What gets me about this stuff is how, like some cults, it masks its hidden agenda. A number of local parishes come together each year for this retreat, and sometimes it's a family tradition, with fathers, sons, and grandsons attending for 50 years. This year, though, they had a new retreat director at the Mater Dolorosa center. The new guy seems to have had some new ideas. Innovative ideas. Heterodox ideas, in fact.
So the retreat got through much of Saturday with no change. There was helpful study of a scriptural passage that would be the theme of the retreat. There was a eucharist and confessions. The conference sessions began to get onto less steady ground, talking about Thomas Merton and Teilhard de Chardin, but I could let that go. Then, after dinner Saturday, the schedule listed a "conference and prayer".
In the spirit of full disclosure, in the mid 1970s, after I'd fallen away from my youthful Presbyterianism in college, I got involved in Zen. Serious Zen, not dilettante stuff. I studied under a Japanese Zen master, Joshu Sasaki Roshi, who passed away in 2014 at the age of 107. When allegations of misconduct surfaced a few years before his death, it turns out that, even when I was active in his center,
His career of misconduct [ran] the gamut from frequent and repeated non-consensual groping of female students during interview, to sexually coercive after hours ‘tea’ meetings, to affairs and sexual interference in the marriages and relationships of his students. . . . Joshu Roshi’s behavior has been ignored, hushed up, downplayed, justified, and defended by the monks and students that remain loyal to him.Those around him were so good at covering up that I never heard, or suspected, anything. Actually, I didn't need to. He would frequently complain in his homilies about how racist and anti-Japanese the Americans were after World War II, but living in LA, I had lots of Korean neighbors and co-workers, many of whom at the time had grown up in prewar Korea, when it was a Japanese colony. Their stories of mistreatment at the hands of Japanese were hair-raising.
I wound up having logical difficulties with Zen, in addition to Sasaki's own extreme ethnocentrism, which contrasted starkly with Buddhist claims of universal non-attachment, and one day it dawned on me that the dullest Episcopalian associate priest would actually be preferable to this Zen guy, and I promptly went to TEC confirmation class, filled out a pledge card, and got involved. But the point here is that I'd studied Zen, I knew it quite well.
That Sasaki was as bad as a Catholic cardinal could be was something I found out only much later, but it was just the icing on the cake. Bottom line, I can recognize "new age" when I see it.
So now let's fast forward to the Mater Dolorosa retreat, where after dinner Saturday, the new retreat director started explaining to us about a great new prayer technique. It was, he said, how Christians prayed for the first 15 centuries! The Our Father and Hail Mary are, apparently, modernist departures. The examples we must follow are instead St Theresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, and the desert fathers.
So OK, he began to teach us how to sit, back straight, arms at the side, a little like a loosey-goosey West Point plebe. We had to select a holy word that we would repeat. We had to close our eyes and sorta-kinda not-concentrate on our holy word and just let our thoughts go. After a short time with this, I began to realize I'd seen this show before. And I knew enough about the not-thinking, and I knew enough about Aquinas, to recognize that Christian holiness requires the intellect and the will, we aren't meant to empty our heads.
This is all called "centering prayer". It's very close to Zen, and it's even closer to Transcendental Meditation, which in more recent times has come to be recognized as a cult. After I got up on Sunday morning, I started to search the Catechism on my cell phone and came up with passages like this:
2725 Prayer is both a gift of grace and a determined response on our part. It always presupposes effort. The great figures of prayer of the Old Covenant before Christ, as well as the Mother of God, the saints, and he himself, all teach us this: prayer is a battle. . .I wasn't sure what to do. I didn't want to come off as a curmudgeon about this stuff, and I was almost determined just to grit my teeth and keep my mouth politely shut. But Deacon Manuel, the Passionist who was making this presentation, began talking about the gospel passage where Jesus leaves his disciples and goes up on the mountain to pray. This was, Dcn Manuel said, just like "centering prayer". I raised my hand.
"Yes?" he asked.
"Doesn't the Catechism say that prayer is a battle? And I don't think that when Jesus went up on the mountain, he was just going to his happy place."
Dcn Manuel was not pleased. He began talking about the kind of people who are like skunks and who just want to spray on everything. And he started going on about how some people want to deny the Imago Dei. He had a lot to say about the Imago Dei. That was Latin! Maybe he thought I'd cringe, huh? I tried raising my hand again, but he wouldn't acknowledge me after that.
Once I got home, my curiosity was piqued enough that I began searching the web in earnest about "centering prayer". One thing that struck me was the cut-and-paste apologia that I heard from the new retreat director and Dcn Manuel Saturday and Sunday: it comes from St Theresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, and the desert fathers. But according to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, of all people, this isn't the case! St Theresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, and the desert fathers aren't new age gurus after all! I'll go into more detail on this later this week.
It was becoming more plain to me that the new retreat director, a Dr Michael Cunningham, had, figuratively speaking, ordered the kitchen to stir up a batch of special Kool-Aid, and he was wheeling in a big bowl of it for us to drink.
More to come.
