up. The monkeys come down from the trees where they’d been jabbering and sit on the ground, exhausted.

The focus of the retreat was Kuan Yin (or in Sanskrit, Avalokiteshvara), the bodhisattva of compassion. I was not yet comfortable with thinking of these figures in the Mahayana pantheon as in any sense real, and I kept asking and wondering, “Kittisaro, what do you mean by Kuan Yin? Are you saying that she is a real being? A personification of something? A metaphor? What?” My rational mind needed answers.

And then this happened.

During a two-hour break between sessions, I thought that I would go for a bike ride and during this ride I would think about who or what Kuan Yin was. It was as if I set out hoping Kuan Yin herself would speak up. For me, riding a bicycle often provides a sort of chemical shift—dopamine, whatever—that can lift my mood and solve problems and questions, especially when I’m stuck while writing. Well, then, maybe it could also summon bodhisattvas! Wouldn’t hurt to try.

So I was cycling down a steep hill on a road through Fort Townsend State Park, in Port Townsend, Washington, when I saw below me an older woman on the right side of the road with a dog on a leash and a man on the left side of the road walking unsteadily and drifting toward the middle of the road. I didn’t want to frighten him, so I slowed, and called out loudly, “Coming up!” hoping that he would move farther to the side of the road. Unfortunately, my shout only startled him. He stumbled forward, lost his balance, and then fell face-first onto the road.

I stopped to make sure he was OK. His face was still on the road, and his arms reached out helplessly, uncontrollably. He could not stand up on his own, so I put my bike down and tried to raise him. I assumed that he had had a stroke recently and was relearning how to walk. We needed to get him off the road as quickly as possible, but his wife was insisting that he get up on his own, saying, like some zealous personal trainer, “Come on! Get up! Use your arms!” That wasn’t happening. I said to her, “Take his arm and let’s get him up.” We slowly got him to his knees and then to his feet.

The extraordinary thing was that when he stood and I looked into his face—glasses askew, dirty, humiliated, and in pain—I felt this profound sense of love for him, and I said, “You’re OK now, brother,” and I embraced him. Stranger yet, I felt incredibly happy and grateful to him for this chance. It didn’t feel like my actions were a consequence of being a “good person” acting out of ethical duty. It felt more like the man and I had stood together, in communion, “lost in a shaft of sunlight,” in T. S. Eliot’s words:

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight …

It was a moment of complete connection. Did he feel this connection? That isn’t possible for me to know in any objective sense, but there was something in the depths of his face. He was offered compassion and he took it in, drank it down, water to wine. Who was he? Who was I? Didn’t matter.

Later, I was thinking about my experience and enjoying the memory of the feeling, and it occurred to me that since I had been asking, “Who is Kuan Yin?” for the last few days, specifically on this bike ride, perhaps she had answered me. She said, “This is who I am,” a little sly wink here, perhaps, “and this is also who you are.”

Because it was not as if a literal god had appeared before us, like the Holy Ghost coming to Paul on the road to Damascus. As Tibetan “deity practice” suggests, we were the deity, this suffering man and I. We had put on our Original Face, if only for a moment. We had become who we really are, or as close to that as I have any hope of coming in what remains of what Dogen called my “timebeing.”

Which is all pretty remarkable if you consider that nothing special had happened. Not really.

Nothing at all. That was its beauty.