This Be the Place: A Countercultural Ritual in Japan

This Be the Place is a series of short essays in which poets explore the mysteries and meaning of a particular place.

Tea ceremony taught me how to pray again.

I was never home. Always on the go. Every spare moment was filled with papers to grade, events to host, and music and poetry performances across the United States and Japan. Then, two high school girls invited me to the washitsu on the fourth floor of the school I taught at in Kanazawa city.

Sitting in the wide, austere tatami room, I felt my mind loosen, hesitantly, like a balled fist, as I took in the details. The kettle of boiling water. The whisking of powder into matcha. The afternoon light softened by the latticed paper windows. A scroll that read peace hanging above a rust-colored vase of yellow chrysanthemums.

I shifted from side to side, wishing I had brought my phone so I could at least check my messages as I waited. Then I closed my eyes and surrendered to the quiet—which was not as quiet as I thought. Tabi socks shuffled across the straw mats. Blue rock thrushes lifted melodies in the pines outside the windows. Tea utensils clanked in bowls and wooden doors thudded softly as they slid open and shut. More than the ceremony itself, being alone, in silence, with my thoughts, felt foreign. But also sweet, like the red bean rice cake with bunny ears, set before me, that I felt obliged to savor slowly.

I eventually closed my eyes to enjoy this rare moment of quiet. The chatter of the six or seven students and the teachers explaining tea etiquette settled into the background as I focused on breathing deeply. And then a voice asked, “Michael, why does everything need to be so quick? Why does it need to be so fast? I will give you rest.” I did not need to open my eyes because I knew that voice. It was the voice that told me to lift my head after a long day. The voice I heard while singing gospel songs. The voice I heard when praying. It was the voice that I had come to know as God’s.

A voice that had been drowned out by a hectic year. 2023 was anything but restful. I started a new job as a high school teacher in Japan, moved homes, sang and acted on more stages than I ever had in my life, incurred thousands in debt, and questioned fundamental aspects of my faith. In the midst of this, I developed cystic hives that made me remove the mirrors from my bathroom, and I was suddenly diagnosed with so many food and plant allergies that even my physician didn’t know what to tell me besides yabai—Japanese for “damn.”

So, when I heard His voice, as clear as the boiling water hitting the bottom of the bronze urn—the voice that seemed to simultaneously well up from within me and descend from on high—I couldn’t help but cry. Hard. Tears because my practices of prayer and poetry, the wellsprings of my life, had dried up. I went from writing every day to squeezing poems on scrap paper or into voice memos every other month. I’d pray every day but it was always one-sided. I found it difficult to quiet my mind and actually listen to what He had to say to me. Afraid even. I had become estranged to silence, the door into both poetry and prayer. It’s no wonder I was sick.

I left the ceremony with a slight caffeine buzz, but my mind also felt clear for once. Students said, come back whenever you want. So, I did. Weekly. I began to reflect on His gentle prodding—“why does everything need to be so quick?”—and made a resolution.

I stepped down from choirs and ministry. I turned down editing, writing, and teaching opportunities back-to-back. I deactivated my social media accounts, began meditating in silence and making matcha at home. I bought houseplants. I started cooking and began to wean myself off of fast food. I woke and slept early, and started reading books again, including the Bible. Inspired by the tea ceremony’s hyper-focus on the changing seasons, I kept a diary that followed Japan’s 72 microseasons. I practiced attentiveness to the surrounding world—my way to ease back into daily writing. Like the bears retreating into their dens or the salmon that finally make it upstream, my world came to a halt. Healing followed.

Tea ceremony is countercultural. It is slow. Ritualistic. Students spend hours learning the proper posture, what hand to use to pick up which utensils, the order of cleaning a tea bowl, how to fold their silk napkins. I thought the process was tedious at first, but as I began to practice, I realized that the intense focus on the present task actually liberated my mind from worry and anxiety about what was waiting in the future. I began to cherish the gift of the present. God in the details.

After studying for a few months, I noticed that the ceremony followed me even after I left the tea rooms. I walked more conscious of my own posture and pacing. I ate more slowly. I cleaned and dried dishes, inspecting each side as I would the handmade tea ceremony utensils. I learned to find the holiness of the thing at hand. If I washed potatoes, I shifted my mind from “how quickly can I finish this” to “how can I do this with mindfulness of the C/creator?” The dirt encrusted on the potato, the freshly washed smell, its soft head in my palm prompted deep gratitude and introspection.

Modern tea ceremony is inspired by Zen Buddhist monks and the Japanese wabi sabi aesthetic, which values natural imperfection and impermanence as seen in tea ceremony’s use of weathered plants and asymmetrical bowls. This aesthetic was popularized by the 16th-century tea master Sen no Rikyu. But my current tea ceremony teacher, Minoru Yamagata, a pastor and samurai researcher I met through a friend, opened my eyes to the ceremony’s interfaith history. He mainly researches Takayama Ukon, known as Japan’s premier Christian samurai, who was an exceptional tea master (and also a disciple of Sen no Rikyu). He renounced his title as a samurai during the Christian persecution era in the late 16th century and took refuge in Kanazawa, where he lived for 26 years practicing tea ceremonies and sharing his faith. He would also often pray with patrons during tea ceremony, believing “the tea room was a place of communion, prayer, and conversation with God, a place of contemplation, and a place of evangelism to lead people to Christ,” as Yamagata explained on my first day at his large, traditional Japanese home that functioned as a tea room, church, and living quarters.

Yamagata continues Ukon’s legacy by writing poems and songs about the samurai and God. Inspired by Yamagata and Ukon’s spiritual relationship to the ceremony, I committed myself to tea, acquired my own tatami mats, and transformed my spare bedroom into a tea ceremony prayer space.

I also began praying and meditating everywhere. I closed my eyes in the staff room, at bus stops, in the cafeteria, along the river, in the middle of conversations, and would descend deep within myself to encounter the always present voice that anchors me each day and reminds me who I am and who He is amid the commotion of life. If my body is a temple, as Paul said, then my heart became a chashitsu, a tea room, and each day, anywhere, anytime, I could commune with Jesus, who helped me make sense of my world and refreshed me with his voice, saying, “Come to me and I will heal you.” “Let me help you with this.” “I want to be with you every moment.” “I love you.”

Tea ceremony is not a place but a practice. A way to enter into the life-affirming presence within ourselves every day. In our tea garden are ferns, camellias, and azaleas—plants whose leaves never wither. Water drips slowly from bamboo shoots into a stone water basin for cleansing. The small door to enter the tea room is silence, and in the presence of the tea master there is rest. I’m learning that if I stop and empty my bowl, God will always refill it with himself.