Adopting a Rule of Life: Not in Words, Not in Theory, but in Waffles

by Shane Steinkamp (Part 2 - For Part 1, click here.)

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Glossary: A kyosaku is a flat, tapered wooden stick or slat used in Zen Buddhist meditation (zazen) to waken, encourage, and refocus practitioners.

On a spring day in 2010, at 3:00 AM, I get up.

I have risen at the usual hour and, in the manner of St. John of the Cross, fled the house while all in quiet rest.  On this night, I am seeking what John sought in the Dark Night of the Soul: to go out into the darkness and set my face “reclined on the Beloved.”

I do not have a chapel, or even much space in the house devoted to such practice, so I go out into the poverty of the garage. The old, unheated building serves as chapel, temple, dojo, workshop, and whatever other sacred or practical space the moment requires.

There, I kneel on the concrete floor in the darkness as God made me and abandon myself to prayer.   Having practiced many modes and traditions, I am familiar with John’s manner and quickly lose myself, “leaving my cares forgotten…” 

An hour or more passes, and then, in the darkness, I become aware of one of the Unholy Ones.  There are some things on this Earth that do not sleep.  There are things that move while the rest of us pray in stillness. Things that wait at the edges. Things that gather where the soul thins and the mind begins to open.  They shift.  They listen.  They sneak.  They wait for weakness.  They are always hungry; full of desire and chaos.  I know they would divide me from the Beloved, and use me for their own wretched purposes. I can feel one of them now.  Not clearly.  Not enough to name it.  Only enough to know that it is coming…

I pray harder.

Was that the door?

I pray louder, hoping it will hear me and be frightened away.

But this demon fears me not at all.

Out of the darkness it calls, “Daddy! I’m hungry! When are you going to make breakfast?”

She finds the light switch and invokes The World of Men. The fluorescent tubes crackle and pop awake, flooding the garage with their ghastly light.  My five-year-old daughter Madeline has risen obscenely early to profane my sacred space. 

Without rising, I say gently, “I’m in practice, love. Say a prayer with me and we’ll go make waffles, OK?”

“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name…”

We make waffles.

My pancreas cries out at the amount of syrup the child pours.

Sitting with her at the table, I fold my hands and attempt to return to the prayer she interrupted. Madeline is usually the child who sleeps, so she rarely joins me for early-morning practice.  Like most five-year-olds, she has little interest in metaphysics, mystical theology, or the spiritual pursuits of her father.

But this morning she looks at me and asks, in a sort of irked way -- the same tone her mother uses when I have done something to inconvenience her:

“What are you practicing for?”

I hesitate.

She did not ask, “What are you practicing?”

She asked, “What are you practicing for?”

That little word for is a nuclear bomb.

Out of the mouth of babes…

I have an answer, of course. I have many answers. I am a man who has spent years collecting answers.

So I reach for one.

“I follow the Path of the Dharmapala,” I tell her.

And because apparently this does not strike me as an adequate amount of explanation for a five-year-old eating Eggos, I begin quoting Saigō:

“However seriously systems and measures may be discussed,

They cannot be put into practice unless there is the right man to do it.

There is no deed without a doer.

To have the right man is the greatest blessing.

One must aim at being that man.”

Before I reach the second line, she has stopped listening. She picks up another piece of waffle, dips it in the syrup cup, shoves it in her mouth with epicurean abandon, and begins chewing with the wet enthusiasm peculiar to small children.  

I take this as a dismissal.

I return to prayer.

But the question remains.

What are you practicing for?

I turn inward in contemplation.

Eventually, Madeline concludes breakfast by slurping the rest of the syrup directly from the little cup.  I haven’t been paying close enough attention to her, and by the time she is finished, her face, chest, and forearms to the elbows are glazed with it.  

How does this even happen? She is a living demonstration of why five-year-olds should not be trusted with a syrup bottle. I make a mental note to try to be a better parent in regard to her syrup consumption.

“Are you finished?” I ask as she’s sucking bonus syrup off her fingers.

She surveys the damage for a moment, gets up, puts her plate in the sink, and says, “Come wash me!” before wandering off toward the shower.

The dark night is over.

Breakfast has been made.

The little demon has been fed.

Her question sticks with me, not because I do not know the answer, but because I am bothered that I cannot explain it to a five-year-old.

If I understand what I am doing, surely I ought to be able to say it simply.

Instead, I have offered her a path, a title, and a quotation from Saigō.

She has offered me an empty syrup cup.

Somehow, my bones know there is an answer here.

Not somewhere beyond this moment. Not hidden in another book or buried in some teaching I have yet to understand.

Here.

Somehow, the answer is already happening in front of me.

There is an old Zen saying: “When hungry, eat; when tired, sleep.”

Perhaps this morning it is: When naked and covered in Mrs. Butterworth’s, shower.

Madeline does not seem troubled by any of this. She was hungry, so she ate. Now she is sticky, so she goes to shower. Soon we will dress and go about our day in the World of Men. Common, daily rituals.  There is no distinction in her mind between the sacred and the ordinary, no problem to solve, no doctrine required to explain what comes next.

I feel something in that. I feel it in my very being.

But my mouth cannot yet figure out how to say the words to a five year old.

What are you practicing for?

In the shower, I use the sprayer to rinse the sticky off of her while I contemplate the answer again. She takes her turn with the sprayer while I get the soap, and together we begin a powerful purity mantra:

“Soap! 

Soap, soap, soap, soapity soap soap soap! Soap, soap, soap, soap, soap, soooooaaaaaap!

Soap! Soap, soap, soapity soap soap soap! Soap, soap, soap, soap, soap, soooooaaaaaap! 

Soon we are both soaped, rinsed, and washed clean.  We bow to each other politely and say, “I am thankful for you.”

I have taught my children that bathing is one of the Sacred Activities.  Ordinary acts become sacred when we enter them with attention and intention.  It isn’t what you are doing, but how you are doing it that makes it sacred.  To wash someone’s body with your own hands is a living prayer.  We do not wash only the person in front of us. We learn to wash everybody -- and every body -- as though we were washing the body of the living Christ.

Caring for one another is the Holy of Holies.  

I am wrapped in contemplation of Madeline’s question, and gratitude for this sacred moment when Madeline shoots water up my nose with the sprayer.

Sometimes the living prayer is mischievous.

As the last of the suds circles the drain, the most brilliant reply comes to me. With a noble air, I announce:

“I am practicing the Art of Life and Death.”

She thinks about this for two seconds, puts her hands on her chest, and breathes in and out dramatically a few times.

“Am I doing it?”

In that moment, she may as well have been an old grinning Zen monk standing in the shower, smashing me square in the face with the kyōsaku.

Yes.

Yes, you are.

Having dueled my fair share of wizened Zen monks over the years, I knew that such a blow required a response. But before I could formulate one, she double-tapped me:

“Turn on the steam.”

To hear is to obey.

I reach up, open the valves, and turn the temperature as high as it will go, and we begin another ritual we often share.  We sit down facing one another. She is growing, and soon the shower will be too small for the two of us. Our knees nearly touch. 

She closes her eyes in the heat, puts her hands on her knees, and breathes.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

By this point in my life, I have been practicing for more than twenty years. I have been a monk and a warrior, student and teacher. I have learned how to endure, how to stand my ground, how to take a strike, how to keep going.

And I cannot possibly be losing a Zen battle to a five-year-old girl. 

But I have been tested in enough places, by enough people, to know when I am being beaten.

And here I sit, face to face with her in the steam, witnessing her demonstrate perfect practice without the slightest effort or even the idea that she is doing so. 

I am entirely vanquished.

My mind races to catch up to her. 

“What are you practicing for?”

I could not articulate the answer at that moment, but I had already inhabited it.

When she said, “I’m hungry,” I fed her.

When she questioned me, I answered.

When she was sticky, I bathed her.

And suddenly another old teaching was sitting in the shower with us:

I was hungry and you gave me something to eat.I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink.I was a stranger…

The words of Jesus had always sounded larger than this to me -- like instructions for saints: feeding multitudes, welcoming strangers, visiting prisoners, tending to the great suffering of the world.

But perhaps the Kingdom is also five years old, naked, covered in pancake syrup, and sitting across from you at breakfast.

I suppose if Jesus were here, we’d have to sing the “Soap!” song for him too.

Although I might caution Madeline not to shoot water up the nose of the Son of God with the sprayer.

Perhaps “the least of these” is sometimes simply the person standing in front of you. 

“What are you practicing for?”

While I couldn’t put it into simple words that morning, I had answered the call.

In each moment, I was the right man.

At every moment I was fully present with her, and fully available to her.

From the moment she cried out in the darkness, she spent the whole morning calling me into sacred service, revealing that the Art of Life and Death was never separate from the life I was living. 

She had asked me what I was practicing for, and then, moment by moment, called me to answer.

Not in theory.  Not into words.

Into waffles. Into answers. Into bathwater and soap and steam.

“What are you practicing for?”

I was still some years away from a simple answer, but I was beginning to understand the question.

It is not enough to hear the bell. You have to recognize what is calling you.

Sometimes the real prayer is not the prayer you are praying.

Sometimes the real prayer is the prayer that is praying you.

Sometimes the thing you thought you were seeking is the thing that has come looking for you. 

Sometimes it asks for waffles.

And so you get up.