“The sound of one man clapping”

LOS ALAMOS MONITOR

June 7, 2006

Pp. 1,2

ROGER SNODGRASS

 Monitor Assistant Editor

Ask a reasonably well-informed person to describe a typical Los Alamos resident and a Henry Finney would probably not come immediately to mind.

A retired sociology professor from the University of Vermont, he is, in overlapping and mutually enriching portions, an artist, a Zen Buddhist and a political activist.

Finney has been a practicing Buddhist for twenty years and was ordained as a “senior,” the equivalent of a “head monk” in 1996. He heads the Kannon Zendo of Los Alamos.

He has a PhD in sociology from the University of California Berkeley.

The sociology is almost synonymous with politics in Finney’s view – trying in a disciplined and methodical way to understand some of the woes of the world.

Most people don’t worry about the existence of poverty or the causes of war, much less their roots and persistence. Finney wonders why institutions become bureaucratized and how imperceptible structures like corporate concentration influence national problems.

He also thinks its not enough to simply to know, without doing.

One of his current projects started last fall. Finney organized a series of progressive films shown at the Unitarian Church, where he is chair of the social concerns committee.

The series started with  “WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price,” and moved on to an assortment of progressive issues, that Finney and his audience believe have not been adequately covered in what they call “the corporate media.”

The point of each show is not just to point up a problem, but also to do something. Finney prepares an action sheet for each movie of people to call, petitions to sign, campaigns to join that are appropriate to each theme.

Politically-speaking, Finney is more likely to mention “Bernie,” – that is, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the sole independent in the U.S. Senate, than “Saint Pete” – the Republican Sen. Pete Domenici, the political patron of Los Alamos National Laboratory. He counts Sanders a friend from his days in Burlington.

“I’m not very good at long, cold, dark winters,” he began, when asked how he got from one of the liberated zones of New England to a top-secret laboratory town where nuclear weapons are refurbished and designed.

After a Masters of Fine Arts degree from Pratt Institute and an early retirement arrangement from academia, he began a journey that brought him and his wife Helen to Los Alamos, and to a second vocation.

To pursue his artistic interest he felt he needed a good climate in an affordable location, near a significant center of contemporary art.

As it turned out, that led in 1995 to the Santa Fe area and, with a little bit of well-timed luck, to an affordable house with a large studio in nearby Los Alamos.

“It’s a small town, yet look what we have,” he said with a sweeping gesture that took in the community and cultural facilities around Ashley Pond and beyond to hiking trails and mountains.

“How many towns of 18,000 have all that,” he said.

At odds politically with some of his neighbors, he still finds much to like and admire in what he considers a beautiful community with wonderful people.

“I could not have learned as much as I have if I didn’t live here,” he said, ready to defend many of the scientist and others he knows against simplistic stereotyping, as sophisticated and highly educated.

“Up on the hill, ‘we’ are defensive about criticism, ready to dismiss it and put it all together in the ‘kook pot,” he said, slipping in a bit of sociology.

“You can’t understand an organization as the sum of its individuals,” he said. “Every organization, whether it’s the University of Vermont or Citibank, or the lab is a system in its own right with qualities and characteristics that transcend the individual.”

He says his art has tended to be abstract, only occasionally venturing into political territory. But it has much in common with the “ecstatic qualities” of his spiritual quest.

“I don’t know that I’ve resolved this contradiction yet,” he said. His art is a way to break out of the mold, including the academic rules of the sociologist,  “to be free to sing.”

He described a current project, in collaboration with Santa Fe artist Noel Bennett, as a collection of sitting sculptures, as sitting in a zendo – neon tubes, trees, a tangle of tubes and lights, a condensation bottle - “an abstract metaphor for the kind of people who meditate.” The installation asks viewers to reflect on what kind of life journey and what kind of research went into it.

After having suffered a tragic personal loss a few years ago, with the death of a son, Finney searched in vain for literature that could help him through his grief. Now, he is writing a book about that experience.

Influenced by central Buddhist teachings on coping with suffering, Finney continues to explore his own inner crisis to learn how to let go of the grieving self by serving others.