Monastery Nights: All Is Not Lost, After All

MonasteryNights

Bhavana Buddha ~ photoillustration by Douglas Imbrogno

An Occasional Memoir of Visits to the
Bhavana Society Buddhist Monastery in West Virginia.

Chapter 1: The Karma of Moths
Chapter 2: The Good Friend
Chapter 3: Just Breathe It
Chapter 4: All Is Not Lost, After All

By Douglas Imbrogno

All I want to do is sit in the angled sun that pierces through the trees. I want to write something about today’s lunch at the monastery, which was personal in more ways than one.

A quarter-hour ago at noon, we finished the last meal of the day. It was a filling one, concocted by Robert the cook. Spicy vegetable curry with homemade nan and steaming bowls of potato-pea soup. Now, we had two hours of personal time before a late afternoon Q-and-A for retreatants with the abbot.

Notebook in hand, I had retired to a bench behind the meditation hall. It was one of many outposts of solitude scattered about Bhavana’s 60-some wooded acres at the base of Great North Mountain in the West Virginia hills.

Today’s lunch dana — a word signifying a donation to the monastery — was in honor of two friends of mine, both recently and quite shockingly departed. Under Bhavana’s recently expanded Dana Project, you could sponsor a meal in memory of loved ones. Or just to help the place out, as it survived on donations.

The merit of giving dana to a Buddhist monastery is considered auspicious. Such merit may be applied to the person in whose name the dana is given. I had written a check earlier in the day in support of this meal. That would explain the print-out, propped on a stand beside the big metal pots of aromatic curry, steaming soup and bowls full of salad and fruit:

‘TODAY’S DANA IS PROVIDED BY DOUG IMBROGNO IN REMEMBRANCE OF HIS FRIENDS, PAUL H. AND JERRY C., WHO BOTH RECENTLY PASSED AWAY.’

In that single sentence was written whole chapters of my life. The week before the retreat, I had learned of Paul’s suicide at age 53, after his younger brother posted a stunned Facebook status update. I’ve written elsewhere of this terribly sad news. Suffice it to say, Paul was the last of my high school friends I would have thought might end up a suicide.

I had been constantly reminded of his cheery face as one of my fellow retreatants had a kindred face, right down to the ice-blue eyes and jutting Matterhorn of a nose. I had not seen Paul in a decade, since the last high school reunion I’d attended. My heart ached to think of what that gentle, sweet-natured boy I knew in high school had gone through to climb up the high cliff of suicide, then to plunge off. (I don’t know how he died and don’t think I want or need to.)

Bhante Gunaratana had read off the names of my friends before the meal began. We then recited a short Buddhist puja and loving-kindness meditation, directing merit their way. I read from a supplied sheet of paper, following the words of the meditation. The words blurred as a drop of water fell onto the page, a runaway tear I’d failed to catch in time.

Jerry. Oh, Jerry, I will write of you some day and what passed between us. But I don’t have the words right now. His life ended in a quick flurry at age 54, from a too-late diagnosed case of hepatitis, concealed from some of us until he was gone. Paul and Jerry. I hoped even the slightest breeze of merit would — should this merit-thing work –  deliver a momentary gust to their backs as they commenced their next incarnations.

I caught sight of the retreatant who looked like Paul. I was cast instantly back into high school. Seeing Paul at a desk beside mine in algebra class. Watching him ride shotgun in a friend’s car, the window rolled down, his hair scattered by the breeze.

What can you do? One must trust in the ongoing dispensation of compassion. Or take faith in the underlying luminosity of all mind and all effort.  Whatever turns our paths take – even the most terrible ones — we are yet on the Way. Or can waken again to it should we stumble off into weeds and darkness.

Monastery Dana ~ treated photograph ~ westvirginiaville.com

When they asked me to write down words to describe those to whom I was devoting this dana, I hesitated. Should I write ‘dear friends’ or just ‘friends’?

I chose ‘friends,’ just to be perfectly honest. Paul was part of my gang of good pals in high school. A good friend. Part of our tribe.

We once went on vacation to a Kentucky lake, staying at a cottage with the family of our great mutual buddy, Jay. One afternoon, the three of us took the family’s white-and-blue boat out onto the glassy surface of Lake Cumberland. Jay gunned the engine across the lake, furrowing its waters. He piloted it to anchor in some quiet, private cove, one of scores notched into the deep woods enveloping the long lake.

He cut the engine and a heartland silence took hold. Only the skree of bluejays, the putter of a fishing boat passing the cove mouth, the water lapping against our hull, tattooed the air. It was the kind of eternal blue-sky summer day that tricks young men into believing they are gods at play who will live forever.

Jay grins. “Want to get high?”

A joint appears. Maui-Wowie or some other best-stuff weed. He fires up, puffs, passes the joint. My finger touches Jay’s fingers, then nicks Paul’s on the next hand-off in what passes for Holy Communion among the fallen brethren of the Church of Stoned Suburban Boys.

We lie flat upon the boat’s deck. Paul rests supine in the bottom of the craft. We stare up at the slow-moving clouds. In our juiced cerebellums, they take on distinct, even mythic forms.

An airplane.
A bear.
A baby with a rattle.
An anvil.
The god Vulcan, hammering out a sword upon the anvil …

Then, in one of those minor, haphazard cruelties perpetrated by the teenage mind, myself or Jay — I forget who began the ruse — tells Paul he has been in an accident. The boat has wrecked, terrible things have happened. Bodies. Yes!

“No!” Paul says. “You’re kidding me …”
It is strong pot. He’s so stoned…
“No, Paul, they’re taking you to the hospital. Why do you think you’re lying flat?”

No, no, no, he says.
Maybe a little of the roundness has sheared off his chuckles.
“I’m not dead am I?”

I forget how long the game went on. We were not inherently cruel or mean boys. Soon, we are all sitting back up. “Screw you guys!” Paul cries. He would have smiled then. I remember him always wry or grinning, his Paul Newman eyes glinting like blue marbles in sunlight.

Jay turns the key. Flips the steering wheel hard right. Off we surge, leaving behind a frothy wake as we dash off to the next episode in our young, hopeful, oh so restless lives.

Now, Paul really does lie in his grave, put there by his own hand. If not my ‘dear friend,’ at this remove of years, he was someone who was genuinely dear. So what to say, except godspeed, were there a personal god to speed him on. Or has he gone to hell as some religions cruelly — speaking of cruelty — dispatch the suicide? (No doubt, in all good faith, and sociologically speaking, trying to dissuade others not to reduce the herd and off themselves when the going gets rough.)

Still, hasn’t the suicide gone through enough without also being consigned to eternal damnation? I prefer the path of karmic consequence. May Paul untie the Gordian knot of whatever confusion and pain finally became too much for him. He is not lost for eternity. He has only relocated the identical issues to another life; he has perhaps found a moment’s relief. Whatever form his forward motion takes, he yet must face the same river of suffering.

And will. And so must figure out how to cross it, as we all must. Which is why he needs the merit. Which is why we all need merit. And teachers. And instruction. And spiritual friends. And much much loving-friendliness.

All is not lost, after all.

So, do not commit suicide, if you can avoid it. If you are reading this and aching with despair and confusion, if you are in terror for your life, stalking your own existence, go. Get help. Cry out for it! Go home. Get better. You can. Paul’s story might have been mine. Many of us have been pulled back from that cliff or muffed the plunge. I will tell you one man’s tale of being a failed suicide some day. It is the one thing in life it is really good to fail at.

Let me tell you: the frenzied mind — it can heal. To be able to sit in the forest before a candlelit Buddha and to watch the mind settle down.

Then, to keep watching.

This is the merit I direct Paul and Jerry’s way. Whichever direction they have gotten off to.

‘Monastery Nights’
Chapter 1: The Karma of Moths
Chapter 2: The Good Friend
Chapter 3: Just Breathe It
Chapter 4: All Is Not Lost, After All