SEATTLE — On New Year’s Eve, families gather across the street from The Seattle Betsuin Buddhist Temple to hear the tolling of the bonsho. The same bell marks the beginning of Sunday services for 560 adult members every week, signaling a full minute of meditation before the chanting of Buddhist scriptures and giving thanks to the Amida Buddha.

It is here, between these walls, that Buddhism and American Christian traditions meet and sometimes intermingle in unexpected ways.

While some sects remain very traditional, others like the Rev. Don Castro’s, have gone further toward “Americanizing.” At Seattle Betsuin Buddhist Temple, where Castro has ministered for 22 years, congregants sit in pews in the main sanctuary. And the services can appear Christian in format, with a sermon and singing of hymns or gathas.

The Seattle temple, founded by Japanese Americans, rests on a hillside amid houses near Seattle University on a parcel of land developed by immigrants more than a century ago. Several doors away from its neat brick façade, an old wooden Baptist church sits, a testimony to the area’s religious diversity.

Seattle Betsuin Buddhist Temple, of the Jodo Shinshu or Shin Buddhist sect, is one of some 65 Buddhist temples of one denomination or another in the Seattle area, according to the Castro, a minister with Buddhist Churches of America for more than 30 years. Buddhism is the fifth largest religion in the United States.

Many, if not most, of Castro’s congregation, or sangha, are Japanese immigrants or the children or grandchildren of immigrants. Still, he points out that there are many more Asian-American Christian churches than Buddhist temples.

The fact that Buddhism itself changes once in America may be a testimony to its fluidity as a religion.

Continue »

SEATTLE— They immigrated to America seeking new lives. Instead they re-discovered their old religion.

Grandmothers Junko Nakano and Aiko Fujii were new brides in those early years after World War II. Etsu Shimbo lived with family and studied in Seattle. All were in their early 20s and, for the most part, lived secular lives when they came to this country.

In Japan, where the three women grew up, Buddhism was “entwined in every day life,” explained Shimbo, a retired accountant whose religious training didn’t really begin until after she had children. “We didn’t have structure like we do here.”

Their families were required to belong to a Buddhist temple. For weddings, Nakano said, they would go to the Shinto shrine. For funerals, to the Buddhist temple.

But it was only in America that they discovered Buddhist teachings.

Maybe it was loneliness or searching for a meaning and identity that drove them back to their old religious roots. But immigrating to America somehow sparked in them a need to go deeper into their Buddhist beliefs.

Continue »

BOSTON--When freelance writer Jenny Sawyer attends church, there is no preacher. No candles flicker. No incense wafts through the air. There isn't even an altar.

This is the type of no frills religious service Sawyer knows her other Christian friends might find totally foreign. They might even find it boring.

Two elected lay people stand up on a raised platform in front of the members and read. One reads passages from the Bible. The other reads from Science and Health, a textbook on health and spirituality, written by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Sawyer's religion. There are also hymns and silent prayer.

Sawyer, a member of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, finds the simplicity soothing amid a frenetic and frantic world.

"For me, when I come to church, it's kind of like there are no distractions. ... You don't even have someone sort of talking at you."

Continue »

BOSTON—The first real deepening of faith for Phil Davis came during basic training in the military.

It came in the vortex of a personal and spiritual crisis so consuming he actually thought about taking his own life.

“I was suicidal,” said Davis, reflecting back on himself as a teen-aged soldier. “It seems like I’m talking about somebody completely different today. But it was a serious problem.”

Davis’s mother discovered Christian Science when he was in the fifth-grade. The religion, founded by Mary Baker Eddy, advocates “practical” healing through prayer and a closeness to God. Still, he said, his relationship with faith was casual then. He didn’t really accept the power of prayer in his life until his own spiritual crisis as a young man.

“I still remember the first day when I palpably felt God’s love,” he said. “I wasn’t asking for a religion. I wasn’t seeking a church. I was just honestly trying to find out if there was a God. And I felt that God was loving me.”

After two weeks of basic training, he had been allowed to go to a church service. He said he cried through it. “I realized I had come home, not to a church building, and not through a religion, but I had come home to a closeness to God. And I wanted more of it. I wanted to devote myself more to it.”

That was years ago. Davis completed his military service, married and became more involved in Christian Science. He is a spiritual practitioner and a leader in the First Church of Christ, Scientist.

He described his earliest sense of prayer as pleading to some distant God. But, he said he eventually realized, “It isn’t trying to get God to do something. It’s an affirmation, a declaration, a growth and understanding of who God is.

“I’m the one who’s learning. Sort of like if you don’t feel very close to God, it’s not God’s fault. It’s my need to move close to him.”

Continue »

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—In a storefront temple here in this upscale college town, Zen Buddhists prostrate themselves before a large golden Buddha statue.

Three times, each kneels in socked feet, touches his or her forehead to a prayer cushion, rises, then repeats the ritual. Led by the abbess and a Buddhist nun in orange robes, the drum beating, bell ringing, and chanting of Buddhist scriptures, called sutras, continue for a solid hour. Sung in Chinese, the sutras sound vaguely haunting, sometimes so slow they appear almost keening, other times light and staccato.

“We meditate and observe the goodness of the Shakayamuni Buddha and learn from him,” says the Ven. Man Kuang, the abbess of the Greater Boston Buddhist Cultural Center, during a break in the all-day celebration. Soft-spoken and serene, Kuang leads the service, chanting into a handheld microphone and ringing a bell. Her head is shaved, and her movements are fluid, composed and purposeful.

This particular ceremony commemorates the Buddhism founder’s enlightenment day more than 2,500 years ago. According to tradition, the Buddha was a human being who obtained enlightenment, not through remote divine intervention, but through meditation. Chanting the sutras is not only a form of worship but also of meditation designed to turn the mind inward. In Zen Buddhism, each person is believed to have a Buddha nature. And through meditating and following the Buddhist precepts, each has the potential to obtain enlightenment, or Buddhahood.

Continue »

ARLINGTON, Va. — I stood on the hillside alone and looked toward the Washington Monument, the Capitol building, and the White House. Our nation’s capital. I have been here a number of times as a journalist. Once, many years ago, I came as a tourist. And now, today, I came to Arlington National Cemetery as a pilgrim-journalist, searching for the soul of America.

But it was not the soul of America I was thinking about in this stark, somber place. It was the souls of young men and women killed in their prime, the remains of old soldiers and war heroes and wives and presidents, all laying side by side underground. And the cavern their deaths left in the lives of wives and children, parents and siblings, and, collectively, a nation.

Amid the keening wail of Taps and a far-off 21-gun salute, I asked Andre Seth, a 27-year-old security guard, how he defined faith, if he could feel any trace of the men and women buried in this cemetery, if he could feel whether some small part of their souls lingered around those graves.

“Faith is believing in something you can’t see,” said Seth.

His job is to watch the tourists, to protect these grounds. He doesn’t feel the presence of the people buried there as much as he feels the force of history and the grief and heaviness of some who have come to find family or friends.

Go down to section 60, he said. That’s where you’ll see where the Afghanistan and Iraq soldiers are buried.

Continue »

WASHINGTON, D.C.— Vietnam veteran Leroy Lawson doesn’t believe in God. But he does believe in justice.

And, for that matter, war.

“I think it’s unavoidable,” said Lawson, an artist and teacher who lives in the Washington, D.C. area.

Take Hitler, Stalin, and Saddam Hussein, he said. “There are simply people on earth who are evil for their own sake.”

Lawson served in the United States military as an infantry platoon leader during Vietnam.
He knows what it’s like to watch friends die in combat. He is alive, he said, because another man died in his place. One day, he was supposed to go on a mission. A more seasoned soldier went in his place. He never came back. And today his name is on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Lawson’s task at the Memorial is to help people find their loved ones’ names on the 246-foot black granite wall that honors the men and women who were killed or missing in action. He and his fellow volunteers answer questions and make sure the men and women who come to the wall have the space they need to remember or grieve. In the process, he has found many of his old friends on the wall, although he says he has never intentionally looked anyone up.

Lawson doesn’t volunteer out of any sense of religious commitment.

Continue »