General Information: Overview: Who We Are: Roshi Sandra Jishu Holmes

Sandra Jishu Holmes

Sandra Holmes was born in Oakland, California, in 1941. She earned a Ph.D. in bio-chemistry from Columbia University in 1976, where she also received an award for excellence in teaching, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship in human genetics at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City. She was ordained as a Zen priest in 1983 by Roshi Bernie Glassman, and in 1995 received Dharma Transmission (authority to teach).

From 1982 to 1996, Sandra and Bernie founded and developed the Greyston Mandala in Yonkers, New York, a group of for-profit and non-profit corporations dedicated to improving the lives of people living in the inner city. She served as the first Executive Director of the Greyston Family Inn, which provided permanent housing and services for homeless families. Drawing on the holistic principles of Buddhism, she and Bernie Glassman developed a highly successful model that encouraged homeless families to move into permanent housing and supported them with comprehensive long-term services, including a licensed child care center. She made numerous excursions to welfare motels where, at that time, Westchester County sheltered its homeless, in order to recruit single mothers with young children to become Greyston Family Inn tenants and begin a path that would take them from welfare dependency to economic self-sufficiency. She also developed initial programs for Issan House and the Maitri Day Program which opened in downtown Yonkers in December, 1997, to provide housing and health services for poor people living with HIV and AIDS.

Desiring to devote their full-time energies to peacemaking, Sandra and Bernie moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, in March of 1998. Her hope was to continue her life of teaching and social action in a quiet and rustic setting, with more time for her home and garden. She wished to create a hub for the Zen Peacemaker Order in Santa Fe and to infuse it with a spirit of gentleness, quiet tenacity, and compassionate action. Self-effacing by nature, she often stood behind her husband, Bernie, letting him publicly express the vision of their joint work while she quietly worked behind the scenes to actualize and implement that vision. She developed training programs for peacemaker priests and ZPO peacemakers. She was to become a ZPO preceptor at the end of March and thereafter become the second abbot of the Truth of Zen Temple. Instead, she died from a heart attack twelve days after her arrival in Santa Fe, at age fifty-seven.

She is deeply missed by her friends, students, and the many people with whom she worked. Her gentle and giving spirit continues to lead and inspire the members of the Zen Peacemaker Order and the Peacemaker Community.

In a moving personal essay, Roshi Bernard Glassman discusses his practice of bereavement following the death of his wife and dharma partner, Sensei Sandra Jishu Holmes.