Maria Kannon Zen Center

The Sandokai also known as The Meaning of Sameness and Difference or The Identity of the Relative and the Absolute is a Chinese poem written in the eighth century by Zen master Sekito Kisen.  This poem is an essential part of the Soto Zen liturgy. The intention of the...

What is Zen practice all about? It is following our heart to the path of true freedom, the wisdom of seeing things as they are, which leads us to compassion. We are helped by countless people who have gone before us. We look to Shakyamuni Buddha and his own awakening e...

Thomas Merton proclaimed in his essay, “The Woman Clothed with the Sun” that a certain power existed in the fact that we know so little of the Virgin Mary. Merton saw Mary’s non-divinity as virtuous in itself and realized that her humility and “hiddenness” offered a pa...

Twenty-five years ago, I fell into a dimension of life I had no concept existed. The event started with a blinding pain in my abdomen. They wheeled me into surgery, and from there I went into the universe. It felt perfectly normal.

I had no body. Instead, I felt reduced...

(originally delivered at Perkins Chapel, Sept. 10, 2003)

When I was a theological student preparing for ordination in the Roman Catholic priesthood in the 1960’s and 70’s, one of my professors conveyed a point in class that continues to resonate with me today. This was...

Editor’s Note: Excerpted from Healing Breath (Orbis Books).

A dimension of our existence that depth psychologists have called to our attention is that of our shadow. This refers to that “dark” side of our being buried in our unconscious that we would rather not see, tha...

Excerpted from Healing Breath (Orbis Books)

It seems that most of us living in this fast-paced contemporary society have actually forgotten how to breathe. Not that we have ceased to perform the biological function whereby we inhale this invisible mixture of gases, incl...

“Listen, O Drop, give yourself up without regret, and in exchange, gain the Ocean. Listen, O Drop, bestow upon yourself this honor and in the arms of the Sea be secure. Who, indeed, should be so fortunate, an Ocean wooing a drop!”
—Rumi

Christian pioneers in interreligi...