The All Things Contemplative Blog©

This threesome rediscovered a contemplative practice based on the 14th century text, "The Cloud of Unknowing" and tailored it for modern times. They eventually named it centering prayer, a type of non-conceptual, non-discursive, non-thinking based meditation practice. The practice has became widely adopted throughout the world. 

Fr. William's passing is a significant closure and perhaps celebration of a chapter in the revival of contemplative spirituality and practice in the Christian world - as all three monks have now passed-on yet left behind a host of treasures. May all three rest in peace.

David Parks, Zen teacher and former guest on the All Things Contemplative podcast (Episode #6) approaches koans with receptivity vs. mental struggle - awakening to the Thusness of living. For a fuller description see here. Highly recommended.

Show Notes - to leave comments/questions click on title above. 

In 1982 Pat Johnson and family moved to the Lama Foundation in New Mexico and there two months later she met Fr. Thomas Keating. She served as the Lama liaison for two 16-day centering prayer (CP) retreats that he led at Lama in 1983 and again in 1984. These were the first intensive contemplative practice retreats using CP in the Christian tradition and inspired by Zen shessins he'd experienced.

In 1984 she served an experimental 9-week retreat Fr. Keating led at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, CO where he was a monk. This began the Snowmass CP retreats at the monastery. From 1984 until 2018, Pat served and oversaw these retreats. She has also served as a Board member of Contemplative Outreach Ltd. and was its overall interim administrator for several years. 

Show Notes - to leave comments/questions click on title above. 

David Parks is the Director of Bluegrass Zen, one location of the Pacific Zen Institute in Waco, KY with groups in both Lexington and Berea, KY. He was a minister for many years in the United Church of Christ before devoting himself full time to teaching Zen. David has a deep trust in life’s generosity and views koans as vehicles for transformation, capable of opening the heart to the intimate experience of life lived freely and fully. David has a special interest in the parables, sayings, and doings of Jesus as Christian koans. 

David Discusses: his understanding of “contemplative” drawing on Thomas Merton’s epiphany at 4th and Walnut in Louisville KY, the Buddha and Jesus’s view of the oneness of existence, the Zen practices of meditation and koans, the importance of non-grasping for opening the Heart to the vastness of life, the difference between spirituality and morality, the relevance of Zen for healing a divided world, the Gospel of Thomas, Christian based koans, and the nature of beliefs. 

References From the Show

Bluegrass Zen

Jesus Points to the Moon Blog 

Pacific Zen Institute

Thomas Merton’s Epiphany at 4th & Walnut 

The Gospel of Thomas

Meditations on the Tarot

Shunryu Suzuki (Zen Mind, Beginners Mind) 

Centering Prayer

Frederic Spiegelberg, The Religion of No-Religion  

This morning I had a delightful time interviewing David Parks, a Zen teacher. David and I both grew up in Kentucky where he has returned to live on a small farm after spending many years in California. His father, John Parks a psychiatrist and now deceased introduced me as a college student to meditation 50 years ago. 

While I knew of David as his son we never really had a chance to connect meaningfully until recently as we prepared to record an episode of All Things Contemplative. He spoke of growing up seeing his parents meditating on a regular basis and he would flip through books laying around the house by Akhilananda, their meditation teacher, Manley Palmer Hall and others. I said likewise with the books my mother left discreetly around by Gurdjeiff, Ouspensky and Yogananda hoping I’d show interest in them. It was she who introduced me to David’s father. 

This is all to say that it is as if I was only aware of threads and in a flash the whole cloth, invisibly woven together appeared as some type of interconnecting "it", sensed though incapable of precise definition. The episode with David will air in about two weeks.  

Stephen Hatch, M.A. is a contemplative teacher, thinker, photographer and writer.  For the past thirty years, he has have lived as a "Worldly Monk," combining family life with meditation, silence, solitary time spent hiking and camping in the wilds, a simple lifestyle, and mindfulness. He has a B.A. from Colorado State University in Philosophy and Religion, and an M.A. from Iliff School of Theology. In the 1980s, he trained with Thomas Keating and then worked for several years with Contemplative Outreach, the organization Keating established to teach centering prayer. Formerly he was on the faculty of Naropa University, Boulder, CO where he taught contemplative Christianity.

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