by Gail Gutradt
Wayne told me these stories so I could begin to know him, to understand his journey and the source of his compassion, and perhaps to prepare the way for me to reveal myself to him as well. He does this for many volunteers.
He also wanted to shed light on his impatience with public opinion and his profound distrust of authority. Like many of us try to do, he has arranged the incidents of his life into a coherent narrative, a legend of himself. Perhaps he also tells these stories in order to model a way we can contemplate our own journeys. In my time at Wat Opot I met a number of volunteers, and each of us left a part of our life behind and had come here seeking some lost piece of ourselves, whether we knew it or not. Sometimes we were permitted to stay on, not so much for what we could offer the children, but because I believe Wayne could sense that we needed space and time to find that missing fragment, or perhaps just needed to rest awhile before we continued our search. In allowing us this respite, Wayne does us a great kindness. First, because we need a pause, and second, because to be truly compassionate to the children we must learn to see ourselves clearly enough to accept our generosity into our own stubbornly troubled hearts.
Wayne is a large man. He has dark hair and a full beard, and the lightly freckled skin of someone of northern European ancestry who has spent many years in the sun. As director of Wat Opot, he has an uncanny ability to accomplish many things while not appearing to move very much, a fact that leads some eager new volunteers to imagine with some irritation that the director is not doing anything at all. He is slow, he is deliberate, and he manages his energy in such a way as to seem at times almost remote, yet Wayne has the capacity to be totally present.
For many years Wayne has worn only black, a choice he attributes to the vow of celibacy he took at a young age. People often question him about his vow, such a curious choice in our secular society, but it is not at all unusual in cultures that honor the channeling of sexual energy into spiritual practice. He tells several stories about it, the primary one being that he decided early on to dedicate his life to God and service, and never wanted to disappoint a wife or family or neglect those he had promised God to serve.
Wayne speaks enough Khmer to take care of the children and, he explains with a twinkle, he understands rather more than he lets on. But it is English-speaking visitors who provide a rare sounding board for his deepest thoughts. Until recently, he has lived mostly among foreigners. His available circle of Anglophone friends has consisted primarily of missionaries and Evangelical Christians, those same friends who began over time to become uncomfortable with his spiritual direction.
Often, late at night, I would find him at his computer composing an email to an old friend who had written an urgent letter expressing concern for Wayne’s soul. These letters he receives are written with deep conviction, but although there was a time when Wayne might have written those very words himself, now, after years of contemplation, he tries to explain in his replies that the God he believes in would not deny Heaven to an innocent, unbaptized child, nor to people of compassion and good deeds whatever spiritual path they choose to follow. Sometimes his Christian friends describe the rivers of fire that await Wayne if he persists in believing that he can be saved by good works alone. Wayne believes that it is not enough to profess faith, but that when the Spirit enters into someone, good works will by their nature manifest.
I believe we should judge a tree by its fruit but they say that requires making a judgment and only God can judge.
To me, Salvation comes with compassion, and that can only come when we look at ourselves and realize that we are not perfect, that we are not good. To become compassionate there has to be an awareness of self, and so Christians would like to put that in a box: you must say these words, you must ask for forgiveness, you must accept Jesus as your Saviour. That’s fine and good, but I want to see the works. If the Spirit enters into a person’s life there has to be works, there must be works, and it must start immediately.
Wayne stands in two worlds, and that footing gives him both the insights and the burdens of binocular vision. Because he grew up in a conservative Christian community, he feels he has special insights that might allow him to open the minds of his old friends. So even after a long day with the children he will stay up late writing letters that try to break through, open a dialogue, spark something more vital than harangues, than threats of fire and brimstone.
During my second winter at Wat Opot, Wayne told me that he was disgusted with what was being done in the name of established religion and had stopped calling himself a Christian. He preferred to think of himself as a follower of Jesus. Rather than preaching, he told me, he aspires to embody his understanding of the life and message of Jesus, to follow the two commandments of the New Testament: to love God with all his heart and to love his neighbor. It is an enormously practical approach, rooted in works and manifestation. Wayne sets an example for the children and for all who come to Wat Opot with open hearts. He allows for the validity of other beliefs.
I believe that the one called Buddha possessed a great deal of Universal Knowledge, as did other great thinkers, including the one called Jesus. It is not their teachings, however, that I follow … but the way in which they chose to live their daily lives.… For the true message of any Teacher is not their words … but how well they practice what they teach.
These days, Wayne tells me he doesn’t talk much about his spiritual life.
I believe that it is more important to live the life of Christ than to preach it, to help others develop their own Spiritual Life rather than forcing them to experience mine. My goal is to lead people to be good, to lead goodly lives, to learn compassion for each other and to live in peace. If they become Christians, great. If they become great Buddhists, great. If they become great Muslims, fine. If they become great atheists I don’t really care. If the improvement of life changes them I believe God is working in them.
During my first winter in Cambodia, Wayne received a letter from his own congregation in Michigan, an important source of support, informing him that they were withdrawing their funding for Wat Opot, effective immediately. They justified their boycott by saying that Wayne and his family were no longer technically members of their congregation, but to Wayne the real reason was obvious. He had made it clear to them that he did not consider it his job to convert the children to Christianity, and, as he once told me, “If God wants someone to be a Christian it will happen. That’s not my department.”
I was with Wayne the evening the news arrived, and he was disturbed not by his congregation’s inability to accept his views but by their callousness. We wondered how people could be so dismissive of the traditions of other cultures. Was it not the same arrogant disrespect that led people to support America’s attempts to impose its spiritual and political beliefs on the rest of the world? Here was Wayne, with a hundred children and adults depending on him for all their needs, and these good Christian folks had cut them off without any warning at all!
We had just returned from the crematorium, among the day’s most peaceful moments. Inside the family room of the pa cha, surrounded by photos of our Wat Opot family, Wayne, a Christian, and I, a Jew, had sat quietly with the children, who are Buddhists. In the cool of evening we had sung a Christian hymn and chanted a Buddhist invocation, meditated together and offered incense to the souls of our parents. The children saw no discord in our worship. Had the children understood the doctrinal tug-of-war over their souls, they would have laughed at such adult foolishness.
Wayne and I both found it incomprehensible that people should punish the children for his evolving beliefs. He composed an email in which he thanked the church leaders for their past support and pointed out to them that, although he would now need to search urgently for new funding to feed his children, he could not and would not bring himself to beg them to reconsider, or even to allow him perhaps one month to find a new source of support. He told these church leaders he could not bear to imagine the closed-door meetin
g at which they would try every possible rationalization for turning him down.
From the beginning, Wayne and cofounder Vandin San envisioned Wat Opot as nonsectarian. Wayne was a Christian and Vandin a Buddhist, and the logo they designed depicts both the cross and the Buddhist flag. Wat Opot was to be open to all, whether believers or not, and pictures of Jesus and the Buddha hung together in the original hospice. Even today, although Wayne no longer considers himself a Christian, the evening ceremony in the crematorium still incorporates both Buddhist and Christian elements, as a way of emphasizing that all faiths are honored and welcome.
Still, some Christian visitors find it difficult not to proselytize. Wayne makes it clear that they are welcome to visit, but that out of deference to the Buddhist wat, which gave the community this land, and out of respect for the Buddhist majority of the residents, any efforts to convert anyone are strictly forbidden. When the hospice was filled with dying patients, before the advent of antiretroviral drugs, visitors would sometimes ask permission to sing hymns and pray over the sick. Wayne allowed this, but he once remarked to me how seldom he saw anyone in these groups try to comfort the patients, or even touch them.
Midway through my first season at Wat Opot I gave Wayne a collection of the poems of Rumi, the Sufi mystic who wrote, “There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” I knew reading was hard for Wayne. He was blind in one eye and still had a cataract in the other. But the next night I came to the office and found him sitting on his stool holding up the copy of Rumi a few inches from his “good” eye, the one with the cataract.
“Wayne,” I said, “I’m glad to see you like Rumi.”
Wayne looked up at me, his face aglow with amazement.
“Like him?” he answered. “I am him!”
I realized then how intellectually isolated Wayne’s life at Wat Opot had been. He seemed to me like a figure in a myth, near blind, seeking truth but cut off from the companionship of literature or enlightened discourse. His cloistered existence had turned him inward, churned his soul and led him to insights that were firmly his own. For many years he lived surrounded by people who demeaned his search because it threatened their own beliefs. So, like the butter churn in the Hindu myth of the Ocean of Milk, the central metaphor of the story of the Kumbh Mela, Wayne continued to spin on his own axis, and, supported by a powerful faith, he churned up his own truth from the ocean of his soul.
For many years Wayne meditated alone, his eyes too weak to read, drawing from his memories of scripture and from lessons learned in battle or from caring for the sick and dying. Now, holding this copy of the poems of Rumi, he saw his own love reflected and affirmed in the words of a thirteenth-century Persian mystic who founded the order of whirling dervishes, and who composed his poems while turning “as the earth and the moon turn, circling what they love.”
Like the demons tugging against the gods in the Hindu myth, straining against the doubts of his friends and colleagues clarified Wayne’s understanding and strengthened his resolve, a struggle Wayne likens to “sharpening steel on steel.” Over time it became clear to him that you can actually learn to understand the demons, even to love them. You can be grateful to them, moreover, for affording you the energizing push and pull that allows you to make spiritual progress. You can even admit that there are demons living in you. But you must have the discernment and fortitude never to turn your children over to them.
These days, Wayne and the children go to the temple every Saturday, where the monks give them instruction in Buddhism, and they share a weekly meditation.
One of the points I am trying to understand for myself and get across to the children is the purpose for our Saturday worship service. The chanting is the same each week and it is boring unless you realize the importance of the discipline the monks are teaching. The words have no meaning, the chant has no power, the Buddha is dead … but by doing the chanting we are gaining control of our mind, even if it is for one hour a week, and as we learn to control our life, the Buddha (Universal Knowledge) awakens within us and we begin to realize all that He did, and our life becomes meaningful as a result.
In 1972, Wayne’s postwar wanderings took him to Gallup, New Mexico, where he began visiting prisons with a missionary group. Ultimately that work grew into a counseling center for Navajo and Hopi youth, but he had no thought of that when he first arrived. He was just looking for somewhere to serve.
I worked on a construction crew for a few months and started going to the jail in Gallup on Sunday afternoons with some of the missionaries. They would pass out tracts and tell the men and boys in the jail that JESUS loved them but warned me not to give them my name or contact information. I thought that was strange. I met a lot of young people in the jail; most were Indian and some were only twelve years old. Curfew violation was the main reason for being in jail and some were there for two or three weeks before being released. I asked the public defender why they held them so long and he said it was because legally they could only release them to an adult. I asked if it could be any adult and he said yes.
Wayne started going to the jail every day to get the kids out. He would drive them home, sometimes all the way to the reservation, which took half a day. He spent less and less time working construction. He struggled with finances. His car broke down in a snowstorm and he had no money to repair it.
I walked home in the blizzard because I had to pay my last $10.00 for the tow truck. I had no idea of how I would get the money for the repairs and no place to go. When I got to my room I collapsed on the bed and cried.
In a dream state I awoke and saw Satan at the foot of my bed laughing at me. I struggled to get away but couldn’t. I started shouting “JESUS help me!” and Satan disappeared. As I tried to clear my head I realized that I was being put to a test. That is when I said to GOD that if He would take care of my finances, I would give Him my life to be used as He saw fit.
Wayne’s work with Native American boys in prison attracted the notice of the local newspaper. A church offered him a small building to start a counseling program for young people, and so with two friends he began the Ford Canyon Youth Center. Wayne had begun to receive his veterans’ disability payments, and they all lived cheaply and did good work on a very low budget.
Wayne continued with the center until they applied for state funding, which required hiring a board of directors and licensed counselors. At that point he found that he was no longer considered qualified to run the program he had started because he did not have a professional degree. In the end he was fired for opposing the director over allocation of funds.
I have always opposed corruption and dishonesty and unfortunately in every program I have worked in it was there. When I found it, I confronted it, and in so doing had to pay the consequences, but it was always worth it because I knew in my heart it was the right thing to do.
My journey, however, had started and although times would get rough again, I never looked back.
In 1984, Wayne traveled to Honduras. He had wanted to return to Vietnam or Cambodia, but those countries were still closed to foreigners. Of his possible choices, he picked Honduras because he had read that it was one of the poorest countries in the Americas. With little more than his medic’s bag he settled in Yocón, a small village four hours from the nearest hospital.
It was like the Wild West. Everybody carried guns and machetes. Often in the middle of the night someone would come banging on the door, to fetch me to remove a bullet or sew up a machete wound or amputate a limb nearly severed in a bar fight.
He also began to care for a group of homeless boys whose mothers had remarried and whose stepfathers did not want to raise another man’s children. As some of the boys reached college age, Wayne rented an apartment for them in Tegucigalpa so they could attend university.
He bought a little house in the village, fenced the yard and planted grass and a garden. As he would years later at Wat Opot, Wayne created a beautiful and harmonious environment. Wayne told
me that he used to complain that the boys would never do any work around the house. He had to clean and wash and pick up and do all the cooking himself. But a few years ago, on a trip to see his mother, Wayne was invited to visit some of the boys who had immigrated to the United States. They were all doing well and had immaculate homes. When Wayne joked with them that he wondered how they could be living so nicely when they had been such slobs, they answered that Wayne had set an example of how things should be, and when they were able to have homes of their own they remembered how they wanted to live. Sometimes when I watched Wayne working around Wat Opot, setting an example by doing work he could have asked others to do, I thought of this story and understood that he chooses to teach by example, and he takes a very long view.
Wayne honed his instincts in Honduras for twelve years. One morning he started out on a short trip to Tegucigalpa, but as he walked to the bus, people in the town approached him to say goodbye. “I’m only going for a day or two,” he insisted, but the emotional farewells persisted. He was puzzled, but by the time the bus reached Tegus he realized that the townspeople were right. It was time for him to go. He went to the apartment where the boys were living near the university and drew up a contract dividing the money from the sale of the house in the village among the boys. They said goodbye, they wept, and then Wayne got on a plane and flew back to America.