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Sitting Sermon
As both a Catholic nun and Zen roshi, Sister Elaine MacInnes provokes controversy while promoting inner peace.
By Ron Csillag S PRING 2 0 09

I
t’s a damp, wind-whipped Tuesday evening in central Toronto.
Shaking off the chill, people arrive punctually, remove coats and
shoes, quietly line the room’s perimeter, and begin meditating. They sit
facing the cement wall, some using cushions, others small wooden benches, with
hands and legs in various positions. The only sound in the semi-darkness is the
ticking of a wall clock.

In Zen practice, this is zazenkai, or a “group

sitting,” offered in this place weekly to support
those who meditate, or “sit,” at home. It also
provides occasion for a teacher to give public Top courses
instruction and private interviews to the Take an online Buddhism course
at your own pace.
participants. After minutes of silent zazen
(sitting meditation), the jikijitsu (bell ringer) 1. Freeing the Mind When the
sounds his gong and participants arise to walk a Body Hurts
by:Vidyamala Burch
few laps around the room, still with heads
bowed.
2. The Spiral to Freedom
by: John Peacock and Akincano Weber
Returning to the floor, and after a short prayer,
they then settle in for the teisho, a talk by a Zen master. Tonight’s sermon, to 3. Dream Yoga
by: Andrew Holecek
borrow a Christian term, is about Zen’s oldest poem, the , -year-old Shin Jin
Mei, attributed to the Third Patriarch of Chan Buddhism, Seng-ts’an. It is the
4. Living and Dying: Navigating
closest thing Zen has to a statement of faith. The master reads the first few lines:
the Bardos
by: Andrew Holecek
The Supreme Way is without difficulty.
It just dislikes picking and choosing. 5. Buddhism for Beginners
by: John Dunne
If there is neither hating nor loving, everything is open and clear.

“The roshi [master or “old teacher”] says we are endowed with feelings such as
hate and love,” gently explains the teacher, who sits in a chair at the front of the
room. “But as long as we cling to such emotions, we cannot grasp the world
where everything is open and clear… Loving and hating are ways of picking and
choosing, are they not?”

There follows another -minute sit, and the master then holds private, one-on-
one talks with fellow practitioners in an adjacent office for work on koans.

This is not an atypical scene in Toronto. But what gives this session a twist is that
it takes place in the basement of Holy Rosary Church, a Roman Catholic
congregation founded by the conservative Basilian Fathers, and that the master
is an -year-old Catholic nun.

Sister Elaine MacInnes doesn’t see herself as a maverick or a free spirit—or even
as a practicing Buddhist. “I don’t know very much about Buddhism,” she says,
almost defensively. “Really.” We are sitting in the drawing room of the large,
nondescript house on a quiet street in East End Toronto she shares with other
sisters of Our Lady’s Missionaries, a community of Roman Catholic nuns
founded in .

Especially to the uninitiated, MacInnes offers an apparent religious paradox. She

projects the image of the grandmother from central casting, exuding warmth,
armed with a hearty chuckle, and offering hugs freely—not remote, not male,
and not inscrutable. She does not present as a stereotypical Zen master in the
least.

Sister Elaine is in rare company: As a roshi, she’s the first Canadian, one of a few
select Westerners (especially women), and, in her own estimation, among just
three other Roman Catholic nuns in the world invested into the highest stratum
of the stream of Zen she practices, Sanbo Kyodan.

As one writer described her, there are “no spiritual trappings here, no
pretensions, no stink of Zen or Catholicism or anything I can put a finger on.”
Dressed all in black with a plain cross around her neck, Sister Elaine seems quite
ordinary. But, as she writes in the forward to Light Sitting in Light, one of six
books she has authored, she is “extraordinarily ordinary.”

This morning, as on many days, she’s been on the phone with the Prison Phoenix
Trust in England, which she directed for seven high-profile years, teaching basic
yoga and rudimentary meditation techniques to thousands of hardened prison
inmates. Although now officially retired, since her return to her native Canada in
she has headed Freeing the Human Spirit, an organization that has won
access to Canadian penitentiaries— of them in Ontario—to impart the
benefits of sitting in silence. Sister Elaine is no fan of prisons—they are “horrible
and loud”—but she sees a silver lining in the limitations they impose on
prisoners.

Launched in , the Prison Phoenix Trust was an outgrowth of the Prison-

Ashram Project, which was co-founded in by the American psychologist
Ram Dass and prison advocate Bo Lozoff, who came up with the idea of helping
inmates see their cells as mini-ashrams. In Britain, where the techniques are
taught at some jails (Sister Elaine herself once led a session at Northern
Ireland’s notorious Maze prison with high-ranking members of the Irish
Republican Army), the program has won plaudits for effecting noticeable drops
in prisoners’ tension levels, improvements in their concentration, sociability, and
self-esteem, and ultimately, reduced prison violence.

Initially, the transplanting of the British program to Canada met with some
resistance. Sister Elaine tells of one Canadian prison official who cited the Bible’s
warning that if you get rid of one devil, seven others will take its place. “I’m not a
trained theologian or biblical scholar,” she explains patiently, “but I know from
my own experience that’s not what happens.” (My seven-month-long efforts to
enter a prison in Toronto in order to witness the sessions firsthand proved
unsuccessful. Despite my pledge not to identify prisoners, even generically,
correctional services officials cited privacy and concerns for the program’s
efficacy. Not even Sister Elaine could help; she bluntly but refreshingly called my
request “quite hopeless.”)

In the Canadian program, prison classes are offered once a week for to
inmates. Ideally, the program’s instructors teach simple yoga postures (asanas)
for minutes and a meditation method called shikantaza, or “just sitting,” for
another minutes, paying special attention to breathing and posture.

At a meeting I had with Sister Elaine in , while she was visiting family in
Canada, she quoted from memory one of many letters she got from program
participants in Britain, this one from a -year-old man who used to sit in his cell
and burn and cut himself just to externalize his pain. After meditating for
minutes in the morning and another at night, “not only is the pain better, but
for the first time in my life,” he wrote, “I see a tiny spark of something within
myself that I can like.”

Sister Elaine was born in Moncton, in the maritime province of New Brunswick,
one of four children immersed in music, and was years old when she
experienced the first of several pivotal moments: she picked up a book about
Saint Thomas Aquinas, the great Christian thinker who demonstrated how God
is the Prime Mover. “That startled me,” she recalls. “I had grandiose ideas about
God. The very fact that God was action—so close, so alive all the time—was
something that startled me when I was . And now that I’m , it’s still startling
me.”

She joined Our Lady’s Missionaries at the relatively advanced age of because
“I felt called,” she relates in her autobiography. “Just like that. No fireworks.” In
, she was assigned to Japan to teach music and English and, she hoped, to
baptize as many Japanese as she could. Spurred by a vow she had made as a
Junior Sister after reading about Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier’s unfulfilled
desire to climb Mount Hiei and encounter the monks there, she scaled the peak
and met the now-famous Tendai Buddhist monk Horisawa Somon, who asked
her how she prayed. “I said, ‘What do you mean how do I pray?’ And he said,
‘Well, do you do it with your body?’ I told him in Christianity that’s not
important. He said, ‘But it is. It’s very important.’”

Emboldened by the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, she began studying
Zen to know the Japanese people better, continued it as a personal discipline in
the development of her own spirituality, “and finally chose it as my service to
others.” She even lived with Rinzai Buddhist nuns in Kyoto for a time, engaging
in a samurai-like regimen of hours of zazen a day, beginning at precisely :
a.m.

It was in the Philippines, where she was dispatched in to pursue an

apostolate in animal husbandry, where Sister Elaine was asked to impart Zen’s
calming influence to prisoners. To condition her for what jails are like in the
country, officials sent her to the Muntinlupa prison outside Manila, a “hellhole,”
she recalls, where , nearly naked inmates squatted on fanned out
newspapers in filthy individual animal cages. Later, at the Bago Bantay detention
centre in Quezon City, she worked with political prisoners who had been
tortured under the Ferdinand Marcos regime and were in the grips of flashbacks.

Finally, in the Japanese city of Kamakura in , Yamada Koun Roshi,

impressed by his pupil’s knowledge of koans, the maturity of her teachings and
the depth of her meditation, conferred on her the title of roshi. She was given the
Zen name “Ko Un Ang”—roughly, “Little Hermitage of a Cloud of Light.” At age
, her reputation drew her to Oxford, England to take over the Prison Phoenix
Trust.

Sister Elaine no longer goes into Canadian prisons herself, and is occupied these
days mainly with paperwork, discussions with penal officials, and fundraising.
She still meditates for about an hour a day. As one of her editors noted, her life
seems to be a continuum of present participles. In her vocabulary, it’s always
“be-ing,” “do-ing” and “no-thing.” She speaks of Zen as a direct experience.
“They say whatever you do, if you’re doing it, that’s perfect Zen.”

She is often asked pesky questions, mainly by reporters, about religious conflict.
Is she both a Catholic nun and a Zen Buddhist? Can that be? She chuckles. “I
would say no, but that’s because of the decision I made in Japan. I admired the
Buddhists there; I had reason to. And of course, I had a loyalty to my own
religion. I didn’t want to be a scandal in Japan either to Christians or Buddhists,
both of whom guarded their own territory.”

Zen meditation has enriched her Christian spirituality without compromising it.
Though she would never say that the two traditions have the same spiritual ideal,
there are fundamental similarities. “It boils down to an inner power in both
paths. “The word ‘spirit’ means in Buddhism, as far as I can tell, pretty much
what it means in Christianity: the presence of the potential sacred within,” she
explains. “And that presence expresses itself in power. You can call it chi or qi,
but it’s power.”

She hastens to add that “I’m not studying a philosophy. I’m just doing something
that requires no thought. It just takes time—and silence. The inner garbage
gradually just disappears. There’s no philosophy there at all. There’s no
philosophy in peace.” Besides, her teacher Koun Roshi would never allow such
talk. “He said, ‘I’m not teaching a philosophy and I’m not teaching a religion.’ It’s
a convenient classification to say ‘Buddhist.’”

Others have expressed less nuanced views. The Catholic author and blogger Carl
Olson once groused on the blog Insight Scoop that “if you have taken vows as a
Catholic nun and are supported by a community of nuns, it’s disconcerting and
scandalous to spend your time spreading and practicing Buddhism, not to
mention saying things that aren’t in keeping with Catholic doctrine and
practice.”

Sister Elaine shrugs off the barbs from fellow Catholics, which have been more
than a few. “I forget about it. I’m not very good at arguing anyway. I’ve never
won an argument in my life.” On the other hand, she’s never tangled with
Catholic higher-ups locally. Asked to comment on her activities and whether she
has ever been disciplined or told to quit her Zen practice, a spokesman for
Toronto archdiocese sent the following email: “Our records show that Sister
Elaine is in good standing with the Archdiocese of Toronto, involved in
important prison ministry, as well as using Oriental meditation methods for her
outreach. We have nothing ‘in the files’ to reflect any concerns with her work.”
Sister Elaine proudly notes that Freeing the Human Spirit once received a ,
donation from the Archbishop of Toronto.

Even so, I can’t help but ask how she would regard herself if she were a
hidebound Catholic bishop. She pauses, drums her fingers, and offers: “Yes, she
does this Zen stuff and Buddhist stuff. But she keeps her nose clean.”

Ron Csillag is a freelance writer in Toronto. Image ©Vision TV

VI E W C O MME NTS

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