WELCOME July 16, 2001 Issue

Love—not guilt

Bill Dawley

The altar at church seemed so far away when I was a little kid. I remember sitting in the back row with my father every Sunday. We were surrounded by all this dark mahogany wood, and the church smelled musty—probably because it was only open an hour or so a week for Sunday services. I remember men who were blue-collar workers during the week, coming to services in dark suits with white, starched collars that looked tight and uncomfortable. And the minister in the distant pulpit, for all his good intentions, scared me with talk about how if I messed up, I could expect to spend eternity in flames. Not pleasant memories for an eight-year-old.

During my years in the military, and after, I became very interested in Eastern religion. Listening to the cool jazz of Miles Davis, reading books and poetry about the Beat Generation—material by Jack Kerouac and Alan Watts—got me interested in Zen Buddhism. A number of these people were into Zen. It focused on enlightenment. Guilt was nowhere to be found in its teachings, as far as I could see.

As the years passed, though, my study of Zen eased off. In a way, I yearned for a more personal sense of God, and I really wasn't finding that in Zen. I was looking for some kind of spiritual practice that would allow me to feel God's presence on a day-to-day basis in a tangible way, something that would lead toward enlightened understanding but not be laced with rules, regulations, guilt.

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