Local Luminary: Clark Strand

by Marx Dorrity and photographs by David Cunningham, October 28, 2009

“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner,” known as the Jesus Prayer, is an Eastern Orthodox devotion that is meant be repeated and internalized. Many know it as the vehicle of a satori experience in J.D. Salinger’s novella Franny and Zooey. In 2000, when Clark Strand was on a commercial flight with his family, the plane hit serious weather and for a fatal instant seemed certain to crash. In the anguish and confusion, Strand found himself intoning the Jesus Prayer. This surprised him, as it also might anyone familiar with his career as a teacher of Zen meditation, a Tricycle magazine editor, and the author of books that brim with Zen wisdom. Though raised Christian, he first encountered the potent mantra in Salinger. To Strand’s mind, the difference between prayer and meditation is merely semantic; still, the Jesus Prayer led him to a close study of the Judeo-Christian scriptures. How to Believe in God: Whether You Believe in Religion or Not (2009, Doubleday Religion) unites traditions in Strand’s ongoing search to find a new way to be religious. Strand is also the founder of WholeEarthGod.com, a forum for inter-religious dialogue and Koans of the Bible, an open-ended discussion group that takes up the Bible from a multitude of perspectives.

Do you still think of yourself as a Buddhist?
I’m not sure I think of myself as belonging to any religion, but I certainly have practiced across several different traditions and studied them in great depth and appreciate them a lot. What I do now is I sponsor this open-ended free discussion of spiritual texts using the teachings of one religion to interpret the spiritual texts of another.

What was your Zen training?
I did Zen training with a Japanese Zen master for 14 years and I was on the verge of being installed as a roshi and I walked away. The reasons are complex. A big part of it was I felt that religion itself was on the verge of changing in some very profound way. But this was a very ill-formed idea—all it was, as God says to Abraham in the Bible, was “Get out.”

How is religion changing?
What’s happening in religion is those traditions that are based on top-down authority and sermonizing or formal talks by experts are beginning to decline. What’s on the rise are spiritual movements that stress discussion. It is very much like what’s happened on the blogs and with journalism, for instance. It’s become much more dialogical, participatory, and interactive. We have a group in Woodstock where anyone can come. The Bible is our anchor, but we’re not likely to have anything approaching a religious understanding of it.

Is the group therapeutic?
We’ve been together for about 10 years—people say they tend to get happier, tend to get clearer. It isn’t that the group sets out to accomplish that. We’re a group that has therapeutic benefits but we don’t have any therapeutic agenda. Nobody’s ever trying to heal anybody. We just get together and talk about things that really matter.