What You Hold, May You Always Hold
Photo by Eye for Ebony
In all lineages and throughout all time, there have been seekers of truth and light. In this talk, Zuisei speaks on the cultivation of love on the spiritual path, that comes from a place of listening, investigating, and taking compassionate action.
“What you hold, may you always hold.
What you do, may you always do and never abandon.
But with swift pace, light step, unswerving feet,
so that even your steps stir up no dust,
may you go forward securely, joyfully, and swiftly,
on the path of prudent happiness.”
—St. Clare of Assisi, Early Documents
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard.
Transcript
This transcript is based on Zuisei's talk notes and may differ slightly from the final talk.
What You Hold, May You Always Hold
What you hold, may you always hold. What you do, may you always do, and never abandon. But with swift pace, light step on swerving feet, so that even your steps stir up no dust. May you go forward securely, joyfully, and swiftly on the path of prudent happiness. This is Saint Claire of Assisi, from her early documents.
I had the opportunity recently to be in two places that really moved me. One was the Basilica of Saint Francis, and San Damiano, that is the main house, the heart of the Order of St. Clair. The other was the great Synagogue of Florence. When Atenka and my partner and I walked into the Basilica first, it was full of people. At first, as you're approaching the train, there's the hill, the mountaintop, and it's at the top. It's the picture of your ideal medieval town. The church itself is built with very light pink blocks of stone. Even though it's huge and massive, the feeling is very light, airy, and spacious. It actually has two parts: a lower church and an upper church. The lower church is more cave-like; it's a little darker, and the nave is very long. The upstairs is lighter, and the walls are lined with frescoes of Saint Francis' life. As I said, it was full of people.
When we came in, first, you're just struck by where you are, that this is where Saint Francis taught. He didn't live there; he lived nearby, but that was the place where he taught. There was a small group of Italians doing a service, and one of the monks was singing. We had been there for about a minute or two. Tanka and I had kind of walked separately, and I turned to her at a certain point and realized that she was crying—and so was I. My heart felt as if it had gone on tiptoe, reaching toward something, and it had gotten larger, unable to hold what was happening—the beauty of the singing. It wasn't just the history of the place; it's one of those places where you realize that something larger than yourself is happening, something you may not understand, but you feel it in every cell of your body.
The synagogue was very unusual. I really wanted to go; I had seen pictures, and the building looked beautiful. It was out of the way, in a somewhat rundown neighborhood. There were only a few other people, so the place was mostly empty. Yet every square inch of the interior is painted with Moorish-style mosaics, and it is staggering how beautiful it is. Because it was empty, I could feel it differently, and I didn’t want to leave. Although I know next to nothing about Judaism, I felt that I wanted to be there and wished I could have participated in a service, part of this tradition. We went to the Basilica first, and yet it all seems like one thread. Someone said there is a language here that needs to be spoken, and we are finding different ways to speak it.
A Life of Awe and Devotion
It made me think how deeply religious human beings are, even people who say they are not religious, and how a sense of awe, wonder, reverence, and love is necessary to our humanity. These are the lifeblood, the heartwood of our humanity. Whether expressed through religion, love for nature, the wild, open space, sky, or art, or a piece of music that transports you, it transcends the boundaries we are used to navigating. Every once in a while, whether through our own breakthrough or someone else’s, we get a glimpse, realizing how limited we have been.
She inspires me to press against my own limits—those I perceive and those I do not. And then there are the women mystics: Buddhist, Jewish, Sufi, Christian. I am going to quote a couple of the Christian mystics because they are the ones I have been visiting with lately, and also because their example demonstrates a clear path, an unwavering aspiration and practice that is outside tradition, yet universal.
So St. Clair says, “What you hold, may you always hold. And what you do, may you always do and never abandon.” This describes her life very well. She was born to one of the wealthiest families of Assisi. Like the Buddha, there was no need for her to look for anything else. She was going to be married at eighteen, but she didn’t want that. She didn’t want to be contained in that way. She had heard St. Francis speak and decided to follow him, that this was the way of life she wanted to live.
At that time, St. Francis had just started his order. There was no place, no church, no established tradition. He was still fighting to have his order recognized. So she was stepping into the completely unknown. What was unfamiliar was certainly not safe, nor accepted. The strength of her devotion to living a spiritual life, despite everything, was remarkable. She was willing to abandon every trace of security to follow these scruffy, wandering preachers.
On Palm Sunday, which was a kind of coming-out ceremony for young women of the time, they would line up to be blessed by the bishop and receive a palm frond. She did not get up. In the midst of the ceremony, she refused to move. Noticing this, the bishop got down from his platform and offered her the palm frond. Some say it might have been a symbol, but it could also have foreshadowed the power she would have. Three years later, at twenty-one, she was the abbess of her monastery. Convents across Europe looked to her for guidance. She did not want the title or to be the head of anything, but she had to accept it because it was the only way her order would be recognized.
Women had to be cloistered; they could not wander like men. She accepted this, and it was said that after the incident with the palm frond, she left her home not through the front door, but through a heavily barricaded side door. She snuck out to the Prosiuncula, where St. Francis was with his ragged group of monks. He received her immediately, gave her a tunic, and shaved her head in the tonsure, recognizing her as a Franciscan. Until he could get the small church of San Damiano ready, he put her in a Benedictine monastery for safety.
Her family chased after her. As the story goes, she grabbed the altar and would not let go. Her two big brothers tried to pull her away. When her veil fell off, they saw her shaved head and realized she was determined. They relented. Her sister followed as well, and a similar struggle ensued. She eventually became the abbess of a monastery in Prague. Until she died at fifty-nine, she spent her life working, praying, healing, and performing manual labor. She was said to have enormous healing power and often confronted bishops and the pope, who insisted on property and security. She refused, living in absolute poverty, owning nothing but the tunic she wore, entirely dependent for her livelihood. She adhered to this principle until the end, and the bishops and the pope eventually relented.
She reportedly faced soldiers twice—once at her convent, and then in the city of Assisi—and all she did was stand in front of them and pray. They turned away without harming anyone. She was the first Western woman to write a monastic rule that was accepted, just before her death. The day before she died, she spoke to herself, saying, “Go calmly in peace, for you will have a good escort, because he who created you has always guarded you as a mother does her child who loves her.” When asked who she was speaking to, she replied, “My soul.” One of her followers noted this as important. She explained that you will only remember what God sees fit for you to remember. On her deathbed, she emphasized: “Always be lovers of your souls and those of your sisters. Always love yourselves and your sisters.”
Fierce Tenderness and the Practice of Love
Can we do that? Can we truly love ourselves and each other, not fight for men’s attention or love, but deeply love ourselves and one another? If we could, the world would be very different. Men need love too, but not flattery at our own expense. Can we deeply love our souls and those of our sisters and brothers? If we want more women to practice Zen, for example, they need to feel this is their place, just as we all need discipline, but not hardness. Zen is not all sharp corners. It is not just about passing more and more koans, but about being a full human being. Firmness and tenderness can coexist; being focused does not exclude being kind.
Mothers know this: we can be large and take charge, and we can step back and disappear. That does not make us weak. When love must be fierce, it is, because it is based on harmony, seeing what is needed, not on personal desire. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross once recounted being at the airport after a long week of teaching and speaking to families of children with cancer. She just wanted to be Mary Smith for a moment, not Dr. Ross. A woman approached her, desperate: her nine-year-old son had died of cancer, and her eleven-year-old daughter had just been diagnosed. Dr. Ross offered guidance, explaining that when life is in harmony—spiritual, physical, intellectual, and emotional—energy can be found even when one feels overwhelmed. She emphasized that you do not need to be religious or of any specific gender to access this wisdom, only attentive and willing to respond.
In the Vimalakirti Sutra, there is a well-known chapter where Śāriputra dialogues with a goddess. First, Manjushri speaks with Vimalakirti, asking how a bodhisattva should regard all beings. He lists examples: like a reflection of the moon on the water, like a bubble, like the appearance and disappearance of foam, like an echo—devoid of self, devoid of fixed nature. Manjushri then asks, if that is so, how does a bodhisattva generate great love for all beings?
Vimalakirti replies that a bodhisattva generates love that is a refuge: peaceful because it is free of grasping, free of conflict, firm, unbreakable, giving, spontaneous, without presumption, not artificial—it is happiness itself. Reading about Christian mystics made me think of Mechthild of Magdeburg. Her relationship with God was so intimate it could be called heretical. She told the church exactly what she thought about empty piety, ritual, and money-making. She was not popular in her time, but she did not care.
Eight hundred years later, we still discuss her. In her account of creation, nothing existed at the beginning, and everything is locked into God. The Holy Spirit, which she equates with love, decides that something must be done. Love proposes a plan to God to create, to express. God accepts this plan and allows himself to be wooed by love. Life and love begin.
This led me to consider what if our prime mover in Buddhism is not ignorance, but love? In the twelvefold chain of interdependent origination, age and death follow birth. Before birth are becoming, clinging, craving, feeling, contact, the six senses, name and form, consciousness, mental formations, and ignorance. Ignorance is presented as the fundamental cause, the driving force. But what if there is more? What if, beyond ignorance, beings are driven by a deep need to learn how to love?
We stumble, we offend, we fail, but we keep returning until we express ourselves fully as human beings. The driving force is not only delusion, but our need to learn, once and for all, how to live in harmony with one another. Humanity has achieved much over millennia, but not this. Our capacity to create is immense, yet we still struggle with love. If “love” conjures sentimental images, reset the understanding. I do not mean holding hands and saying “all is love and light” in a naïve way. I mean the profound, disciplined realization of love born of experience, reflection, and returning again and again to this mind-heart.
Ho-Jian Oshu used a word yesterday that I have been thinking about. I have spent much of my life in abstraction, feeling ready to move beyond it. Abstraction has its place, but it is limited. It is a fraction of the whole being. I am suggesting we make the abstract concrete, bring what feels distant into proximity, make what feels top-heavy grounded yet light. I am saying we stop complaining that Zen is male and make it female, acknowledging that fundamentally there is no male or female, no soft or hard, no body or mind—they are not separate.
Yet, through karma and circumstance, many of us are born in female bodies. This is not accidental, nor a flaw. In the Vimalakirti dialogue, Manjushri and Vimalakirti discuss compassion, joy, equanimity, and fear of life and death. Overhearing, a goddess manifests physically, showering flowers upon the sages and bodhisattvas. Śāriputra, concerned with propriety, shakes off the flowers. The dialogue continues: he questions her attainment, her vehicle, and the legitimacy of enlightenment in female form. She explains that she has lived in that body for twelve years, witnessing inconceivable things.
The goddess then swaps forms with Śāriputra. He, inhabiting her body, is unsure how to proceed. She points out that there is nothing to transform: there is neither male nor female. Those born in female form also find nothing to transform, nothing to change. When they trade back, he asks what has been done with the female form. “Nothing,” she says. When asked when she will attain enlightenment, she responds, “When you become ordinary.” Vimalakirti confirms that she has served countless Buddhas, attained irreversibility, and can live in any form necessary to free beings and herself.
Saying there is no male or female is not whitewashing; it is truth. Here we are, in female form, which carries enormous power. Often, we fear using it. What would it look like if we were not afraid? Would we confront authority like St. Clair, make God our lover like Mechthild without guilt or apology, stand unapologetic and undaunted?
We must give ourselves full permission to feel our desires before we can let them go.
What you hold, may you always hold. What you do, may you always do, and never abandon. But with swift pace, light step, unswerving feet—so that even your steps stir up no dust—may you go forward securely, joyfully, and swiftly on the path of prudent happiness.
With all due respect and honor to St. Clair, let us go on the path of wild, unfettered, boundless happiness. A path that lets us see there is no male or female, no strong or weak, greater or lesser, so that we can be fully human, and so we can love without distinction, without envy, without fear.
I loved what Ho-Jian Oshu said last night about feeling your desires fully. How much of our lives has that not been allowed? Somebody asked me how this jives with the teaching that desires are numberless and should be ended. You cannot end them until you first recognize them. We must give ourselves full permission to feel our desires before we can let them go.
I also thought about the feeling I had when I walked into sacred places—the Basilica and the synagogue—and I felt it again here in this building the first time, and last night during chanting Rengetsu’s poem. This welling up of awe and wonder should not be so rare; it should be a normal part of our existence. This awe and wonder is our life.
St. Catherine of Genoa expresses it beautifully. Her words, with only slight paraphrasing, could echo Dongshan: “I see without eyes, and I hear without ears. I feel without feeling and taste without tasting. I know neither form nor measure, for without seeing, I yet behold an operation so divine that the words I first used—perfection, purity, and the like—seem to me now mere lies in the presence of truth. Nor can I any longer say, my soul, my all, everything is mine. All that is truth seems to be wholly mine. I am mute and lost in this truth. Everything is mine.”
Actually, we could simply say, “Everything,” and it would suffice. That is why we can hold what we hold and never abandon it, but we must not forget that it is true.
What You Hold, May You Always Hold, a dharma talk by Zen Buddhist teacher Zuisei Goddard. Audio podcast and transcript available.
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