With Rev. Patti’s retirement the temple no longer has a resident minister. However, as we embark on our search for the next resident minister there is a plan in place to provide us with ministerial guidance. Rev. Fred Brenion has agreed to act as supervising minister until such time as we have a new resident minister.

Here is a ‘brief sketch!’

Rev. Fred was born in Santa Monica, California on August 19, 1952. He remembers when he was five of seeing Sputnik flying overhead! He witnessed the start of the Space Age.

He was a slow-starter in school. Later, after moving to West Los Angeles, he eventually mastered, or rather, was mastered through reading. He found strength in exploring other horizons and views. He found libraries and bookstores to be places of wonder and comfort.

Raised in the United Methodist tradition, he loves good hymns and developed a fascination with religion. His Sunday school gave him articles on the holy books of other religions where he began to learn that there were other ways, and felt the need to learn them.

Growing up he experienced puzzling questions that troubled him and sat him apart. He wondered if we really shared reality. Are we really alone? What also of life’s ending?

It was in Junior High that he discovered his vocation to be a librarian. To help others find their answers and to help himself to do the same by having access to all human knowledge and wisdom.

He encountered incredible works that formed his mind and heart. There was Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norman Juster. Winnie-the-Pooh brought a poignancy of childhood fading. Then he read his first ‘adult’ work, Dante’s Inferno! The idea that there was a moral universe, a geography of right and wrong transformed his thinking as a teen. Then in the late 60s he encountered The Lord of the Rings of J.R.R. Tolkien. The work that changed everything for him, revealing the power of language, history, courage and endurance. Becoming involved in the Tolkien fandom of the time he found friends, who like him, were ‘weird’ and found together their own normalcy. One of whom he later married, now for almost 50 years!

He went to college. At Los Angeles City College he got his A.A. in Philosophy. Then to California State University, Northridge, where he majored in Religious Studies. After this, he went on to the University of Southern California (USC) where he received his Masters in Library Science.

He worked for a time in and soon was managing a bookstore. It taught him new ways of promoting books and patron service. Finally he became the Patients’ Librarian at Patton State Hospital, a mental institution, where he served the criminally insane for 34 years. It was there he learned his humanity through the broken humanity of others.

During all this he plumbed depths that shook his Christian faith where it eventually collapsed. Going into quietude he experienced a kind of ‘emptying’ of views that provided contentment. At this his daughter told him that he “would be a very good Buddhist”. This shook him awake. He realized that the state of mind he was in was what Buddhism talked about. But he had studied it through Christian eyes. Now his eyes were empty of views and he realized that that was what Buddhism was really talking about. This was his “Ugly Duckling” experience. He had discovered he had been within a Buddhist all his life but didn’t know it.

Beginning an intensive study of he found it fitted him like a hand to glove. He dallied about, absorbing book after book. But he came to realize it was not enough to have head-knowledge. Buddhism needs to be tested by living it. He needed a Sangha.

This was hard in that there was so few Buddhist groups near him. Then he found a temple, 60 miles away. West Covina Buddhist Temple. Here he was welcomed as he was. He found a home.

But such a strange home. Pure Land had not been on his agenda, and yet it spoke to levels that met his real needs. He had seen something like this before. You see, Rev. Fred was an alcoholic, one of his missteps in growing up. But he recognized that the teachings of Shinran mirrored so much of what was presented in Recovery. He had realized his helplessness and his need for a Higher or Other-Power. And he saw this presented here in a way that went deeper. This was where he needed to be. A tradition that would tell him the real truth about himself, that he is a bombu, a very foolish human being, even with all his book-learning.

Soon, Fred went into the Minister’s Assistant Program and was accepted as a candidate for ordination.

Rev. Frederick Brenion received tokudo (priest) ordination in 2011 and kyoshi (teacher) ordination in 2012 at the Higashi Honganji headquarters in Kyoto, Japan. He wrote his ministerial thesis on Jodo Shinshu and Twelve Steps.

Since then he serves our Higashi Honganji temples as a Kaikyogakari – a minister-at-large, or rather, in his case, as a very large minister! He gives talks, articles, and occasional seminars as requested, filling in wherever needed. And so he is here with us now till we get our resident minister!

Rev. Fred says that Buddhism is a very human religion and it comes best to us in our everyday lives. He hope to share his stories and questions as he came to discovering himself in discovering the Buddha. He hopes that we may also see how our own stories and questions have brought us together as the Buddha calls us. Buddhism is the religion you go to when all else fails, and if Buddhism ever fails to work we then come to Jodo Shinshu, which teaches us to discover that we really are accepted just as we are, right now, every now…and that takes us to the very heart of Buddhism!