Virtually Touching

It was a year ago yesterday that we had our last in-person meditation service at the Boundless Way Temple—and a year ago tomorrow that we had our first Zoom meditation service. Since then our daily attendance at morning sessions has increased four or fivefold and our overall attendance has doubled. Our ‘regulars’ are no longer confined to the greater Worcester region and now live in Boston, Hartford, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Tulsa, Los Angelos, Brussels, the Isle of Wight, and beyond. Almost every day we gather virtually to meditate and to support each other in walking the path of awakening.

Religion and spirituality are almost always communal endeavors. Just setting off on a personal journey to find God or to wake up or to be saved is rarely enough. Of course, it is about that personal existential journey however we define it, but this journey is almost always taken with the support, guidance, and encouragement of other like-minded spirits. Hermits and recluses, though a revered part of many traditions, are the exception rather than the rule.

Most of us need each other. We humans are herd animals. Like horses, when we gather, we sense and respond to each other’s energy and intentions. The first time I ever galloped on a horse, it wasn’t my choice. I was simply carried away on my horse who was carried away with the energy of the other horses around us. We were riding one early summer morning through a dewy pasture when we came to a small hill. One of the riders decided it would be fun to gallop up the hill. She began and the other (experienced) riders urged their horses to follow. The small group of horses gathered energy and surged forward. Before I knew what was happening, my horse was galloping up the hill with all the others. It was astonishing to feel the power of the horse and rider community manifesting through the four-legged being I was riding. We quickly reached the top of the hill and paused—horses and riders were all elated.

It was somehow similar when I began going back to church in my early 40’s at the local Unitarian Universalist church on Main Street here in Worcester. I was amazed at how powerful it was to gather with people and to turn our attention together toward these ultimate questions of life and death and the meaning of existence. I found myself delighted to be sitting in a large room with people I knew from other roles in the community, and for once we were all setting down our organizational and political agendas to sing together and to listen to inspiring words that caused us to think deeply about our human existence.

In the Zen tradition, we have honored this ancient wisdom of communal worship in its simplest form. We sing together (mostly just on one note) and listen to inspiring talks, but the heart of our worship (which we call ‘practice’) is simply sitting still together in silence. And in this stillness and silence, even as it is conveyed over Zoom, we find some ineffable, undeniable, and ever-changing connection that supports us.

In years past, I probably would have refused to participate in a virtual meditation session. I would have said that authentic Zen has to be in-person. Zen practice is a physical practice—one position yoga, we sometimes say. An upright, balanced and dignified posture—or as close to that as you can come—is essential. But the energy we generate, share and receive as we practice together is not some physical, measurable substance that has a limited range of effectiveness. Just like the power of prayer that is conceived as reaching beyond the room where you pray—just like the correspondence of the spin of related particles that shift instantly with each other no matter the distance—our connections to each other and to life are not as limited as we imagine.

In our Zen community, we are now talking about how and when we will return to some form of in-person practice. With the vaccine rollout progressing so quickly, we are hopeful that the early summer will see us physically together again in some form. But we are clear that we are not simply going back to how it was. We are adding in-person local practice to the vibrant and virtual community of practice that has so surprisingly emerged over this year of the pandemic. How to mix and match virtual and in-person will (hopefully) be the learning of the year to come.