Melding ideas and schools of thought-- religion and law, Christianity and Zen, meditation with counseling--is key to the work of Deborah Barrett, who helped found the nonprofit Newport Mesa Zen Center.

Deborah Barrett’s life is startlingly simple.

And startlingly complex.

She is a Zen monk, a Catholic nun, a lawyer and a psychologist.

In her sparely furnished office there is a futon and a computer. There are books on religion, Zen and psychology, a poster of Catholic scholar St. Teresa of Avila and wood block prints of a Zen garden, a church and Janice Joplin.

All the pieces exist separately and--somehow--together, much like the seemingly disparate experiences in Barrett’s life.

Barrett, 44, has worked with convicts in prisons, with the elderly in nursing homes, with the restless in suburbs. She has lobbied lawmakers and defended the accused. She has lived throughout the United States and, for a while, in West Africa.

Today, she lives in Orange County, where she helped found the nonprofit Newport Mesa Zen Center. The center was established to encourage Zen practice and meditation.

And meditation is something Barrett endorses wholeheartedly.

She describes meditation as the palm of the hand and all the world religions as the fingers, extending out. At the Costa Mesa center, she is trying to reach out, particularly to Christians to help them deepen their faith.

Melding ideas and schools of thought--religion and law, Christianity and Zen, meditation with counseling--is at the core of Barrett’s work.

“Zen works well with Christianity because it has no written creed,” Barrett says. “And just as it isn’t necessary to be a Hindu to practice yoga, it is not necessary to be a Buddhist to practice Zen.

“My commitment to Christian Zen is from my experience. In Christianity, I found there are so many people who are trying so hard to be good Christians and yet have a sense that something is missing. Meditation and prayer are not taught at a deep level, and that is where Zen comes in.”

While Barrett’s path may be the one less traveled, it is not without connecting roads.

“I’ve gone in a different direction than her, but we parallel in spirituality,” says Sister Virgie Luchsinger of Chicago, who has known Barrett for 20 years and is a member of the same nontraditional religious order. “What I’m doing in Christian spirituality is what she’s doing in Zen. I like to refer to it as finding the space between your thoughts.”

Barrett, born in Moline, Ill., took a circuitous journey to Zen--starting with her desire to be a Catholic nun when she was 19 and a student at St. Ambrose College in Davenport, Iowa.

“I wanted to be a nun primarily because I went to a small Catholic college and was impressed with the lives of the nuns who were teachers there. They were spectacular. I was especially attracted to their community activism, their commitment to service and their scholarship. They had the kind of lifestyle I wanted to live.”

After completing a degree in philosophy and classical languages, she decided to go to law school--seeing the “opportunity to use law as ministry”--and enrolled at DePaul University in Chicago.

“It was providential because the difference between a small town in Iowa and Chicago was its own education. I went to DePaul because it had a history of activism. It was very suitable for my own direction,” she says.

Barrett completed her law degree in 1977 and began doing criminal defense work in Illinois.

She became an activist for social issues. There was a bail project to prevent indigent people from being imprisoned before trial. A project to help former coal miners with black lung disease get benefits. An interfaith project to assist women emerging from prison.

“The more I was involved in law and politics, the more I began to realize that real change occurred at an individual level, in my life as well as the lives of others,” Barrett says.

At age 28, the same year she earned a master’s degree in theology, Barrett joined a religious community.

She is a member of Sisters for Christian Community, a Roman Catholic sisterhood that does not submit its constitution to the Vatican. The degree to which the order is recognized by the church varies by location. The order is made up primarily of nuns from other orders who sought a less regimented environment.

“Our community has had a mostly favorable response from the church, mainly because we attract new people. The average age of most nuns today is 70, whereas ours is 40. Everything in our community is the same as other orders of nuns except that we function with less bureaucratic structure.”

The order has about 600 members, 40 working in Southern California. More than half work in Catholic institutions such as schools and hospitals. The members are self-supporting and live in modest apartments.

“I think our order is very forward-thinking because we really don’t need a big convent, and there’s a lot of flexibility in the kind of work we’re doing,” she says.

Among her work posts: teaching English in a Catholic high school in Monrovia, Liberia, and serving two summers on the staff of the African Studies Institute at Notre Dame.

In the mid-’80s, Barrett became active in national projects promoting reproductive rights for women--issues controversial within the church and which brought her in contact with members of Congress as well as national media.

Over the years, though, the thrust of her work has shifted more and more into counseling.

*

Barrett has always been good at one-on-one counseling, says Luchsinger, who was a cloistered Carmelite nun before joining Sisters for Christian Community 15 years ago.

“She helps people find their own way, which is very freeing,” Luchsinger says.

In San Diego, Barrett created a pastoral care program at Casa de las Campanas, a retirement and nursing care center. She counseled residents and led support groups on meditation, bereavement, philosophy and care giving.

As her studies and work in counseling grew, so did Barrett’s involvement in Zen. It is, she says, what “really pulled everything together.”

In 1994 she completed her doctorate in psychology at United States International University. That fall, she was also ordained a Zen monk--capping seven years of study with Charlotte Joko Beck, her teacher at the San Diego Zen Center.

When less than a year later her friend Carol Mudd invited her to help establish a Zen center in Orange County, Barrett said yes.

*

The Newport Mesa Zen Center is in a commercial area on 17th Street. From the outside it looks no different from its businesslike neighbors.

The meditation room and Barrett’s office are on the second floor. In the air is the faint scent of incense; on the floor are cushions for those who come to meditate.

In Barrett’s office and counseling area, the religious symbols include a Celtic cross and an image of Buddha.

The center shares the building with Zen Home Stitchery, a small business that creates clothing and pillows used in meditation. The business was founded 10 years ago by Mudd, a longtime friend of Barrett’s and a Zen practitioner.

In September, Mudd and Barrett opened the center, which initially borrowed space from the business but is now self-sustaining.

“We saw the need for a Zen center in Orange County because there is a huge interest in meditation here, with many people participating in informal groups,” Mudd says.

There are a number of meditation centers--Zen and otherwise--in the county. But, Mudd says, theirs is distinguished by the presence of Barrett, a teacher of Zen.

Permission to teach Zen is granted by one’s teacher--in Barrett’s case Joko Beck--and it is a permission granted only rarely.

The Zen style Barrett teaches draws from the Japanese tradition but is becoming more and more American. “Zen changes with each culture,” she says.

Barrett is involved in Zen education outside the center too.

She recently taught a course at Rancho Santiago College in Santa Ana and will present a workshop on Zen at the National Convention of the American Assn. of Pastoral Counselors in Vancouver in May. She is also involved in meditation instruction in a drug rehabilitation program at Donovan Penitentiary at the Otay Mesa border.

*

Zen, which literally means “sitting meditation,” teaches people to fully experience each moment, whether that moment is happy or sad, Barrett says.

Her goal as a teacher is to help people deepen the experience of their existing beliefs. It is not to set up yet another system of beliefs.

Hanging in the center is a long, vertical scroll that asks, in Japanese, “What is it?”

The question goes to the heart of Zen awareness meditation, Barrett says.

“We don’t ask ‘why’ because that stimulates thinking. ‘What’ stimulates us toward direct experience.”

“When people sit still for a moment, they begin to feel a fear or anxiety. That’s why it can be very difficult.”

Getting past that point and learning to experience a greater level of awareness is the challenge, she says. The reward?

“The tensions which seem to exist between religious ideals and life as it is are dissolved.”

*

The Newport Mesa Zen Center is at 711 W. 17th St., Suite A-8, Costa Mesa. Sittings, retreats and special events are offered; most programs are free. (714) 631-5389