Rugged Interdependency - Amaravati Buddhist Monastery

Part IIIAbhayagiri – Sonoma Mountain – Green Gulch – Spirit RockMay 8 thThe morning is taken up with the “mixed blessing” at the house of our next-doorneighborsPeter La Rivière and Mary Curran. Both of them having once beenCatholic monastics (he for a few months, she for 20 years with 12 of them as novicemistress) and now close to Buddhist practice as well, they had asked us to do ahouse blessing for them in combination with the monks of Mount Tabor – theUkranian Uniate order of forest monks between whose property and ours Maryand Peter’s place is wedged, like the lettuce and tomatoes sliding out of a wellfilledsandwich.Ajahns Pasanno, Vajiro, Visuddhi, Ven. Jutindharo and I walked over and metFather Damian, Brother Elias, and Mary and Peter at their house. Peter was stillsomewhat pale and tender after his operation for lung cancer which had takenplace only a week before. They were both in good spirits, however, and glad thatthe long-awaited blessing was finally going to take place. We began the proceedingsdown at Dhammadhara, their little shrine-room and meditation space, whichhad suffered somewhat from the winter storms.Despite the slightly disheveled look of the place we all entered the spirit of theoccasion immediately. Father Damian went first and spoke of the Jordan water thatthey use for such occasions – their Monastery has a small supply of water from theJordan River itself and a few drops of this are placed in any water that is employedfor blessings. It is thus seen as having the presence of the Christ infused in it andthe sprinkling of it accordingly serves to bless the place with that same immanence.It was remarkable how similar the ceremony was to our own – the only differenceseeming to be the size of the sprinkler and the quantity of water in the bowl, eventhe spiritual/mythical symbols were virtually identical.After the initial short blessing at Dhammadhara we went to the main houseand conducted a full-bells-and-whistles ceremony – particularly empowered bythe presence of Peter’s cancer and our goodwill and hopes for his speedy recovery.We gave it our full force and, apart from the Russian incense failing on FatherDamian (he blamed it on a suspected Ukranian nationalist plot) the whole affairwent perfectly. Peter and Mary rounded off the morning for us with tea and pastries,not leaving much room for the meal-offering back at the Monastery – a smallprice to pay for the chance to wish well and to pour our friendship into a form thatwill linger in all our memories with a sweet glow.The afternoon passed with my hacking through the thickets of e-mail andanother rehearsal for the ordination up at the clearing. All went very well.Richard Smith from Detroit, Faye Dirksen from Oklahoma, Rachel Ropp andher father from New York and LA respectively, and others have already startedto arrive, along with numerous cards, parcels, e-mail and cyber-gladioli for61