Sangha

When I was growing up, my older brother and I had to go to mass every Sunday. The rest of our family didn't go - the younger siblings being too small to attend without our parents who didn't want to go to Mass. For some reason, my Dad seemed to think that my brother's and my attendance was crucial to our moral and spiritual development.

This mandated attendance usually involved both of us standing in the very back of the church, as far back as we could get while technically being 'in church'. I would look out over the congregation the way people look at those optical illusion illustrations, where if you soften your gaze enough, some other picture becomes clear. I could do that for 45 minutes. Lost in my thoughts, appreciating the stained glass windows, willfully disregarding all the memorized-into-nonsense prayers.

My brother, being two years older and far more openly rebellious, would stand with arms crossed, sulking or glaring. The very skate punk insignia that covered his mostly black clothing was an all encompassing thumbed nose at all he surveyed.

One Sunday, Father Brennan walked into the back of the church and stopped next to Pat. Conversationally, he said 'They love you in there too, you know.'

Having been raised to be especially respectful to priests and nuns, my brother shrugged and mumbled. Meanwhile, I was drawn out of my reveries by that interaction. I felt embarassment for the priest who spoke so earnestly but had completely misread the situation and mostly - uncontrollable hilarity. I willed myself not to laugh. I refused to look at my brother even after Father Brennan walked away because I knew that when I did, I would lose my shit laughing at him.

We left at the earliest possible time we could while still saying we had been to mass. Outside I immediately started in 'Dude. All this time, you've been hating going to mass. But it's cool now. Problem solved. They love you in there too.'

Being teenagers, we were especially mistrustful of institutions and viewed them and their congregants with a Holden Caulfield-ish hypersensitivity to phoniness and hypocrisy. And to our skeptical eyes, there was a whole lot of phoniness going on there. Not to mention a pretty big disconnect between the idea of the grand scope of Jesus' love and the little insignificant rituals of sitting, standing, kneeling and repeating prayers. From the back of that church, the ritual of mass looked like a collection of small, pixelated images that were obscuring the larger image I wanted to connect to.

More than ten years later, after a few years of working on my individual Buddhist practice, I decided to move to a monastery in Germany for three months to find some kind of structure and support for my practice. The 'official' ceremony for becoming a Buddhist is called 'taking refuge'. The idea is that you take refuge in the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. The Buddha offers refuge/support in his example of embodying Buddha Nature or the god in all of us. The Dharma offers refuge as a philosophy or lesson. Sangha means 'a community with a common goal, vision or purpose.' And the support it gives is in the day to day efforts to apply Dharma and to recognize our Buddha Nature.

Here again was this idea of a collection of individuals as a support and kind of conduit to spirituality. Yet it was easier for me to feel the validity of that idea within the sanghas in Philadelphia and Germany. Inside these groups, I didn't see them as phony or hypocritical, I saw them as I saw myself - people who aspired to connect with love and spirituality yet who were naturally and humanly flawed and lible to act in ways that weren't quite in keeping with their highest aspirations. Those very flaws, that very humanity was what allowed me to feel connected to them in a way that I didn't feel connected to Buddha or Dharma. There seemed to be a lot of perfection going on there.Whereas our sangha was quite imperfect.

The funny thing about my time in that monastery is that half the time, someone in the sangha was freaking out or acting in a way that was so ego based it seemed the opposite of everything Buddhist. And the structured/organized religion of Buddhism is not completely without monks or nuns who abuse power and act in ways that are hypocritical.

As a 14 year old, standing in the back of the Buddha Hall, I would have disregarded the people as little pixelated images, totally insignificant and unrelated to the concept of Buddhism. I wouldn't have cared if a monk had come up to me and said 'They love you in there too.' Who wants to be loved by hypocritical, crazy people? And what does that have to do with God? I would have softened my gaze, disconnected from the group and tried to see the bigger picture that was separate and better than the group of individuals and their seemingly unrelated actions.

Honestly, sometimes I still do. But then I'm reminded that I am one of those little pixelated images that makes up the bigger picture. And the times that I've felt most connected to the bigger picture, it's because I opened myself up to the humanness of myself and the humanness of others.

From the back of the church, outside looking in, I might see a group of crazy people, or I might see a bigger, seemingly more important image. But inside, among the group, I can feel it. And in the mixture of imperfections and repeated efforts to let go of fear and identify with love and compassion, I can feel the point where the human experience meets the spiritual experience.

And it's in experience that we gain wisdom, which is a deeper knowledge than any we could gain from staying detached and trying to critically and conceptually understand.