Tag: religion

The Diamond Sutra.

The Diamond Sutra is set up as a conversation between the Buddha and an elderly disciple named Subhuti. Two voices, one asking, one answering, both circling around the same old questions we still ask today: What matters? What lasts? How do we see the world without getting lost in it?

Some dates slip past us without a sound, and some carry a little echo if you stop long enough to listen. This one goes all the way back to 868 A.D., when somebody — a monk, a printer, a pair of hands we’ll never know — pressed inked wood against paper and created what we now call the oldest printed book with a publication date. The Diamond Sutra. Sixteen feet of teachings, questions, answers, and the quiet persistence of human curiosity.

The word sutra comes from Sanskrit and means “teaching,” but it’s more than that. It’s a thread, a line connecting one mind to another across centuries. The Diamond Sutra is set up as a conversation between the Buddha and an elderly disciple named Subhuti. Two voices, one asking, one answering, both circling around the same old questions we still ask today: What matters? What lasts? How do we see the world without getting lost in it?

The physical book itself was printed from carved wooden blocks onto seven long strips of paper. Each page had its own block, carved by hand, reversed like a mirror, every line a small act of faith that someone in the future would want to read it. Those seven sheets were pasted together into a scroll about sixteen feet long — a book before books were bound the way we know them now. Imagine unrolling that thing, the slow reveal of words that had already traveled further than most people of that time ever would.

And then, like so many things, it vanished.

For more than a thousand years the scroll sat hidden away in Turkestan, sealed up with hundreds of other manuscripts in one of the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. A whole library walled off, maybe to protect it, maybe to forget it, maybe because someone thought the world was ending and wanted to save what they could. We’ll never know. What we do know is that in 1900, a caretaker sweeping out a cave stumbled onto a doorway that hadn’t been opened in centuries. Behind it: bundles of manuscripts, paintings, scrolls, and among them, this sixteen‑foot conversation between a teacher and a disciple.

I like stories like this. They remind me that the things we make — the words we write, the thoughts we try to pin down — have a way of outliving us. They get lost, they get found, they get read by someone a thousand years later who has no idea who we were but still feels the spark of recognition. A voice calling across time saying, “I was here. I wondered about the same things you do.”

Maybe that’s why I keep writing. Maybe that’s why any of us do.

SUBSCRIPTIONS ARE ALWAYS FREE

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Mentors

Mentors can come from the docks, the back roads and back alleys, or, surprisingly, a monastery in Kentucky. Thomas Merton was one of mine. He wasn’t my only mentor, but he was a steady voice that helped me find clarity.

He was born in 1915 in Prades, France—a place distant from here, and even further removed from the Trappist life he ultimately embraced. Throughout his life, he authored 50 books, wrote 2,000 poems, and kept journals that revealed a relentless pursuit of personal growth.

What I admired wasn’t just that he was a monk. It was the strength underneath. He questioned everything, including himself. He spent time in silence, listening to things most of us drown out with noise, drinking, TV, or anything else we use to avoid facing ourselves.

He wasn’t afraid to say he didn’t have all the answers. Sometimes, he wasn’t even sure he was asking the right questions. That kind of honesty can surprise you and help you see things more clearly.

He taught me that solitude isn’t about escaping. It’s about taking care of yourself, like cleaning a boat so it keeps moving. He showed me that silence isn’t empty; it’s where change happens. He also taught me that being human is slow, difficult work, often done without recognition and against challenges.

I’ve had other mentors—some loud, some quiet, some unexpected. But Merton taught me how to be still without losing myself, how to listen, and how to stay honest even when the truth is hard to accept.

Every year on his birthday, I remember him. Though he was born in France in 1915 and eventually became a Kentucky monk, he somehow found his way into my journey. Even from behind monastery walls, he found ways to help others see new possibilities.

We don’t choose all our mentors. Some arrive unexpectedly, shaped by life, and turn out to be just what we need to keep going.

Now, fifty years later, after running up and down many roads, I find myself once again sitting in silence. Being alone is sometimes the hardest part—quiet, remembering who I have been, and, most importantly, who I am. I sometimes drift with the tide, or swim against it when necessary, here on the shores of Rambling Harbor.

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Born today, November 8th, 1897 Dorothy Day

From an early age, I was drawn to voices that challenged the world’s cruelty with conscience and compassion. I read books by and about Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Merton, Elie Wiesel, and John Howard Griffin, among others. Each offering a view into suffering, resistance, and the sacred duty to bear witness. But among them all, it was Dorothy Day who walked beside me the longest and still does. Her words didn’t just echo in my mind; they shaped the very path beneath my feet.

Dorothy Day, born on this day in 1897 in Brooklyn, New York, was not merely a writer or an activist. She was a radical in the truest sense: one who went to the root. She co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement during the Great Depression, not as a charity, but as a revolution of mercy. Houses of hospitality. Loaves of bread. A newspaper that cost a penny, “The Catholic Worker”, and told the truth. She believed in voluntary poverty, in the dignity of every person, and in the fierce, inconvenient demands of love.

It was her vision that led to the creation of communities like the Community for Creative Nonviolence (CCNV) and Jonah House, which I was a part of. These were not places of comfort, but places of confrontation with injustice. With indifference. With the part of ourselves that wants to look away. And yet, they were also places of deep, stubborn hope, the kind Dorothy carried like a candle into the darkest corners of the world.

Even now, as I live and write from Rambling Harbor, her teachings guide me. In every act of remembrance, in every refusal to be silent, in every meal shared or injustice named, I feel her presence. Not as a saint on a pedestal, but as a companion in the struggle. A woman who once said, “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed so easily.”

Dorothy Day taught us that the works of mercy are not optional. That feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, and comforting the afflicted are not acts of charity, but of justice. She reminded us that the personal is political, and the political must be individual. That love, real love, is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.

So today, on her birthday, I light a candle not just for her memory, but for the movement she sparked, a movement that still burns in kitchens and shelters, in protests and poems, in every quiet act of resistance that says: We will not abandon each other.

Dorothy Day walked the hard road. I’ve tried, in my own stumbling way, to follow.

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