This website is the home site of my criminal reformation apostolate; here you can find details about the Lampstand Foundation which I founded as a 501c (3) nonprofit corporation in Sacramento, California in 2003.

I have written twelve books, one being about Lampstand and each one of the other eleven being a response to a likely objection to Catholicism that will be encountered when doing ministry to professional criminals; and for links to all of the Lampstand books which are available—free to members—and at Amazon, go to http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=david+h+lukenbill

I also maintain a daily blog, The Catholic Eye, https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/

Lampstand also keeps track of rehabilitative programs that fail, and the one or two that appear to work, with the findings available at https://catholiceye.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/evaluation-of-reentry-programs-3/

The work connected to the apostolate is listed under the home page categories (to your left) which I will be expanding as needed.

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The Lampstand Foundation E-Letter

No. 128, September 16, 2017

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Zen Catholicism, Suchness, & the Rosary

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I believe the heart of Catholicism is, as Fr. Thomas Merton surmised, similar to the heart of Zen, a mystical and precious space words are unequal to; and Zen’s Suchness—the nameless reality in its central nature—is captured in many ways by Catholics, including the praying of the traditional fifteen decade rosary.

1. R. Reno, writing in the August/September 2017 issue First Things. Wrote:

“God’s revelation in Christ has a sheer thatness, a particularity that can never be framed, explained, or reduced to a cosmological or anthropological role or meaning.” (p. 62)

When our Holy Queen Mother told us to pray the rosary daily at Fatima, it was the fifteen decade rosary she was talking about; the ancient rosary connected to the Old Testament of the Psalms and Israel of the Prophets, the New Testament Israel of Christ, and the deepest roots of our Church.

Praying the fifteen decade rosary is entering into the central spirit and acts animating our Church and causing them to resonate, even if unconsciously, within us.

Solange Hertz, in an article published in Remnant Newspaper, writes:

“One of Pius XII’s favorite theologians, Fr. Matthias Scheeben, had this to say in the first chapter of his Mysteries of Christianity:

“If by mystery we mean nothing more than an object which is not entirely conceivable in its innermost essence, we need not seek very far to find mysteries. Such mysteries are found not only above us, but all around us, in us, under us. The real essence of all things is concealed from our eyes. The physicist will never fully plumb the laws of forces in the physico-chemical world and perfectly comprehend their effects; and the same is true of the physiologist with regard to the laws of organic nature, of the psychologist with regard to the soul, of the metaphysician with regard to the ultimate basis of being. Christianity is not alone in exhibiting mysteries in the above-mentioned sense. If its truths are inconceivable and unfathomable, so in greater part are the truths of reason.”

Retrieved June 27, 2017 from http://www.remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/3255-the-real-world

In a very interesting book, the author connects Zen Buddhism and Catholicism:

“To be reconciled, not blindly but with a mind enlightened, to the inevitable—that, if I have rightly understood, is the heart of Zen Buddhism. But this also, in its depths at least, is the message of Catholicism. Such, at any rate, is the “suggestion” offered in these ages. Nothing in the way of religious syncretism is called for; the aim is to evaluate, sympathetically, Zen from a Catholic point of view; and in the process, though incidentally, to present Catholicism at its mature level. The approach is not that of an orientalist, for which I have no competence, but of one formed in the oldest monastic tradition of the West, familiar with a truly “existential” Christian philosophy, and really interested in the contemporary world.” (p. xiii)

Dom Aelred Graham—Prior of the Benedictine Community, Portsmouth, Rhode Island—(1963). Zen Catholicism: A Suggestion. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.

As Fr. Thomas Merton was to share with us through so many beautiful books, it is a suggestion well followed.