Sister Kathleen volunteers once a week in the Children’s Ward at the Tokyo Cancer Hospital. When she started, decades ago now, she was made to sign an agreement that she would not proselytize to her patients on their sick beds. As a medical professional, her job is to speak to children and families about their hope and fear, as well as some techniques for relief. Although these might include a breathing exercise, they are not Buddhist meditation or Christian prayer.

To Sister Kathleen, the distinction is hardly worth pressing. To her patients, she offers comfort, and, at times, peace. “Often, I will hold one hand and the mother will hold the other.” Then she asks, ‘Would you like to learn a breathing practice?’ Together, they close their eyes and breathe for 30 seconds, or a minute. As she explains this, Sister Kathleen invites me to do the same, and we breathe steadily, in unison. In so doing, the patient and parents may “give their anxiety over to the breath.” I don’t know if this is Maria-sama or Kami-Sama,” says one child, but I sense a “mysterious power (makafushigi chikara).” For Sister Kathleen as much as her patients, this non duality is not theoretical but lived: “When I am with the children, there is only the children. When I am sitting, there is only the breath.” As a part of her work, Sister Kathleen attends children’s funerals where they play Disney music and share memories. Parents tell her that they feel something is missing. But what she provides, Sister Kathleen insists, is not Christian. Rather, it is the effort to establish “a place for the deceased.”

I met Sister Kathleen at the Nishi-Oi station in Shinagawa. We had messaged on Facebook just a few times before she agreed to travel from her home in Kamakura for an interview. I played host in my apartment at the temple where I was staying for the month. The Roshi and his wife allowed me to have a guest, but I would have to wear a mask during our meeting. So, Sister Kathleen had warm chickpeas and salad, and I asked questions while she ate. Sister Kathleen was not, even sitting in front of me, an easy person to pin down. She looks, as my host observed, like a typical Japanese obaasan (grandmother), from her printed silk scarf to her shuffling walk, indistinguishable as a gaijin (foreigner) in passing. When she came to Japan from Pennsylvania on a mission assignment, she had joined the order just a few years prior, but, excepting a brief period between 1978-1981 and in the late 1980s, during which times she continued her studies in Clinical Pastoral Education, she has lived in Japan ever since.

Very early on, Sister Kathleen was introduced by a roommate to Zen meditation. She was a young Catholic nun recently transplanted to Tokyo and apparently without qualms about taking up a Buddhist practice. Sister Kathleen has managed since then to establish a nondualistic mode of being that appears intuitive. When asked about the way her formal education, which includes two advanced degrees, may have either hindered or contributed to this mode, she is dismissive. “The older I get,” she explains, “it becomes more and more simple. I don’t have to analyze or figure it out.” Meanwhile, I am impatient because I cannot understand how a Christianity that is so formalized as to inspire taking orders can also be compatible with being a devout practitioner of Zen. The answer is apparently that these distinctions do not exist. “When you’re eating chickpeas,” which the sister is doing as she explains, “you’re eating chickpeas, and they’re wonderful. You don’t compare them to bread.” I insist that there must have been some tension between her stated vows and the demands of Zen, if not in truth than in conscience. Searching for the unenlightened past mind of the enlightened person before me, I’m missing the point.

Before we had reached the temple from the station, a common lineage was unearthed between her temple and “ours.” Yoshida-roshi, Sister Kathleen’s teacher, comes from the same line as Deguchi-sensei’s master. Both temples practice a hybrid model of Zen and Rinzai, which combines meditation with koan recitation, a shocking enough development. But the Kamakura temple where Sister Kathleen has been practicing and is now a certified “advisor” of Zazen, has what she describes as a “renegade reputation.” Nonetheless, the camaraderie between Sister Kathleen and Deguchi-sensei is apparent from their introduction, although I can’t understand all that’s said. A detailed tour of the temple followed, and Deguchi sensei took us through the many rooms with gleaming dark wood floors. Sister Kathleen bowed reverently, her forehead touching the ground, before each painting of a Buddha. She complimented the artistry of engraved wood beams and admired the books and portrait of the late master. In the koan recitation hall, she read fluently the kanji on a painted tapestry above the alter: A single smile and 1,000 flowers open.

We came finally to a room on the top floor that I hadn’t seen before. Inside were several statues of Buddhist deities and demons, all of varying sizes and materials, gifts from wealthy parishioners. Out of a black lacquer cabinet which held a seated Buddha, Deguchi sensei pulled the photo of a young white woman, about my age, smiling and wielding a katana in the dojo downstairs. Listening hard, I learned that she had stayed at this temple several years before and that she had since passed away. Although this woman taken up study with Deguchi-sensei, she did not actually have a room here. She preferred instead to sit in meditation almost constantly, sleeping in intervals on the tatami floor. Beyond these I had difficulty understanding the details of this woman’s life, but Sister Kathleen heard them with emotion.

My conversation with Sister Kathleen came at the point in my time in Japan when I had begun to get a handle on the practical challenges of living in Tokyo and had become brutally aware of how little I understood about Japanese life. Here was someone who appeared to have gotten to the bottom of it, primarily by negating the East-West dualism which many of us cling to for structure in our analyses. This is the result of time, certainly, but mostly of a rigorous study (practice) of…practice. It is the absence of boundary, the continuity of life before and after Japan, and the temporary presence of the breath.