rishi

LOCATION: CANADA  

Joined Nov 26, 2008

Age Group:46-59

Gender:Male

Occupation:pastoral caregiver, writer.

About Me:

I am 50-something, happily married to Shaun Eaton (below), and I currently live in London, Ontario, where I am completing training for the Anglican priesthood. Shaun is an M.Div. student at Huron College, but his interests at this point lie more in the area of spiritually oriented counselling and psychotherapy than in formal parish ministry. 

 

 

I am making a living now as a writer (a.k.a. "starving artist").  I have just finished my first book, "Unlearning The Basics: A New Way of Understanding Yourself and the World."   It deals with the dynamics of character formation and transformation from a Buddhist perspective. (Here's a summary: We all want to escape the messiness of being human. But, in the end, how well our lives actually turn out depends on how we respond to the discovery that there are certain realities that we cannot escape. Buddhist thought focuses in on those key responses and helps us to discern the differences between those responses that generate suffering and those which effectively contain it and neutralize its destructive influence.)   If you read the book, let me know what you think.

 

This is Detroit, where I was born and raised, as I remember it:

 

           

 

Although I left Detroit when I was 18 and it almost never comes up in conversation any more, it is a place that is still somehow very much a part of who I am and how I experience the world. My interest in spiritual life began there, initially as a way out of the pains of drug addiction. But over time the spiritual took on a life of its own.

 

My immediate family (brother, Bob & nephew, Jeff) still live in Michigan, but no longer in Detroit.  I don't see them enough, and miss them a lot. Here is a picture of Bob and I at a slightly younger age. I'm the one with the bow tie.

 

 

My religious background is diverse. I was baptized, confirmed and educated Roman Catholic, involved in the charismatic movement in the 1970s, and studied at a Wesleyan Methodist university (Houghton College) in the 1980s.  Mom was an Irish Roman Catholic. Dad was a "Progressive" English Protestant. And my actual theology has always been very much in between Catholic and Protestant lines. This photo was taken on my graduation day at Houghton College in 1982, in the days when it was illegal to go outside without massive quantities of mousse or gel:

 

 

After graduating from Houghton, I decided to go to graduate school in psychology instead of seminary. It was clear to me that I had a pastoral vocation, but I was also finding inner peace in relation to my being gay, and that became very problematic for the church of that day.  And so I ended up chanelling my religious vocation into 'secular' work in the mental health field.

 

 

In retrospect, it was good that I left. My spiritual life continued, but outside of the institutional church. One of the most transforming things that happened during my time away from the church was that I became a Buddhist monk in the order of the Theravada ("Thera" = Elders, "Vada" = Way, hence "Way of the Elders").  This photo was taken at my higher ordination in Sri Lanka.  The ordination temple here is built on stilts in the center of a large river.  When the ordination rites begin, the plank connecting the temple to dry land is removed, symbolizing separation from the world. My teacher is on the right, and my preceptor on the left. In this photo my preceptor was 106 years old! He was also blind. But he heard every syllable of my vows and corrected every mispronunciation until I was finally ready for the big day.

 

 

About seven years ago, while I was participating as a monk in an interreligious project in Australia (with the Archdiocese of Brisbane), I experienced an epiphany that led me to realize that I had never really left the Way of Christ, just given up on the institutional church for a time to do some healing and growing that I wasn't able to do within the church at the time.  This led me into a long process of discernment. A few years afterwards I reached a decision that the time was right for me to leave monastic life and to renew my baptismal vows in the church.  This is a photo of me with my dear friends, Anna and Wendell, about an hour before leaving the order.

 

 

Though I left the order, I kept my monastic name as a tribute to those who gave it to me and as a testimony to the mysterious ways in which God works in our lives. Since then, I have been consciously exploring the shared ground between the way of the Buddha and the way of Christ. I initially joined the United Church of Canada. I met people there who could cope with my diverse background, see it as a plus, and value my ministry. I later moved to the Anglican Church because I found their contemplative roots and theology and liturgy to be more in synch with my own spiritual life and sense of vocation.  The Anglican theologian, John Macquarrie, has been very helpful to me in thinking through my Buddhist and Christian experiences.  I agree with his view that there is a dialectic between the East and West in their understanding of God as impersonal and personal. God really does not have to be either one way or the other. I've also benefitted greatly from the work of the Sri Lankan Jesuit theologian, Aloysius Pieris, who has walked both the Buddhist and the Christian paths with great integrity.

  

In terms of my theology,  I am orthodox with a small "o,"  and socially liberal.  The Christian tradition, expressed in scripture and the great creeds, is foundational for me.  It concentrates the wisdom of our spiritual ancestors. And yet, apart from the primary spirituality that gave birth to it, it becomes, as Aquinas suggested, "nothing but straw."  Similarly, without the application of our best critical reason, the timeless truths of the tradition become inaudible in our present context.  I believe in the Trinity, for example, but I also believe that for us to perceive how that Reality is manifesting itself in our present 21st century context requires us to be post-conventional in our theological thinking. We no longer live in a world where we have little or no relationship with persons of other cultures, philosophies, and religions.  And that fact pushes us to grow beyond accepting only those who conform to our particular conventions.

 

 

I understand the Bible to be the invaluable testimony of our spiritual ancestors, which means that I read it reverently, listening for God's voice, but also critically and contextually. I also understand it as describing all of the truths necessary to our spiritual liberation and as the supreme standard of Christian faith.

 

 

My theology and my approach to the spiritual life has, of course, been influenced by the contemplative philosophy and practice of Buddhism in my background and also by my training and working with children, adolescents, and adults in the mental health field for several years.  I am, however, very happily grounded in the Christian tradition and very much 'at home' in the Anglican Church.  If you would like to read more about my theology, check out the links to some of my sermon-essays near the bottom of this page.  I am also a seminarian member of the Society of Catholic Priests (SCP), whose rule of life I support and follow. (Click on the Cross logo below to see the site of the SCP).  But as a child of the Vatican II era, and someone who has worked in the trenches of the mental health field for most of my life, I probably tend to be more "modern" than some Anglo-Catholics, which probably has its pros and cons.

 

 

Having named all of those sticky labels -- "orthodox," "socially liberal," "Trinitarian,"  "contemplative," etc....  I like to get past them as soon as possible because I find they can often obscure more than they clarify. I would much rather tell the story of my spiritual life, and hear the stories of others. In my experience, that usually leads to much better understanding than labeling.  Some Christians might be troubled by the fact that I have been influenced by Buddhist philosophy. Others might be more concerned that I consider myself to be orthodox. Somewhere I once read "An enemy is just a person whose story we do not yet know."  

 

 

 

My evolving approach to preaching & teaching is to give short, ten minute homily-style talks, and to offer a more in-depth version of the homily in a written sermon-essay for anyone interested in exploring the theme further.  There is a series of these sermon-essays here on my blog, called "Symbols of Transformation."   This series gives an overview of my theology for anyone interested.   You can access it by clicking on the following links:

• What Are Symbols Anyway?
• The Symbolic Life of Jesus
• The Symbol of Water
• The Symbol of Spirit
• The Symbol of Fire
• The Symbol of Fruit
• The Symbol of The Way

 

And here are some more sermon-essays on a variety of themes:

• An Emotional Bypass
• What is Church?
• Love & Character: formations, de-formations, re-formations, and trans-formations
• 2 Kinds of People in the World
• Stations of the Cross: Integrating vs Fragmenting Approaches
• Sacred Cycles & Good Questions
• Emerging 21st Century Appetites
• An Appetite For Prayer
• Social Justice & Contemplative Life
• Stewie Griffin & Finding Our Center
• The Simple Life
• God is Not an Alpha Dog: A View of Atonement
• Love, Honour, and Shame
• Narcissism & The Mirror of Divine Love
• Holding Lightly & Holding Tightly
• A Secret Hidden in the Eucharist
• Are you tired of Cross talk?
• "Jesus is Lord" -- What could that possibly mean???
• A Neo-Aboriginal Vision of Pastoral Ministry

 

Like me, these are all works in progress, and your helpful comments would be very welcome. Over the past six years, since I began preparing for ordination, my views and experience of Christ and Christian faith have continued to evolve, and some of the perspectives in the above sermons have been refined or outmoded. Rather than updating or discarding them, though, I keep posting new sermons, as a way of tracking how my views and style are evolving.  

 

In my blog, you will also find excerpts of writers whose work I have enjoyed enough to want to pass on.

 

 

 

Interests:

Narrative things of all kinds -- written stories, films.

Liturgy & Transformation.

Animals of all kinds.

Drawing.

Good conversations with good friends.

Traveling to other cultures and staying in them for long periods of time.

Latino culture of all kinds.

American politics in light of Barack Obama. Political theology.

Most geeky things.

The natural world unspoiled.

 

                 

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