Bensonhurst Sutra: Tales of an Italian American Buddhist

By Geraldine DeLuca

The book is full of stories about her place in her traditional family, where her father was the intellectual, her mother the traditional housewife and her sister the older sister who never got the nurturing she needed. As the favored child with a wobbly sense of her own power, DeLuca chronicles her development as a writer and painter, her teaching life, her marital struggles, and her yearning for a spiritual life that centered itself in this world. The book moves in and out of narrative, framing stories in theoretical contexts, calling upon her understanding of Buddhism--which is avowedly a study in progress--to give context and meaning to her experience.

Her colleague and award-winning scholar Peter Taubman writes: "I can't think of anything I've read that does such a beautiful job of presenting Buddhist practice and revealing how it works in the raw, everyday reality of our lives. Each chapter is a gem. I was provoked, moved, inspired, and tickled by so many of the stories recounted in the book, the way they were framed in terms of the author's own practice. And the prose is beautiful. The word 'pellucid' kept coming to mind. . . . The writing in this brilliant work is like a totally clear glass, and the light shines through, illuminating paths through these dark days."

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 7, 2024
• ISBN: 9798350963762

Geraldine DeLuca

Geraldine DeLuca is a writer, painter, and English professor who taught at Brooklyn College, CUNY for many years. Early in her career, she found herself drawn to the ways that contemplative practices could take the edge off the tension in her classroom. Joining other teachers and writers who advocated for "radical self-acceptance" as a way of approaching whatever came next, she sought to put down the burden of the endlessly critical self and looked for a spiritual tradition that could support her experiences. Bensonhurst Sutra grounds the stories of her life in the search for a more peaceful way of being. For many years she has been a part of the Valley Insight Meditation Society in Lebanon, New Hampshire, which grounds her work, her relationships, and her experience of being in the world.

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Cover of Bensonhurst Sutra: Tales of an Italian American Buddhist by Geraldine DeLuca

Bensonhurst Sutra: Tales of an Italian American Buddhist

©2024 Geraldine DeLuca

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN 979-8-35096-375-5

eBook ISBN 979-8-35096-376-2

For my grandchildren,

Anthony, James, Sophie, and Luca

Contents

My Beautiful Cousins in Bensonhurst

Perception and Its Discontents

Healing Stories and the Unlived Life

What Do I Mean by Warrior?

Enchantment, Disenchantment and Re-enchantment

Altered Brains

Why I Teach Hamlet

Learning to Paint

At the Art and Dharma Retreat

Goodbye to My Family

Coda. Living with Paradox

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Works Cited

You live inside us, beings of the future. . . .

You reveal courage within us we had not suspected. . . .

Haunt us with your hunger . . .

O you who come after, help us remember: we are your ancestors.

Fill us with gladness for the work that must be done.

Joanna Macy, from World as Lover, World as Self (201-02)

G. DeLuca

Chapter One.

My Beautiful Cousins

in Bensonhurst

I used to listen to an album by a Canadian singer named Ferron. Like Joanna Macy, she was an activist. In one song she asked her listeners the question: Don’t you want to see yourself that strong? I imagined myself marching, chanting, holding a sign, over and over, showing up, and I knew, That’s not me. I was not a performer, not brave. I couldn’t get on the bus. I bargained on the virtues of a quiet life. But now, finally, having cleared away some of the conditioning that kept me hidden, I say, Yes. I do want to see myself that strong. And it’s about time. But it means something different now. Now I understand that for me being strong means continuing to put my words on paper. I am a writer. Writing is my way to do the work that must be done.

Can I heal the burning forests with my words? Can I open a heart? Heal an ideological rift between me and a cousin: someone just like me, who went to the same church as a child, someone with whom I now have a huge disagreement. It doesn’t seem to diminish our love for one another, but it is important. He and I have to know one another more deeply, learn to talk with love in our hearts. And how will that happen?

We had a family gathering several years ago. One of my cousins told me that they had made up a list of things they could not talk about with cousin Geri: global warming, racism, guns, abortion.

Global warming? Really? They don’t believe in global warming? Is there any point in driving 75 miles to get to this cousins’ party in my polluting car?

We drink wine and eat good food. We sit with one another and remember the old neighborhood in Brooklyn, where all my aunts and uncles moved. My father, who was a lawyer, found houses for everyone. All of us were in the same neighborhood, within walking distance of one another, within walking distance of our grandmother, who loved us fiercely. We remember Uncle Johnny, with his hearty laugh, his face so animated when he smiled. He died at age 53 in a fire that burned in his house in the middle of the night. He had almost made it out through a window when he collapsed from smoke inhalation and his body folded on itself at the windowsill. I can hear my grandmother sitting in the mourner’s chair in the funeral parlor—the funeral parlor that was called DeLuca’s, no less, that’s how connected I am to that institution in the heart of Bensonhurst where we all grew up. My grandmother sat in front of the casket where my uncle lay, in his dark suit. And she wailed, No more Uncle Johnny. The room was carpeted, and the air smelled heavily of flowers. There was the great broken heart of roses from my uncle’s wife, my Aunt Carol, who was also my godmother. The other uncles stood at the edges of the room in their suits, their young sons tall and straight next to them, like an honor guard, and the women, the aunts and daughters, sat with their handbags in their laps, and we murmured words of comfort to one another.

I realize as I write this how much I miss it all, even the mourning: the closeness of us loving one another, holding one another, showing up. This was what it meant to be Italian and Catholic and family. On Christmas and Easter, we would climb the stairs to our grandmother’s second-floor apartment with our new shoes and our beautiful hats, gleaming-faced children in holiday clothes. Grandma would hold our faces, she would kiss us, and she would say to each of us, facia brutta, ugly face, to ward off the evil spirits. And I know that feeling exactly now as I see my own grandchildren’s luminous faces. And all my cousins, they too now behold their grandchildren’s faces and they say, either aloud or to themselves, facia brutta, because we learned that kind of loving early, and those memories and those feelings never leave us. Still today we laugh and whisper about our common stories, the grandfather whom everyone adored but who had his dark alcoholic moments, the uncles as boys bringing home live eels for Christmas Eve dinner and watching them escape from their bags on the subway. I’m telling you, Ger’, says my cousin Barbie, you can’t make this stuff up.

I love these people, my cousins, my sisters and brothers. I love you! Do you hear me? And I worry now, as I write, that if you ever read this, you will feel betrayed. But I write not to betray you, but to register my support for our children’s home, for the health of the earth, the air they will breathe, the sky above them. I write to register my concern for all of our children and grandchildren and their children and grandchildren. I may need to say this on every page!

There is one particular cousin whose opinions I know now mostly from his observations on Facebook. He is a graceful writer, commenting eloquently on the state of a football team and its lousy coach, or on his wife’s delicious manicotti which he gets up to eat in the middle of the night when he can’t sleep, or on the state of the country. And even though I often disagree with his opinions--this dear cousin, who has been struggling with cancer for years, who is so brave, undaunted, bordering on miraculous in the face of his suffering--I admire his courage and the ease and authority of his voice.

I sometimes write back to him on Facebook, because a lot of my cousins and his friends read his posts. And I can tell that some of them, the women usually, hear me sometimes. But he won’t let me in. I try my best to write from a place of cousinhood and compassion. But it’s hopeless. Get real, cuz, he says, when I complain about guns. Guns! We are surrounded by grandchildren who go to schools just like the ones we see on television, the ones filled with mourners to whom we are enjoined to send our thoughts and prayers. But he cannot let himself be afraid. He was my little cousin, a boy with hair like corn silk standing on a stoop in Brooklyn, where one could try out the world under the watchful eyes of parents, hidden like birds behind porch window shades. It was a form of pastoral, the green world of springtime, the only pretty ring time, where the trees kept us safe.

But now we are in the red world of violence, in the smoke of global catastrophe: But only if you admit it to be so. Otherwise, the flooded basement is just a bad storm, a singular event. Never do we put two and two together unless it’s about some girl whose belly is growing and she’s doing you-know-what with you-know-who. Shit happens, cuz. No worries. He does not have time for my nonsense. I refer to myself on his Facebook page as his annoying cousin who still loves him. And I know that beyond our deep disagreements, he loves me back—as if our love in person, at this cousin’s party, is deeper and more real than the argument over whether our children are being killed by young men with automatic rifles or whether the planet is being destroyed.

So at our cousins party, we don’t talk about anything on the list. We just revel in each other’s presence. But can we ever move forward that way? Who can intervene for us? The beings of the future? They are here already. All the beaming little faces, one more heartbreaking in its beauty than the next. Can our grandchildren tell us that they are becoming afraid to go to school or that the world has grown too hot for them, the forests are burning, the shorelines are eroding, the surf is littered with garbage, the glaciers are melting, the birds are dying. Joanna Macy lists the hundreds of creatures we have allowed to become extinct. What do we say to those beautiful children whose photos we post on Facebook for their first Holy Communion, their Confirmation? We live in our suburban worlds and we keep our blinders on.

II

I think often of the Buddhist ideal of the Bodhisattva: the ones who take a vow that they will not enter heaven (or become enlightened, as some of my Buddhist friends would prefer me to say) until every other being has entered heaven. Thich Nhat Hanh called Martin Luther King a Bodhisattva. Mahatma Gandhi was surely another. And there is Thich Nhat Hanh himself. And Joanna Macy? We can all name someone. It is an impossible ideal, but it puts one in an exalted state of mind. Be your best self. Vow to keep the faith (until, unfortunately, somebody understands how powerful you are and kills you). At the end of Buddhist sittings, we offer the merit of our practice to all beings everywhere: may they be happy, may they be free of suffering, may they be joyful, may they be at ease. We count on that state of mind to spread itself throughout the world, and thus, in however many small ways, to change it.

But for the moment, I am just a misguided liberal to my cousins. Or part of me is. The other part is my beloved father’s daughter, the one who stood with them in my Easter hat, the one who loved and was loved by our grandmother, the one who joins arms with them at weddings to sing and sway to Billy Joel’s Piano Man, that famous song about loneliness that is woven into the dream of our lives.

The day after the cousins’ party, I wake up with a sense of guilt that there is this tension between us that dissolves as we hold one another’s hands, as we embrace to say hello, to say goodbye. Another dear friend reminds me that it is not okay to mourn all the time. We do not need to ignore our sorrow. But we have miraculous lives. There are miracles of seeds exploding into flowers. Of babies becoming beings of magnificence. We are all Buddhas, she says. Yes. I believe her. We are all Buddhas. We have not completely learned to care for one another, to hold one another in the great circle of our arms. But we have much to be grateful for.

So how will I repay the world for my good fortune? By writing my essays? By loving my children and my grandchildren? Maybe I’ll make a sign like the wonderful ones I’ve seen old women carrying in recent years: So many issues. So little cardboard, or I can’t believe I’m still showing up for this shit. I send money to good causes, and I vote and make my voice heard. I know Joanna Macy’s voice because she writes books. Many of the heroes of my life are authors. So I write and I remember Thich Nhat Hanh’s admonition that disagreements are not overcome by fighting but by finding common ground and the love that is nurtured there. We are Interbeings. We Inter-be. Like Joanna Macy, I write from the gladness.

I think of Tomie de Paola’s picture book The Clown of God, about the medieval juggler who stands in the church and juggles for our Lady. He juggles and juggles and the priests laugh at him. His offering seems so paltry. But when he falls from the exhaustion of juggling before her statue, our Lady comes alive and wipes his brow. And when he dies, he becomes a part of that statue. Like her son, he sits in her lap.

So with a grateful spirit, I make this offer. I do what I am most suited to do. I write. Over and over, I throw words up in the air. I catch them. I am a Bodhisattva juggler, juggling to cool the planet, to eradicate racism, to put a limit on guns, to give people dominion over their own bodies and their own minds. These are my issues. I write to my beautiful cousins, my sangha, to all beings everywhere. May we save one another. May we save ourselves!

Chapter Two.

Perception and Its Discontents

I first became interested in Buddhism as an undergraduate English major. I wrote a paper entitled "Buddhism in J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, " and I used Alan Watts’s The Way of Zen (1957) as my primary source. My American literature teacher told me that she had recently lost interest in the field of American literature, and I know that she regarded Salinger as a light weight even among the light weights. But I adored him. I still adore him. I loved his character Seymour, the oldest, see-more brother who wrote quotations from the ancients on the walls of the apartment, who killed himself out of what seems to have been an intolerable sense of shame for his sexual desire for a young girl he meets on a beach. I loved Franny, who couldn’t deal with the phonies at her college; and Zooey, the actor with the beautiful face that he tried not to look at in the mirror. There is also the upper-West-Side mother who brooded over the whole family of fragile wise children while a cigarette burned down in her hand. All of them live with Seymour’s suicide. Franny, who is an actor, has been struggling with life’s phonies, the many ways in which we pose our way through life to compete and to protect ourselves. She plays the heroine, Pegeen Mike, in that masterpiece Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. And she cannot bear her own or the other actors’ pretensions, their unskilled laughter: until Zooey tells her to act for the fat lady with cancer who sits on a porch in the Midwest listening to the radio. Don’t you know that goddamn secret yet? he says. "Don’t you know—listen to me, now—don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is?. . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy" (170).

How could I not love that book? I had been looking for Christ all my life and Salinger told me who she was! She was all of us, Franny. She was all of us.

Later in my life, I would come home from a day of teaching and settle into bed with books by Thomas Moore, who was a popularizer of the work of James Hillman, and Buddhist teacher Stephen Levine who told us to breathe deeply into our belly, our merciful belly. Jack Kornfield’s wonderful narratives took me back and