‘Your Phone Call Saved My Life’

In mid-April, I attended the Cleveland Buddhist Temple, spoke at the temple’s Hanamatsuri service and conducted a Kieshiki ceremony in which 15 people received their Buddhist names.  

The Cleveland Buddhist Temple, located on the east side of Cleveland, had declining membership and the Sangha could not afford to maintain the temple building. The Cleveland Sangha sold the building and moved to Shaker Heights, Ohio. They currently rent space at a Unitarian church and have a monthly service led by Rev. Anita Kazarian, a Minister’s Assistant with Tokudo.  

The Sangha there is unique. There isn’t a single Japanese American in the Sangha, although like most of our BCA churches and temples, it started out from a Japanese American community that built the first church in 1945.  

Rev. Kazarian has implemented some creative things into the service that I have never seen done before. All of our temples set up a hanamido, or altar for Hanamatsuri, in which we decorate it with flowers and pour sweet tea over a statue of the baby Buddha.  

At Cleveland, Rev. Anita made it participatory with the entire Sangha. As part of the service, we all silently decorated the hanamido. On a table next to the hanamido, one member was cutting flowers that each person could then place wherever they wanted on the hanamido. We formed a line and filed by the hanamido and silently decorated it, making several rounds until all the flowers were gone. It was a wonderful “ritual” to feel engaged in the service. 

Most of the people there were relatively new to Buddhism. Only Rev. Kazarian had a history that went back to 1989.  They were of various ethnicities and backgrounds.  

After the service, they had refreshments, and arranged the chairs into a circle and had a discussion based on a reading. I was impressed with how freely everyone shared their thoughts and experiences. We read an essay from Taitetsu Unno’s book, “River of Fire, River of Water,” titled, “What it means to die.”

In the discussion, one man shared that just the day before, he decided to call an old friend that he hadn’t spoken to in years. He picked up the phone, dialed his friend and his friend burst into tears upon receiving the call. After his friend gathered himself, he said, “Today, I was the lowest I have ever been in my life. I am about to undergo a divorce from my wife and I thought to myself, ‘Maybe I will go out and buy a gun and just end it all.’ But thankfully, your phone call out of the blue pulled me out of my depression and I feel like I can live again. Your phone call saved my life.” 

What an amazing story. Just a friendly phone call to an old friend saved his life. The timing of the phone call was uncanny. What if he didn’t call his friend and then heard later the tragic news that his friend had taken his life?  

This thing that we call life, that we so easily take for granted, is really a very thin thread, that with any number of causes and conditions could be severed. We might meet a tragic accident, or fall victim to an incurable illness, or we might fall into depression and lose our will to live. Nobody knows how long we will have this precious thing called life.

While we have this life, we can live for ourselves, for our happiness, for our profit, for our enjoyment, for our pleasure. Or, we can choose to do something with our life for others, not necessarily all the time, like joining the Peace Corps or something like that, but even in little ways, find something we can do for others.  

Maybe it is to volunteer at our church or temple, or at a school or hospital, or maybe help to deliver bento to our senior members. We can find little things to do, not for ourselves, but for others, which brings us joy as well.  Who knows, even a phone call to an old friend might cheer them up, make them smile, or even save their life.