a letter to the community of green gultch farm
notes on religious indoctrination
A Letter to the Community at Green Gulch Farm
July 12, 2024
Friends,
I am so thankful for you. I am moved to tears in my gratitude to know you are there. You are dedicated to compassion, to community, to silence and action. I feel your presence. The earth you touch is proof of the work of your hands. I wish to live on your outskirts, drawing from the well you feed in your practice.
You are also a refuge where I seek to meet with compassion the indoctrinations of my past.
The church I belonged to thought itself a beacon on a hill. We said we had the light of truth. I am broken-hearted, for we were lost, and our singing led many to darkness. We told the holy they were unworthy. We made God’s love a riddle and purity the key.
I came into this world craving spiritual connection. I faced chaos at home and outside. I sought orientation. I sought meaning in a painful world. All of these needs were met, if imperfectly, in the religious community that surrounded me. But the price was very high. Cruel are those that make acceptance in spiritual spaces contingent on the abandonment of self and the denial of the body.
Flee my children! May the glory of your inner knowing guide you.
Lost are those who kneel before the altar and not at the feet of their sisters. Lost are those who look only to the dead and the exalted for wisdom. I tell you, it is better to walk alone than to follow the blind who claim to see.
To the stewards of Green Gulch, this is a letter of gratitude. I hold in my heart the days I spent seated with you in silence and sharing your table. I walked your trails today and reconnected with the hope of your sangha.
This is also a letter of action. No doubt you carry struggles and hypocrisies which are unknown to me. Such is the stuff of human community. I ask, if only for my selfish needs, that we take this time for humble examination. Not knowing is most intimate. The desire to make others wrong is natural, and it separates us from each other. Judgment of any kind cuts us off. Vulnerability dissolves the pain that drives us to harm. I ask your strength, that I to may look within.
Blessings to you,
Matthew Cooper
