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Suffering Caused by Personal and Structural Violence

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Fr. Bruce Baker, O. Carm, Sr. Mary Collins, OSB, Fr. Mark Delery,
OCSO, Joseph Goldstein, Henepole Gunaratana, Sr. Kathy
Lyzotte, OCSO, Prof. Donald Mitchell, Fr. Thomas Ryan, CSP,
Judith Simmer-Brown, Geshe Sopa, Ajahn Sundara, Ven. Samu
Sunim, Rev. Heng Sure, Ph.D., Fr. Joseph Wong, OSB Cam

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from Gethsemani Encounter II, April 2002

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Benedict's Dharma
Gethsemani I

Dialogue after Sr. Mary Collins's Presentation
Bruce Baker: I was very glad to hear that in your dialogues there has

Gethsemani II

been some focus on teenagers. For a good number of years I worked

Gethsemani III

with troubled kids and had about sixty I was responsible for. The

Abhishiktananda
Society Bulletinsinteresting dynamic with these kids was that society had given up onthem, but they hadn’t given up on society. To respond to what Sister
Mary Collins said, they also had adopted their own philosophy, which
was that even if nobody else loved them, God did. They insisted thatHelp

before we circle up for group or whatever, prayer was a part of their
healing process. One of the most interesting things that happened
during the time I worked with these kids, talking about ecologicalviolence and so forth, was when Earth Day first started becoming

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II, April 2002)
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Presentation(Gethsemani Encounter
II, April 2002)
Fr. Bruce Baker, O.
Carm, is a Carmelite
priest, and Director of
Mount Carmel SpiritualCentre.
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Fr. Bruce Baker, O.
Carm
Sr. Mary Collins, OSB, isa liturgist and former
prioress at Mt. SaintScholastica in Atchison,
Kansas.
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Sr. Mary Collins, OSB

strong. The kids came to me and said, “We want to do something.” I
said, “Fine. What is it you want to do?” They said, “We want to plant
flowers.” I said, “Okay. You arrange it. You fix it. You organize it.” The
kids put together a car wash over a weekend and managed to get
together a couple of hundred dollars and spent the entire amount on
flowers.

Fr. Mark Delery, OCSO,
is a Trappist monk at Holy
Cross Abbey in Berryville,
Virginia.
All articles by or about
Fr. Mark Delery, OCSO

After the flowers were planted, the mayor was invited. It was beautiful
what the kids did. They planted them themselves, and were a muddy
mess by the time they got finished. The very next day the same mayor

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ordered the city workers to mow the flowers because people wereslowing traffic, enjoying the view. These kids had adopted their own
council, and had a president, a fifteen-year-old. The fifteen-year-old
had been in nine foster homes before he was eight, and the strides that
this young man had made were remarkable. I had not caught wind that
this had happened until my phone started ringing off the hook, and I
got a call from the fifteen-year-old, saying, “Oh, by the way, has yourphone been ringing?” He proceeded to tell me what happened. The kids
called an emergency meeting and said, “We want to plant more
flowers.” I said, “Fine. How are you going to do it?” They said, “We aregoing to collect soda bottles, anything that we can redeem for cash.”
They had also gotten their foster parents or biological parents topromise to match whatever they had put together. So they came up
with about $100. They went back to the same spot with flowers andreplanted them. What they also did was get a life-size poster of themayor, and had it headed over the top of it, “He okayed it two days
ago and mowed it the next day,” and it stood there challenging thebureaucracy: “We are doing something beautiful. Don’t destroy it.” My
point is: in your dialogues with kids, listen to them, because they havemuch to say.

Joseph Goldstein is the
co-founder of Insight
Meditation Society and The
Barre Center for Buddhist
Studies in Barre,
Massachusetts. He wasinvolved in both
Gethsemani Encounters.
All articles by or about
Joseph Goldstein

Kathy Lyzotte: I think the Cistercians and the Benedictines have a lot
more in common than was suggested. We could have a dialogue on
that, too. My thought was about an awakening of conscience. After
September 11, it’s my perception that there has been something
happening on a large scale, especially in the United States, of an
awakening of conscience on many levels. It has rippled through many
levels of our society. The Enron and the campaign finance scandals arealso happening at the same time. The clergy problems have been goingon for fifteen years, but it’s only right now that there is a demand for it
to stop, that somebody has to be responsible, and that it cannot go on.
There is a greater urgency than ever before on these issues. As I see it,
there is an awakening of conscience. Victor Frankl says that consciencecomes from the same part of our being as love and art—it’s a creative
part of our inner work. An awakening of conscience is an important partof the traditional Catholic background, when we were taught toexamine our conscience and take it seriously.

Henepola Gunaratana(Bhante G.) is presidentof the Bhavana Society
and abbot of its
monastery in West
Virginia.

Thomas Ryan: Thank you, Mary, for describing community life as a

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skillful means. I suspect that our experience in both Christianity andBuddhism is much closer to what you have explicitly recognized as the

All articles by or about
Henepole Gunaratana

experience of your community—namely, muddling through without theskillful means. I’ve been a participant in different conversations in thelast couple of days, one of them being between Buddhists observing
the difficulty in providing skillful means to the first generation of new
Buddhists in communities, monasteries and in the American context.
Thomas Keating this morning pointed out out that to look at theschedule of Roman Catholic monastic communities is to observe that it
would seem that contemplation is not taken all that seriously. When is
one to do it? When is there any time simply to come to rest in God
between all the singing and the work and other common life practices?
I certainly observe in my own community a lack of skillful means.
The second observation is that life seems to provide us with skillfulmeans to polish and grind and make us diamonds with facets thatsparkle in spite of our privation from certain traditional skillful means.
My observation with celibacy vis-a-vis family life is that family life is amore radical asceticism for true holiness, because my understanding of
the universal Christian vocation is availability for service in love. WhenI see parents raising a family of children, what I see is a more radical
availability for service and love on the part of parents to the children
than anything I’ve ever been called to live as a member of a religious
community. I recognize family life, and its adjunct in the religious
community experience of community life, as precisely the skillful means

Sr. Kathy Lyzotte,
OCSO, is a Trappistine nun
from Our Lady ofMississippi Abbey in
Dubuque, Iowa. She hasserved on the MID Board
and was one of the
speakers at the second
Gethsemani Encounter.
All articles by or about
Sr. Kathy Lyzotte,
OCSO

that in the life requires, even when other more traditional skillful meansseem not as much in evidence as we would like them to be.
Don Mitchell: I’ve been having to process our dialogue as an editor,
so I haven’t had time to really think about saying much. One thing that
did come to mind is that, in 1987 or 1988, I was asked to meet with
His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Bloomington to convey some information
to him. In the process I talked about various activities within the
church for various projects and so on. He listened very carefully,
attentively, and politely. But as I was talking, I wasn’t quite sure howinterested he was. I then talked about some youth activities that weregoing on and some elements of character formation, such as Kathy wastalking about. He became quite excited and animated, and he said,“This is very important.” He asked a number of questions about what
was going on, and he was especially interested as to whether we were

Professor Donald
Mitchell teaches at Purdue
University. He is theco-editor (with James
Wiseman) of The
Gethsemani Encounter: A

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teaching doctrine, or if we were teaching values. In this case, it was
mainly value education, and working with young children and families
in lay communities.
“This is very, very important,” he said, “because in the future thechildren are going to do unthinkable things in terms of violence.” Hesaid a few more things about it, and I listened to him, and I thought,“Well, this may be the Dalai Lama, but I think he is crazy.” I couldn’t
think of children killing children and whatever.

Dialogue on the SpiritualLife (Continuum, 1996)
and Transforming
Suffering: Reflections on
Finding Peace in Troubled
Times (Doubleday, 2003).
He serves as an advisor to
the Board of Directors ofMID.
All articles by or about
Prof. Donald Mitchell

We finished our conversation, and I stored the experience in mymemory. Then, all of a sudden, there was [the massacre ofschoolchildren by other schoolchildren at] Columbine [High School, inColorado] and other events, and I thought back to that conversation. It
was not too long after that that we began planning Gethsemani II.
Columbine was in our minds because it was on the front page of thenewspapers some years ago. One of the things we thought about was,What can monastics, Buddhists and Christians, do to put into the handsof people in community and families certain skillful means, not so muchto teach doctrine, but to pass on values? One of the points that His
Holiness made to me is that the values that are typically passed on are
not going to be passed on. That’s what we are seeing today. So, what
can we do? What kind of advice can we give? There is a chance for us
to examine our own consciences and what we aren’t doing. What are
the avenues in the lay communities outside of the monasteries that we
can take to try to convey something that is missing more and morefrom family life and the education of children? That was one of thereasons we thought that if His Holiness was here, we could go to a kindof a youth meeting in Louisville and present some of these things inthat context. It didn’t work out in the end. What Kathy was mentioning
is very important in terms of how this spiritual life can be conveyed
beyond the monastic walls into families and communities.
Heng Sure: If I could offer a definition from one Buddhist tradition ofskill and means. This might be helpful to think about how the Chinese

Fr. Thomas Ryan, CSP,
Fr. Thomas Ryan resides
at the North American
Paulist Center in
Washington DC, andworks for Christian unity
and interfaith relations
through a variety offormats: interreligious
dialogue, retreats, on-line
courses, graduate
instruction, workshops,
etc. He has served on
MID’s Board of Advisors.
All articles by or about
Fr. Thomas Ryan, CSP

Mahayana tradition uses this term. The Sanskrit word is upaya; theChinese word is fung bien. The Chinese say that that skillful means is afunction of wisdom. Wisdom is the substance, but upaya or skill inmeans is the application of that. Yet wisdom doesn’t move until there isa provocation. The Chinese say that the analogy is like a mirror. When

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there is nothing going on, the mirror is still. But as soon as somethingarises, the reflection is perfect in the great, perfect mirror—wisdom.
Skill and means, therefore, are always tuned to the person, to theplace, and to the time. One means might be perfectly inapplicable at adifferent time or for a different person or place.
Joseph Goldstein was talking about this complete collision between two
worldviews of the Dharma. Yet from the Buddhist point of view, twodifferent sick patients get two different medicines. If you have a
bleeding toe, you don’t take an aspirin. If you have a headache, you
don’t put a bandage on it. The skill and means come as appropriate
medicine for the ill. Likewise, there is no set upaya. What might work in
the abbey or in your priory might be absolutely perfect and yet bebrand-new because the wisdom in the mirror reflects that that’s the
medicine we need to solve the problem. There is another list, called the
84,000 Dharma doors, and those are methods of practice. All you could
say by definition are upaya. And any one of those 84,000 Dharma
doors could be appropriate for this person, and it still could be number
one. So there is no competition across that variety of practices.
Judith Simmer-Brown: It seems, in thinking about the things thathave been said, particularly about young people and about the issue ofvalues, I was haunted by Mary’s quote, “Never turn away fromsomeone who needs your love,” because it seems to me that young
people especially need our love. One question is how we teach values. I
think that we could really misunderstand this challenge and do it in avery unskillful way. As a mother of young teenagers and a teacher ofundergraduates and graduates, who spends hours each week talking to

Judith Simmer-Brown isa professor in the religious
studies department at
Naropa University in
Boulder, Colorado.
All articles by or about
Judith Simmer-Brown
Geshe Sopa is one of the
few Tibetan scholars tohold a regular position at aWestern institution ofhigher learning: at the
University of Wisconsin. He
founded the Deer Park
Buddhist Center in 1979.
All articles by or about
Geshe Sopa

kids from eleven years old to twenty-five, what I hear from many ofthem is that they just want someone there. The most powerful way I
know how to teach values is to listen and help young people come toknow who they are, especially through meditation practice.
I think that any kind of laid-on value is not going to work. We knowthat about young people. We know that about ourselves. No one cantell us values, but they have to be discovered in a practice setting.
What I see in the many students who come to Naropa is that they wanta spiritual practice and a spiritual life. They want to find some kind of
inner meaning. I can’t tell them values, but I can show them tools to
discover an inner life and to find meaning in themselves. The teenagers

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want the same thing. My son just finished sitting a meditation
weekend—his third—sitting eight hours a day (he is fourteen years
old), for two days this weekend between weeks of high school. He ispart of a small community of teenagers in our community who are
sitting. He says, “When you are a freshman in high school, you reallyneed support.” This is how he is finding that. One very directcontribution the monastic community has to make to the parentless
teenagers of our world—those who may be given money but aren’t
given time and attention by their parents—is to support them in some
way to discover themselves through meditation and prayer.
Henepola Gunaratana (Bhante G.): I’m very much interested in this
topic. I am also head of a meditation center. Normally, meditation
centers draw all kinds of people, particularly people with troubles ordifficulties. We don’t have a paid staff to work with them. All ourworkers are volunteers. Working with volunteers and troubled people isa yeoman’s task, very difficult. We learn all sorts of ways of dealing
with people in a very friendly way. The first thing, as Judith mentioned,is that we have to listen to them patiently and teach them how to bepatient. Being patient doesn’t mean that you let others walk all overAjahn Sundara is a
Theravada Buddhist nun
who was ordained inEngland in 1979 in the Thai
Forest Tradition of Ajan
Chah. She was aparticipant in Gethsemani
Encounter II in 2002.
All articles by or about
Ajahn Sundara

you. Being patient means buying time to say the right thing at the righttime with right words with right attitude. If you use any of these things
incorrectly, you will misinterpret patients and people will be misguided.
We also have to learn to listen to them—sometimes to agree andsometimes to agree to disagree. We always don’t expect them to agreewith what we are going to say or what we tell them. We don’t expect
them to accept whatever we tell them. There are situations where wehave to listen; and if we don’t agree, we tell them that we don’t agree.
If they don’t agree with us, they have to say that they don’t agree withus. We both have to learn to agree to disagree. That situation applies
not only between individuals but between societies, organizations,religions, ideas, views, and so forth. This means that we learn torespect each other’s cherished and valued opinions, ideas, and beliefs.
For harmonious existence between two people, two families, or twosocieties, we always have to learn to respect each other’s opinion,
feelings, ideas, and so on. With this approach I try to help mycommunity and people who come to seek help from us.
Mark Delery: As I’ve been sitting here listening for three days now, it

Ven. Samu Sunim is thespiritual director and headof the Zen Buddhist
Temple in Ann Arbor and
the Zen Buddhist Temple in
Chicago.
All articles by or about

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suddenly occurred to me, especially with Sister Mary Collins's talk andVen. Samu Sunim

Donald Mitchell’s contribution, that we are hurting. Thomas Keating
mentioned it the other day in terms of monasteries. A few weeks ago, afriend of mine was at a baptism, and the priest very beautifully said,“I’ve often wondered why Christ insisted on us becoming like little
children.” He said, “I think I have the answer. Little children cry when
they need help.” A novice master had just finished a six-monthly
meeting with so-called Generation X from Washington, D.C., and at theend of that meeting, he asked their advice. The only advice the young
people could give him was based on what they knew about themselves
and Generation X. Young people today are not ready for monastic life.
They have very little religious training. The culture is not adequate.
Trying to put this a little bit together, I don’t have any real answers.
Monks and nuns, especially in monasticism and contemplative
communities are worried, and they need your help. The values that
Don speaks of, we cannot give. Only the family can give them. If themedia gets that message from us and lets the families know we are
hurting, worried, and afraid of what’s going to happen not only to ourmonasteries but our country, that could be part of our message. But
it’s not the complete one.

Reverend Heng Sure has
been an ordained Buddhist
monk in the Chan lineageof China since 1976. He is
the director of theBerkeley Buddhist
Monastery.
All articles by or about
Rev. Heng Sure, Ph.D.

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Fr. Joseph Wong, OSB
Cam, was elected amember of the Council of
the Camaldolese
Benedictines in 2005 andlives at the Mother Houseat Camaldoli, Italy. He wasinvolved in the second
Gethsemani Encounter in
April 2002.

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Fr. Joseph Wong, OSB
Cam

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