Audio: BMI 10th Anniversary: Harrison Blum
Full transcript:
SPEAKER 1: Harrison Bloom completed his MDiv at HDS in 2012, when the BMI was just getting started. We might rephrase that, and say he completed his-- he was doing his MDiv in the years before, and he was a key player in getting the BMI started and taking the shape that it did. I'll just say knowing Harrison, and his imagination about what possible Buddhist ministries might look like was a real learning experience for me, to say, that is a vision of the future that I hadn't imagined before.
So Harrison has worked as a chaplain in medical, psychiatric, and university settings. He has done things about embodied ministry, I know very much, and has been a director of Religious and Spiritual Life at Amherst College since 2018. One of a very small number of Buddhists to hold such a role. He mainly practices and has trained within the Insight Meditation tradition of Theravada Buddhism. So with that, turn it over to Harrison.
HARRISON BLUM: Thank you so much, Charlie. And Hello, everyone. I'm just going to-- since I'm the first Zoom speaker, can I have confirmation that you can hear me well if you're in the room?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
HARRISON BLUM: We have a thumbs up. Great. Excellent. I will ad lib and just say I was a little disappointed with the mention of your book in progress, Charlie, that it's not some title like Buddhist wisdom I learned from my children, because those are some of my favorite stories studying with you, but maybe that's after this one.
SPEAKER 1: Six of one, half dozen another.
HARRISON BLUM: Excellent. Well I'm just going to speak for a few minutes as well the others on Zoom, and I'm going to offer some remarks about a question, what did I take with me from my time at HDS, and the Buddhist Ministry Initiative, and how have I tried to use that to impact the world? Quite a large question.
Two answers come to my mind. Two learnings of what I took with me, other than seeing [INAUDIBLE] smile which was a very positive experience for me, and you'll all be treated to that soon. The first takeaway are significant experience, the message that we each have a degree of appropriate agency to shape the evolution of Western Buddhism and its ministry. We are allowed to create it, not just study it. I felt that I learned that at HDS.
And secondly that we can, and we should draw from a wide range of disciplines and toward different applications in doing this study and creation of Buddhist Ministry. So on the wide range of disciplines, it was a reason why I chose to go to Harvard and not Naropa. Naropa, to me, might have been more of a Buddhist immersive experience, but not the multi-religious environment that you spoke to, Charlie, and that I so embrace and benefited from.
So for me that included courses on feminism in the yard, on counseling, on race and racism, on US and its prison system, on organizing and social change at the Kennedy School with Marshall Ganz, on spirituality and medicine, cross-listed with the medical school. And how wonderful that I could study so broadly to explore and use imagination toward what is Buddhist Ministry.
And just before I give a few examples of how that manifested for me, I'll say what many of you know, or are experiencing now, if you're students, yes, amazing courses, amazing professors, wonderful staff. I see Dudley Rose is here. And field education, crucial. And also this other piece the kind of special sauce of the students that this program attracted, that we were as it were each other's living texts, that we were in conversations with each other and really forming each other, like why are you here? What are your vocational horizons? Where is your curiosity? How does your personal life, your practice life, your scholarly life intersect?
And in this way, I really felt that more than anything, you could read about in a course catalog or a brochure, there was this combined environment where we could be formed and help form each other as holistic and integrated Buddhist ministers, ministers of the mind, of the heart, of the spirit, of the community.
And so just for another few minutes, I'll put-- as was spoken of earlier-- I'll put pride to the side, if I can, in shyness and just lift up some of my work, not to say I did it especially well, but as examples of what the Buddhist Ministry Initiative helped me become a vector toward or experiment with. So just a couple of those examples for me are Occupy-- Occupy Boston, and the Occupy Movement was happening when I was a student, and several of us from many different denominations, including Buddhism or traditions, were taking turns sleeping at the encampment in Boston, being as we were calling ourselves, protest chaplains.
One of my classmates, Grace Egbert has a film freely available on Vimeo. I commend it to called Holy Mess. I forgot the subtitle but it's about 15 minutes looking at mostly HDS chaplains and how they showed up overnight, and during the days at this protest encampment. So maybe that could be Buddhist Ministry, like you were talking about, Professor Hallisey, a full service religion. Maybe Buddhist ministers can also be people providing pastoral care at protests.
You mentioned embodied work that I've done, and I love that, doing less these days, but before, during, and after, I was a student at HDS, I was a dancer and I loved dance as a form of spiritual expression. And I think in many ways from classroom conversations to mentoring and support, mentoring the faculty, mentoring outside the classroom was huge for me. I see [INAUDIBLE] Professor [INAUDIBLE] Cheryl Giles, and Chris Berlin are here, which is wonderful tonight.
So that's just all to say that I thought maybe a Buddhist could also be a dancer, or someone who publishes about dance, and my BMI training was helpful in-- helping me dip my toes in, and even after a dozen rejections from publishers, getting that approval in publishing an anthology about Buddhism and dance in the West. So maybe Buddhist Ministry is also about dancing.
For some of the years when I worked as a mindfulness teacher, among part of my chaplaincy work with adolescent acute mental health patients, even though I never felt called to do a PhD, I loved research. I love citations. I love data. So pursuing publication of mindfulness research, it was really hard for me. There was another probably dozen rejections there on that article, which finally got published about mindfulness meditation, lowering state anxiety in these adolescent mental health patients.
So maybe Buddhist Ministry can be researched, maybe chaplains can publish research. I'm not the only one, but that's part of our edge, I think, that we need to lean toward quantitative demonstrations of our work. And maybe it's even OK and even positive to be Buddhist while doing so, kind of to your point, Charlie about being in two camps or speaking among kind of the intellectual as well as the personal application of Buddhism.
The last piece I'll mention is mindfulness equity. So some work that I did, and this was the focus of my thesis-- that Cheryl had a lot of oversight and support with me on-- I called it at the time "The mindfulness Allies Project" one of the generative questions for me there was, how can we not just try to make Buddhist centers more diverse, but how can we leave the Buddhist centers and teach meditation to those who need it, especially in less wealthy and less white neighborhoods? As it were, or as it had to be, providing dinner and child care so that people can actually show up in the evening.
And I'll just end by kind of giving a little bit of a cheeky bit of computation that project, in reference to it, a friend of mine's son emailed me, saying that, "Oh you were in our homework today for Buddhism and some program, and I had no idea why." And I asked how, and he sent me a little paragraph in my name was in this one paragraph talking about this work in-- I don't know how to pronounce your last name, and Ann Gleig perhaps? American Dharma-- Buddhism Beyond Modernity. And that if we average 300 words per page, and if we average 17 words per sentence, and noting that her book has about 350 pages of total actual text, we might average out that maybe there's 6,000 sentences in that book.
So I'd like to think maybe I have a .0002% impact on American Buddhist Ministry, but I think I can maybe objectively claim that I have, at least, that much one out of 6,000 sentences. So these are some ways I felt empowered and I guess, my message to current or future students would be, similar. You can shape that it's not just for you to study, it's for you to create. So thank you again to the whole foundation and all here who helped make it so. And I'll end with that.
SPEAKER 1: I can just--
[APPLAUSE]
Let's make two comments. To take up, lift up some of the things that Harrison just was sharing. One is that perhaps it's not an accident that the Buddhist Ministry Initiative, at the time when Harrison began as a student was pretty close to the time when Obama was first elected as president. And his slogan, his campaign slogan, "Yes, we can" maybe was adopted by lots of-- by the Buddhist Ministry Initiative itself as our model for the future.
Yes we can. But whatever, someone like Harrison might come along and say, well, cab Buddhism and dance be a form of Buddhist Ministry? And we say, yes, we can. So that idea of living in the future, I would say is part of the Buddhist Ministry Initiative.
The other comment of Harrison's that I was happy to hear, I didn't know about the idea of, we have to leave the Buddhist centers and take what we want to share outside of that. Maybe we remember the first-- when I was-- the first time I was at Harvard Divinity School in 1975 for the convocation that year, in which the president of the University has the prerogative of saying that he wants to speak at the convocation of any part of the university. And Derek Bok chose to speak at Harvard Divinity School that year with a very provocative question, what does it mean for Harvard Divinity School to be a school that is a professional school, the training of ministers when very few of its graduates ended up in pulpits?
As a new student, [INAUDIBLE] I didn't take it personally, but it was an important question. I was very happy to have the then dean, [INAUDIBLE] stand up immediately and give the answer. We're breaking the stained glass out of the church walls. We're taking it outside. And so that history of breaking the stained glass to take things outside, I would say, Harrison's continuing when he said, we have to leave the Dharma centers, and take what we want to share outside that and find ways of doing that. If that means providing child care and otherwise, yes we can.
SPEAKER 2: So I can add one more thing about what Harrison Bloom learned, and took, and also gave to Harvard Divinity School. What I would say that it was something about the Buddhist insistence that one should not essentialize any concept or any kind of identity, and always be willing to question and always see things in a different way as much as you can.
Harrison, a wonderful student in my classes as well, made a film. Harrison, which I still have, of himself dressed up in full body costume as a chicken, and him going around the campus, and going to various classes, and trying not to make any fuss about it. And seeing what the reactions were of all of the students around him. So, Harrison, I still think about that film, and show it from time to time in my classes. So, thank you.
HARRISON BLUM: That's excellent, and you have a great role, keeping a straight face and lecturing on Buddhism while the chicken is studying. So thank you for that.
SPEAKER 2: That's true. That's true. He came to class, and I decided to, if a chicken is here, that's fine. I can teach a chicken.
[LAUGHTER]
Anyway, it's wonderful as part of this celebration that we're having to be having visits from our former students, just wonderful to see you all again, and wonderful to see you, Harrison.