For a period of time in my life I worked in sales. Being a salesperson is difficult work, it requires a person to be able to process a lot of rejection and still remain positive. An individual who defines their self worth by the success or failure of their job, or role will find it difficult to remain positive and healthy mentally as a salesperson dealing with rejection. What the salesperson needs to learn is their role is not the same as their identity.
When I was being interviewed by my committee to become a certified chaplain I made a comment that for me being gay is not a significant part of who I am. It is not completely irrelevant but it is certainly not the defining characteristic of who I am as a human being. One of the people interviewing me disagreed with me on that.
My response was that it is true that within the context of the cultural dialogue on homosexuality it is certainly a prominent subject. My feelings though are that as our culture and society work through to accepting homosexuals as equal human beings the importance and significance will shift.
It has only been a few hundred years perhaps since being left-handed was branded as an abomination and left-handed people were forced to be right-handed. Today the fact that I am one or the other is not important. We don’t consider my right-handedness to be a defining characteristic of what defines me as a human. We don’t factor handedness any more than perhaps blue eyedness. There are many small and insignificant characteristic that make up who I am but don’t define me as a unique individual.
All of this I offer to help illustrate the distinction between self identity and self function or role in society. Learning to separate the two can be an obstacle to ones becoming happy and even attaining enlightenment. And the inability to separate role from identity can lead to physicl illness. We only need to look at the number of men who once retired are unable to function and feel worthy and give up and die; it happens.
I would like to share with you a couple of examples when I have felt dread. One instance was upon joining the military, another was right before I undertook the final monastery stay towards becoming an ordained priest.
On the night before I was to leave for Marine Corps bootcamp, the basic training every Marine undergoes to prepare them initially for service, I lay in my bed trying to go to sleep. My mother came into the room and sat down on my bed beside me. I think this was the most affection I ever recall her displaying. She said to me that she was afraid of me being killed. I shared with her that what I feared the most was not being killed but of having to kill someone.
I wasn’t dreading going to bootcamp. I figured I would be able to manage that, even if it was hard. What I feared was being put into a situation where I would need to kill someone. I just didn’t know if I could do it, and I certainly knew I didn’t want to do it.
The other example I wish to offer is before I entered into the monastery, Shingyo Dojo, in Japan. I had traveled to Japan a week before I was to enter in the monastery so that I could get my body adjusted to the time change, and also to help me switch from American culture to Japanese culture. The last three days of this advance period I spent at Minobu staying at one of the lodging temples.
On my first morning there I woke up early so that I could walk up the hill to attend morning services. This hill is the same one I would be required to walk up every morning during Shingyo Dojo. On that first morning I was unable to make it all the way up. I was almost in tears because I didn’t know what I was going to do if I could not make it up that hill.
Perhaps it is my nature but in both cases I set aside my dread or my fear and followed through trusting that somehow things would work out even though I didn’t know how they would. In the Marine Corps I was never called upon to go into combat. I came close to being called upon to go to Viet Nam however due to a complication and the rule preventing siblings from being in a war zone at the same time I was passed over. At Shingyo Dojo two factors appeared that enabled me to accomplish my goal. One was the speed at which the group walked up the hill began much slower than I had begun. Eventually they did increase the speed up the hill but I was able to build up to that speed and so never really struggled making the climb. The other factor was having a group of 80 plus other priests along with me. As I think about it now, even getting through bootcamp was manageable because it was not a solo undertaking.
