Meet a Member: Charlie
October 14, 2026
Charlie Schneider shares his favorite moment on retreat: three o’clock, when the morning has gone, the light has deepened, and the sangha sits down to tea. He reflects on silence, sympathetic joy, and why membership at BZC is an act of faith in not being alone.
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Name: Charlie Schneider
Member Since: 2022
Favorite Program: Full Moon Ceremony
BZC Roles: Longtime jisha, and returning to the doanryo
Fun Fact: I’m a huge fan of gummy candy.
My Story:
My favorite time on retreats is usually around three o’clock. Often it is the most zazen-like moment for me all day: I’ve been weaving in and out of mind and body, thinking about how many minutes more, how many things I said and did and didn’t say and didn’t do, how many things I miss and fear and want, and about how I’m still bad at zazen after all these years, and of course there’s the pain in my body, and more thinking, and bowing, too—and then I look up and the morning has gone, the light is heavier, the day has deepened, and we are drinking tea.
That moment of tea has always felt like a way station within the forms, and a form itself. Amid the blocks of time and dedicated practice, here is an incursion of the everyday. We sit informally, an organism at rest. Sips punctuate the silence. I sneak furtive looks—who drinks what, how? How does that body move? How does that peer of mine bring their life to their cup? And why that cup? Who are these people, and what are we doing? I have many answers, and they’re all incomplete. Drinking tea is where I most readily enjoy that incompleteness, that openness, especially because it is silent. With no need to talk, there’s no temptation to obfuscate. We’ve worked too hard for that, together.
That, maybe, is what’s most precious to me about drinking tea on retreat. After a day in the trenches of selfhood I remember that I do not practice alone and cannot. Watching whole other lives known and unknown drink and stretch and eat cookies in the afternoon light, mudita always comes: sympathetic joy, delight in others’ particularity. And is it possible to feel sympathetic joy for oneself, too? Every time, I feel lucky and strange to be counted in our number, to drink tea in the eyes and heart of our sangha.
To me, being a member at Brooklyn Zen Center is an act of faith in our condition of not being alone and an act of refuge in our condition. It is a commitment to a life in which I can be accepted. It is a commitment to building a space of quiet love in this hard world.
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