Radical Grace
Jul- Aug 2007

Still Life: A BUDDHIST CHRISTIAN CONTEMPLATIVE JOURNEY

by Gordon Peerman

It was the end of a month-long silent Buddhist retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Northern California. I was looking for a way to the Oakland airport to make my way home. A man whose practice I had admired over the course of the month made eye contact to say he’d give me a ride. I had noticed his careful concentration during our periods of walking meditation during the retreat. We both tended to do our walking meditation outside in the woods, and he was dependably there, whatever the weather. It seemed odd to me that one day he disappeared from the retreat and was gone for a time, only to return for the final week. It turned out that his father had died during the retreat, and he had returned home for the funeral. After a week at home with his family he came back to sit in the silence and stillness of the last week of the retreat. All this I would learn on the ride to the airport.

His name was Kurt Hoelting, and among other things Kurt was a commercial fisherman, having fished the waters of Alaska since the summers of his college years. He usually practiced in the Rinzai Zen tradition, famous for its rigorous week-long sesshins, but had come to Spirit Rock because he wanted to sit this longer, month-long retreat. Kurt had worked as a Congregational minister until fishing in Alaska called more powerfully to him than the ministerial fishing of college chaplaincy. He had come to Zen by way of the Christian contemplative practice he’d done with the Trappists. While on retreat at a Trappist abbey some years ago Kurt met his Zen master, and thereafter found himself drawn ever more deeply into Buddhist practice.

Like Kurt, I had come to Buddhist practice by way of Thomas Merton and the Trappists. I have been an Episcopal priest for thirty years and for at least the last twenty-five have been moving toward a kind of hyphenated Buddhist-Christian spiritual identity. I’m grateful to have found much help in both traditions. At home in both, with a kind of dual citizenship, I slip back and forth across the border between the two.

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