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When Mom and I stayed at the Ilikai in October of 2010 I made sure to get up early each morning so that I would have two hours to myself out on my private lānai.  Having made a mug of Kona coffee I would go out and sit there, watching the night’s darkness slowly melting away into the dawn’s sneaking in.  Those two hours enabled me to have some time in Hawaiʻi to myself, enabling me to take in it’s sights and sounds: the boats and yachts in the harbor, the sound of the Tiger Doves, the smells of breakfast from the hotel’s Grill.

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Time for myself in the morning, no matter where I am, is crucial for me.  It is a time for me to collect myself, to take stock of where I am emotionally, to make sure I am aware as I go into the day.  I have found that the awareness (or lack thereof)  with which I go into the day acts as the template for my living in that day.

I suppose this 40-year habit is the fruit of my monastic life, in which verse 10 from Psalm 46 was drilled into me: “Be still and know that I am God”.  When one enters monastic life one first learns how to still one’s exterior, and then how to still the interior.  The inner stillness that one strives for is not so much an absence of noise, not a passivity… but an inner alertness.

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So why is this important for me?  It is important because I have come to see how vital it is that the way that I live needs to manifest what I believe; or rather, the way that I live will manifest what I  most deeply believe, no matter what I “say” I believe.  Monastic ascetical practices have helped me in trying to keep my inner and outer lives in touch with each other.  Some modern-day people think of asceticism as life-denying whereas those who fruitfully engage with ascetical practices, no matter what religious tradition, come to know that the only purpose of asceticism is to help one get control of oneself, to learn how to catch on to one’s tendency to mindlessly flail about through life.

Whether in Hawaiʻi at the Ilikai or here at home in Rincon, GA, I usually get up early enough so that no matter what I have to do that day, I can go out to the picnic pavilion here at the back of the property with my coffee.  As I sit there and sip, I think… I assess… I pray… and I am grateful.

Kahuna-pule Kimo

(click Alika & Mom)

During the two weeks in 2010 that we were in Waikīkī, on each Friday Dan and his friend Alika threw a picnic for us on the water’s edge of Magic Island so that we could watch the weekly fireworks show put on by the Hilton when it got dark.  We had a picnic blanket, food in various containers, drinks and a few camp chairs to sit upon.  Once everything was set up I looked around to see where Mom was.  I was stunned to see her over on a park bench merrily chatting away with a Hawaiian mother with kids who came for the show, she and Mom going at it like fast friends.

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Having lived in the monastery for so long I often find I need to get away from people and noise in order think and make sense of things.  In monastic life, silence and solitude are means used to foster awareness.  Through the practice of silence the monk comes to terms with reality rather than projecting his will upon it.  Silence, for the monastic, is not passivity nor even the absence of noise; it is, like the discipline of obedience, an intense alertness to reality.

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But what does that matter if it doesn’t translate into how one lives with and relates to others?  Reality has an uncanny way of making me face my selfishness, despite being a Kahuna-pule.  At exactly the moment when I don’t want to have to bother with anyone, a stranger will ask something of me: my time, my talk, my ear… my heart.  The heart is at the core of it all, at the core of aloha; not “heart” as in emotions, but as that place where my soul lives.  That place where the real fireworks occur.

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I have to say that on every trip to Hawaiʻi I have never even once felt like I was being treated like a stranger.  On the contrary, I had the strange sense of being welcomed home, as if  Hawaiʻi and I have known one another for a long time.  So there Mom sat, exchanging aloha with that Hawaiian mother, chatting about kids, clothes, and life, both of their families suddenly enlarged by knowledge about the other.  Aloha changes strangers into family, ʻohana.  Just another wonder at the heart of Hawaiʻi.

Kahuna-pule Kimo

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Down the road from Darrell’s gallery and studio in Holualoa is the Kona Hotel.  My first sight of it was one of utter shock: It is painted a bright Pepto-Bismol pink!  What, I have often wondered, lead them to choose that color?  Each day presents us with choices: What to do, who we want to be, how to get to where we want to go.  Those choices are dependent upon what matters to us, our values, but how we go about making those choices is sometimes as important for us as what we choose.

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I have been in love with Hawaiʻi long enough now to not take a romanticized view of it and its people, and it is clear to me that some Hawaiians are angry.  Very angry.  And rightly so.  Over a century ago the Hawaiian people were mugged and robbed by those obsessed with money above all else.  The relationship between monarchy and people was taken away.  Hawaiian culture was deemed immature and its people were forbidden to use their language or express the art of the hula.  But anger, especially long-term anger such as I see now in Hawaiʻi can be as corrosive as an acid and eventually destroys the vessel that contains it… unless it is transformed into a gentle but steely determination.

Choices are important in that they take us somewhere.  They take us into a future which we will all eventually depart from, then leaving behind either the treasures we have chosen or the detritus of our misguided choices.  Those choices are determined by how we go about the choosing.  If we go to poach an egg and drop the yolk and the white into a pot of furiously boiling water, the ferocity of the water will tear the egg apart.  If, on the other hand, we drop the egg into gently simmering water, the controlled heat will accomplish its purpose and poach the egg perfectly.

Sometimes when doing artwork I listen to Olelonet tv shows on the computer.  I am heartened to hear some Hawaiians talking about Hawaiian issues with a determination no less intense that those who are angry; and yet, their determination seems to me, to be finely channeled and manifests a clear vision of where the Hawaiian people need to go and  what they need to do, as differentiated from the incoherence and blind lashing out of a volcanic anger.  As the days go forward I will be very interested in seeing how Hawaiʻi goes about poaching its choices!

Kahuna-pule Kimo

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In Orthodox monasticism one engages in the discipline of discipleship by apprenticing oneself to an experienced Elder.  That Elder shows by example, teaches by words, reflects the disciple back to himself.  Discipleship is an authentic relationship, a relationship in which the disciple learns how to see and to hear, how to be faithful while being open and vulnerable.  All of which points out how crucial is the choice of one’s Elder.

I thought of starting off today’s blog with the question: What makes us “belong” somewhere?  Immediately, my relationship with my Abba came to mind, as well as the answer to the question.  It is relationship that makes us belong: Relationship to others, to a place, to a culture, to God.  There is the terrible possibility of our becoming émigrés from our own hearts when we become divorced from others, from geographical rootedness, from prayer.

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Every time I have come to  Hawaiʻi my brother Dan, who lives in Waikīkī, has met me in the baggage area of the airport with a double tuberose lei.  Every time he has put the lei around my neck the smell of the tuberose reminds me that I am back in Hawaiʻi, back home where I have not yet moved.

So even scent can put us in relationship with someone, some place.  Every so often I pass by the candle aisle in a store here in Georgia and get a whiff of tuberose… and I am back in relationship with my new spiritual Elder, Hawaiʻi, where I “belong”, with the One whom I love.

Kahuna-pule Kimo

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On one of my trips to Hawaiʻi, Dan and I climbed up to the top of Diamond Head Crater.  The view was fantastic, an overview not able to be had from down below.  Whenever I have been to Hawaiʻi, I have taken hundreds of photos.  When I view the photos later I sometimes have the experience of remembering what that photo does not show, what was just outside of the frame, what was there but was left out.

When we use a camera we view the world through how we frame it. In living Life, how we frame it often becomes how we view it.  Western culture, I’ve come to believe, has framed the world and life into artificial segments which lose an overview of the whole: Secular vs Sacred, Independence vs. Interdependence, Work vs Play.

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What I pick up about Hawaiian culture is that it does not foster this dividedness.  Life is hā, God’s own breath of himself, and Hawaiian culture seems to view Life and all of its components as “sacred”, meaning that anything that constitutes living is sacred.  That Hawaiian culture does not recognize an artificial division between sacred and secular, Hawaiian cultural values, in my opinion, foster wholeness.

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Hā, Life, comes to us from others, which perhaps explains the Hawaiian emphasis on genealogy.  Hawaiians value that we come from others, that we are part of others and that we therefore are obligated to live with a sense of respect and gratitude.  This Hawaiian sense of inter-dependence certainly clashes with the western concept of independence.  Once again, I think that  Hawaiʻi has framed it better.

So much of our life seems to be the struggle for wholeness, the struggle to see and remember what is outside of the frame.  Hawaiʻi, I think, has the correct overview… whether from up on Diamond Head, or down in the homes.

Kahuna-pule Kimo

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High above Waimea Bay on Oʻahu we went to see the Pu’u O Mahuka Heiau, driving along a twisty and winding dirt road to climb up there, even scraping the bottom of the car at one point!  Once there, my brother Dan and I got out to walk around while Mom stayed in the car.  I did not want to approach the Heiau as a tourist, tramping around within its consecrated borders since that space had been made sacred by those who built it; as a priest myself, I am sensitive to such things.

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Sacred space has nothing to do with whatever particular denomination to which one might belong.  Sacred space is a part of the physical world that has been dedicated for no other purpose than for meeting the Divine.  Through ritual and purification, a spot on the earth is set aside (which is the meaning of the word “consecrated”) as a portal between our created world and the Eternal.

So instead of going inside the borders I walked all around them.  I was particularly taken by the one end that I, being a priest myself who serves at an altar, thought of as “the altar”.  I just stood there imagining the ceremonies performed long ago, only feet away from where I was.

There is a yearning inside us which leads us to build altars and temples, a yearning almost like a homing beacon which guides us through the Eternity into which we entered at the moment of our first hā.  That yearning prompts us to reach higher than ourselves, to build altars that raise us up and to declare that this spot on the earth serves no other function than to be in contact with the Divine.

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Standing there that day, even as an Orthodox Christian Priestmonk, I felt a tug of affinity with those priests who had functioned so long ago at that altar within that heiau.  It was a strange moment for me, a moment completely outside of time, feeling as I stood there like one more priest in a long line of priests.

Kahuna-pule Kimo

Driving up to the main house is like approaching a small castle, with  a foyer approximately 40 feet tall.  After passing through a series of rooms we eventually found Roswell in his wheelchair in what I suppose would be the living room, but which for most of us would comprise an area the size of a entire house! All around the room and lining other rooms as well are lighted cases holding various collections: Silver, crystal, minerals.  I remember being overwhelmed by the beauty of it all and the sheer amount of items; it was like going to a small but well-stocked private museum!

There have been times on my visits to Hawaiʻi when that experience has popped back into my mind at the oddest moments! As I saw Hawaiians making do with whatever the island could offer them I had a feeling that living there might rather quickly turn one from being a mindless consumer into a recycler of things, since much of what’s required for living is limited on an island: fresh water, land, food.  I suspect… and hope to find out in 2019… that living on an island breeds a mindset of being more responsible for what one uses and fosters an orientation of respectful awareness.

The western, commercial mindset on most of the mainland is use it, throw it away and buy more, which fosters an orientation of irresponsible wastefulness as well as thinking more about what I want and less about what the costs for wanting that will be to others.  In our land of Walmart abundance I suspect most of us give little thought to the fact that what I use and/or waste deprives someone else of what they need. On my visits to Hawaiʻi as I wandered in and out of tourist shops and Ala Moana Center, whenever something caught my eye I found a little voice in the back of my mind asking me, “Do I really need this?”  Or do I just want this?

Kahuna-pule Kimo

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It strikes me that Hawaiian culture is a fertile ground for living a spiritual life.  But seeing so many western or mainland stores in the islands, I wonder whether there is a danger of modern Hawaiians losing sight of the value of their inheritance, of the value of their ʻohana, of losing those values which make them Hawaiian through the idolization of western goods?

When we dismiss something we do so because we hold something else to be of a greater value.  What we dismiss or neglect we do not pass on, and if enough people within a culture do this they give up or give away the very soul of that culture.  Such a way of being betrays a lack of a spiritual approach to life and living.

So why wouldn’t young Hawaiians value their inheritance?  Or another way to ask this is: Why might they be blind to its value?  Is it a blindness due to lack of exposure to the ancient ways, or is it that they automatically dismiss all that they have been taught about the ancient ways, convinced that what those who went before valued is irrelevant to modern life since the ancients didn’t know of microwave ovens, computers, and iPads?  The presumption of such an approach is that modern “things’ trump ancient insights.

I don’t mean to suggest that Hawaiians be a Pacific version of the Amish, spurning everything that came into being after the 1800’s.  I am not proposing that to be Hawaiian means going back to grass shacks and loincloths.  Is it possible to have running water, mass transit, and televisions and yet to use them in a way which does not conflict with the Hawaiian cosmological comprehension of how everything fits together?

But making it all fit together, for Hawaiians, means not automatically rejecting everything that has constituted Hawaiian life in the preceding centuries.  To meld ancient wisdom with modern gadgets requires reflection upon the ancient values, not automatic dismissal of them. Even while driving an electric car, it is that reflection which gives sight to the blind.

Kahuna-pule Kimo

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Some of my memories of Kauaʻi have pleasant feelings associated with them, some… not so much.  Which brings me to a common misunderstanding that people have about spirituality and being spiritual: that it has to do with feelings.  The fact is that feelings come and go and despite that our calling is to strive to be good, to do good, no matter what we are feeling. This can be difficult in the presence of strong emotions and feelings.  In the end, one aspect of spirituality is the cultivation of an awareness of what needs to be remembered.

One thing which needs to be remembered is that we are more than just ourselves.  We are also who our family and land have been, what we have done, repented of having done, what we have been given and what we have given to others.  Living in a western culture which stresses individuality at the cost of responsibilities and placing an unbalanced emphasis on being a “self-made man” (or woman), we most need to cultivate the awareness that we did not give birth to ourselves.  Our very life has been entrusted to us and when we give it back there will be an accounting of our stewardship of ʻāina, ʻohana and aloha.

Which makes me wonder about all of the eggs that must be strewn about Kauaʻi hidden under bushes and behind rocks: Do the chickens remember where they all are?

Kahuna-pule Kimo

(click for New Skete)

For 18 of the 23 years that I was in my monastery I was the Guestmaster; the monk tasked with attending to all visitors to the monastery.  Some visitors came on a personal and spiritual pilgrimage.  Some came because of the German Shepherd dogs that the monks bred and raised.  Some came to buy the food products produced by the monks and sold in the Farms store.  But the point is that they all came, and I had to deal with them.

Being Guestmaster was absolutely crucial in my coming to see how self-centered I really am.  I would be in the midst of artwork up in my studio and a brother would inform me that guests arrived, which meant I had to leave the artwork and go and attend to them and their needs.  And in the beginning years I did not like it!  Each instance of the negative emotions that I experienced when disrupting my schedule for a guest made it all too clear to me 1) That I was only beginning to learn how to give of myself, and 2) That God had placed me in the position that I was in so that I might be forced to wrestle with my self-centeredness.

I also discovered that a companion to self-centeredness is self-pity: Why did they have to show up right now?  Why can’t someone else do this job?  Why, why, why?!  It isn’t a pleasant discovery to realize that one is a self-pitying whiner.  The first 5 years of the 18 were the hardest.  Eventually I awoke to the dynamics of what was going on within me! Self-disgust gave birth to repentance, which led to self-lessness… giving oneself away in order to grow.

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As each of us was greeted at the Polynesian Cultural Center with a lei and an “Aloha” I watched the giver’s face to see if they were connected to the gift-giving they were bestowing upon us, or simply doing what their job said that they had to do.  From my own Guestmaster experience I know that it’s all too possible to say “Aloha” with no more interest in the individual than a conventional “How are you?”

In a way, all Hawaiians are Guestmasters tasked with the job of welcoming visitors to the Temple that is Hawaiʻi.  From my own experience I can share the insight that we are most alive, most ourselves and most human when the heart learns how to break out of the prison of its own self-centeredness and self-preoccupation, giving itself away… in a lei or in an “Aloha”.

Kahuna-pule Kimo