I have formally reconnected with my Lutheran family background through membership in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (a contemporary amalgam of several ethnic synods, founded in 1988). This membership does not imply an end to my relationship with Zen, but rather, it represents a combination of traditions that so-far works together in my spiritual practice.

            My mother's claim that we had Jewish background from her mother's family could never be proven. Since she despised her German background and transferred that self-hate to me, her claim seemed to be a form of denial.

          The truth is that my whole family belonged to the Lutheran Church, or they became non-believers. A few wandered into new religions, but the backdrop was very Lutheran and very German. My dad's sister was a church musician, so I was raised in a culture of Bach's music and Lutheran values that were simply taken for granted, even though my experience in the church-proper was limited.

          My parents had no use for religion, but despite himself, my father transferred basic Lutheran assumptions to me. The main ones included the priesthood of all believers, salvation by God's grace alone with faith rather than through work on our part or through the church, and a distrust of church, especially papal, authority. I was raised to read and think for myself rather than be told what to believe.

          The goal of Buddhist Practice, although it is denied in the Zen Schools, is not atonement, or redemption, but awakening (enlightenment), whatever that means. The result of enlightenment is thought to be dropping off the wheel of continuing incarnation, or no further births in this world of suffering. Buddhism is quite different from Christianity in this way, and I approached Buddhism erroneously with a very Christian agenda. I sought forgiveness and redemption rather than enlightenment.

          Although I finally understood and accepted that man's inhumanity to man evolved as a problem for human beings, not only German human beings, I still needed forgiveness. I needed forgiveness for messy relationships, bad marriages, poor fathering, and a host of other misdeeds like everyone else. 

         At San Francisco Zen Center, specifically from Blanche Hartman, and Philip Whalen, the priest who ordained me a Buddhist Monk, I learned about Pureland Buddhism and its impact on Zen. Some core ideas borrowed from Pureland or in common with it, are that 1) we are already enlightened but we don't know it (we are deluded), 2) in faith, we are the Buddha, due to our inborn Buddha-Nature, and 3) enlightenment (some say the Buddhist equivalent of salvation) does not come from work on one's own practice. It is a gift.

          The chances that I am operating in left field or completely off the track exist, obviously, but about five years ago, I began to wonder why thirty years ago, I wandered away from Christianity, Lutheran values specifically, only to encounter the same framework and ideas about the way things are (to use a Zen expression) in an Eastern Tradition (Buddhism). How are these ideas different? I cannot distinguish one. It seems to me that Christianity fits easily into the Pureland paradigm, and vice versa. In addition, Lutheran attitudes nest well with Zen; they even counterbalance each other (but thank goodness, nothing is as dark as Zen, not even German theology).

         Zen raised my awareness. Many others in the Christian world appreciate the monism of the East. A movement exists that calls itself Christian Zen. Literature in English is beginning to proliferate as more books are written or are translated. Feeding into this is the two-thousand-year-old Eastern Orthodox practice of Hesychasm (Centering Prayer in the Western Church) that parallels zazen practice; the literature here too is beginning to expand as the exercise grows in the West. My spiritual seeking has made a three hundred sixty degree turn, a completed circle. It has taken on a life of its own.

Montaña de Oro State Park, San Luis Obispo County, California, 2009

          It took years to resolve shame and self-loathing around my ethnicity. In the process, I changed my name several times to bury the fact that my name could not be more Germanic. I disowned myself in a variety of ways; all of them added up to denial and plain, ordinary ignorance.

          Through Zen, awareness grew that what attracted me to it was Zen's rigid, dark formality, because firstly, I am so seriously German that the meanness of it (to quote Jack Kerouac) felt normal to me. More significantly, through the hard work of intense practice, I was making amends. I atoned through work.

           Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama among other Buddhist Teachers recommend such connections with our cultural and spiritual backgrounds. They teach that it can be healing, as I have found it to be.

             One of my life-long problems has been that I come from one hundred per cent German descent. I was born during the holocaust with no way to know the degree to which my own relatives participated in the murder of millions. That I am American born, and did not personally participate, does not matter because as both Jesus and the Buddha taught, we are all connected through time and space. Thich Nhat Hanh says that we interare. I apparently feel that way, and apparently, I always have. It is not an exclusively Eastern concept. The English poet, John Donne (1572-1631) once wrote, "No man is an Island,… intire of it selfe, … [a]ny mans death diminishes me, [b]ecause I am involved in mankinde…[t]herefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee (Meditation XVII)."