My father, 1928-2013

Dad was in a cooler.

Saturday afternoon, Mom said, “I need to see him again.”

They were keeping him over the weekend. He’d wanted nothing. No chemicals. No box. No ceremony. Ashes to ashes. And fast.

But he died on a Friday afternoon. So he did get no chemicals. He did get no box. He was going to get no ceremony. But paperwork had to come before ashes, paperwork that had to be processed by offices that weren't open on weekends in that semi-rural Texas town two thousand miles from where he’d grown up.  

“He’s in there all alone. And he’s so cold.” Mom said.

I'd flown back -- just two weeks after I'd helped them move there. “I know, Mom, but it’s good he’s cold. It’s like a blanket for him now.”

“I suppose…” And then a few minutes later. “But he’s in there all alone. I can’t stand to think of him in there all alone.”

She had no choice but to leave him in there all alone all weekend. She’d asked my brother, the one who lived there, to make sure that, when she went in to sign all the papers, that Dad would be out where she could see him again. One last time.

There was only one funeral home in Brazos county that would cremate a body. Only one. You couldn’t be born yet again if your entire body wasn’t in the ground. No seed, no body, no resurrection. Resurrection required nostrils, there, ready to breathe in the breath of the Divine even if those nostrils would soon be dust by time and life feeding on itself. Cremation was for heathens.

To get to that one funeral home, we took turn after turn through ramshackle residential streets. Low yellow brick houses, one with plywood over a window, a dog barking, another with a car on blocks, most with high green grass fed by the heavy wet air. I thought we were going through this area to another. But we weren’t. At a low red brick building, my brother turned in to what I thought was just a wide open graveled dirt lot with one big tree in the middle and standing pits of water too large to be called puddles. I looked for a funeral home like the ones back east. I looked for the too perfect former house of every funeral home I’d ever seen and, when I didn’t see it, I thought my brother was stopping here to tell us all something, to leave one of the cars for some reason, to change directions. But he turned off his car and my brothers got out.

“I guess we’re here,” I said to Mom.

“Where?”

“There, I guess.”

In front of us was a worn house that had once been painted white with dark green trim. It was attached to the back of the brick building. There was a small sign over a bent screen door, a sign like motels have, that said “office.” 

When I opened the car door, a humid mass of unbreathable air flopped like gelatin inside the once-air-conditioned car. I stood up and went around to the passenger door to help my mother out. Kevin, who'd flown in to be with me, followed behind. She took my arm and we picked our way slowly around muddy pits of water and loose piles of scree.

At the office door, there were no stairs, just a step up off the dirt over discontinuous slats of worn white wood, one with a wide wedge rotted and gone.

From the look of it, there weren’t enough heathens in Brazos County, Texas, to support even this one funeral home. 

We stepped up into an office as bad off as the outside of the building. The mat by the door meant to clean dirt off muddy shoes had all the dirt and mud it could take and the carpet it was supposed to protect needed none: it was threadbare and worn.  Floor boards sagged in places and office equipment sat on top of old metal file cabinets with their thick wires running to large, completely filled multiplugs. Worse, when we walked in, no one was there. The five of us, my mother, husband, two brothers and I, stood, listening for any sign that it was worth calling out for someone.

I wanted to scream at my brother, what were you thinking taking our east coast surgeon Dad here? Were you thinking at all? How could you do this to Dad, to Mom, to us?

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it without making things worse for Mom, without making things worse for all of us. I couldn’t believe she wasn’t saying it, wasn’t reacting to any of it, when an only slightly subpar upscale hotel could make her reel.

She was standing like she was underwater, a current flowing through her seaweed hair.

But no one said anything. Not one of us. For the first time in our lives, the scene wasn’t written by Albee or Williams or O’Neill. No, we stood there, kind – or, rather, not inflicting on the others what we thought their “kind” should sound like, look like, be.

In 1968, when I was eleven, I’d seen a movie - I don't remember which one - in which time and space stretched out for eons before and for eons after me, the me that I’d never considered in relation to time, to space, to stars, to planets, to rocks, to mountains, to grains of sand and the oceans that made them and I was in terror. I flew out of my bed and into Mom and Dad’s bedroom. My father was asleep, the acrostic book on his bedside table. Beyond him, the rise of my mother’s hip, her arm on top, the orange glow of a cigarette in the blue light from the television.

I ran around the king bed to her side and threw myself down on the floor. I knew better than to try to crawl in bed with her. As I whispered and cried my incomprehension, my fear, she took the cigarette she'd been smoking out of her mouth, stubbed it out in the large ashtray on her bedside table then, before she took another out of the pack with her mouth, she said, “Don’t be such a little fool.” She flipped her silver lighter open, spun the flint wheel, and leaned her cigarette down to the flame. A drag of air drew the fire towards her and, when the end glowed red, she snapped the lighter shut and put it back on top of the cellophane–wrapped pack on the table. “What happens after? Nothing. When it’s done, it’s done. That’s all. That’s it. And there’s really no point in thinking anything more about it. You're too old for this. Now stop your foolishness and go to bed.”

I did go back to bed - there was no place else to go - but my foolishness didn’t stop, not then, not ever, I just learned to hide it better. I learned that no one really knew what to say about death, that the ones who did were just making it up to anesthetize themselves or to make me shut up and go away. I learned that I was going to have to build my own structure to cope because Mom didn’t need any and she thought I was damaged if I did.

But I did need one. I was defective.  It's probably the seed of this entire project.

After waiting for too long in the funeral home office, my brother went to find someone but came back without results. Finally, a vague woman wandered in to the office. She seemed surprised to see us standing there, her eyes magnified by her large glasses. We said we had an appointment.

“Oh,” she said, then went away. When she came back, she said, “Ricky will be out as soon as he can.”

“Is there someplace more comfortable for my Mom to wait?”

“Oh, yes. Sorry. Right this way.” She walked up the short set of stairs and then disappeared into a room. When she realized we weren’t right behind her, my mother couldn’t move that fast, she came back out and stood at the top of the stairs and said, “You can wait in this room here. May I get you some water or something?”

I didn’t want anything but thought some caring action was better than nothing. “Yes, please. That would be nice.”

The room was an ochre cube. An oval conference table too large for the space was on the diagonal so people might be able to get to the plush chairs on wheels around it. There were only four chairs and soon to be six of us: my mother, my brothers, Kevin, the funeral director, and me. My older brother helped Mom sit down.

I said, “I don’t want to sit.”

No one else did either. 

The shelves along the wall advertised the funeral home’s services, casket upgrades, choices of headstones, keepsakes and special jewelry, urns for ashes, possible flower arrangements along with pamphlets offered by plastic holders, all in bright pinpoint spots.  “Helping Yourself Heal”, “When Your Parent Dies”, “Accepting a Loss”, how to deal with those who are only in the process of dying and another about how to help children understand what’s going on. Yeah? Some bullshit pamphlet was gonna do that? Help me understand what the fuck was going on? Help any one of us clueless panicked parents make sense for our children of what doesn’t make sense?

What was going on was Dad was dead, his unpreserved body in a cooler somewhere, rotting in this rotting place, and Mom wanted to get him out of the icebox to see him again, wanted us to go with her and what choice did we have but to wait in the ochre box that wrapped us in advertisements for what we should be buying if we really loved him, the “deceased”, my dad, the man who’d tickled me on the den floor until I couldn’t breathe, the man who’d held my hands so I could stand on his feet and walk as he walked, the man who’d made me Halloween costumes year after year until the Tin Man’s wrapping paper tube legs came without knee joints and I told him I wanted to be like everyone else with plastic princess masks from the five and dime, the man who'd made big garage clean-ups fun, the man who’d broken up the spin the bottle game at Doug’s because Doug was four years older, the man who’d taken us to the science museum and liked pushing the buttons as much as we did, the man who'd take me to the penny candy store to buy red hot dollars that weren’t hot, the man who’d bury us up to our necks in the cold wet sand and then walk with me on his shoulders into the waves, the man who'd bring boxes of donuts home with him when he had to see patients on the weekends.

You know, the deceased.

The vague woman was back with small warm bottles of purified water she put in a clump on the table. Behind her was Ricky, a squat middle-aged man wearing a yellow shirt and brown striped tie. He stood just outside the door jam until she left.

My brother who lived in Texas sat down next to Mom. He was in charge of this part.

Ricky sat down at the table with papers. He left to get more papers he’d forgotten. He explained. He spoke with a mouth with too much spit. He turned papers over. He pointed to lines to sign. He smoothed his shiny dark hair. He talked about faxing and state regulations and turn around time and office hours and how long “it” would take once all papers were signed and faxed and approved. He told us what day and time he thought we could return to pick up the cremains (i.e. Dad) and did Mom want a special box? Oh, and did she want to take his wedding ring now?

The air conditioner strained against the heat outside the small wooden building. My other brother leaned against one of the walls and looked over at me. I gripped my lips thin and saw him do the same, something I’d never noticed we had in common.

Mom nodded, her hands abandoned, palms up, on her lap.

Ricky stood and said, “Now, if you give me a moment to make sure the room is ready…” and backed out the door.

We listened to the building’s hum. The sound of a door. Some footsteps walking on carpeted sagging wood. A copier working.

“He never took off his ring,” Mom said. “Ever.”

She waited for an answer from someone.

I said, “I know, Mom.”

Too soon, Ricky was back. His hands in front of him as though that was more respectful. He stood back from the door and motioned for us to walk down the hall.

I had decided I wasn’t going in the room. I couldn't bear the thought of seeing my father like that. He hated viewings. He told us so. It was part of the reason he wanted to be cremated and as fast as possible. If he'd been there, he would have told me to forget about it, to not go in, to run, that he didn't want to be seen like that, that it meant nothing to him, that he was gone, done, dead, and what was left was "nothing but chemicals." He'd said that so many times at the dinner table. Nothing but chemicals. Complex chemicals breaking down into simpler ones. Order to disorder. Energy released. I knew he wanted to make sure no one ever saw the beginning of his personal breaking down from order to disorder. At eighty-six, a doctor with a bad heart he'd kept a secret, he'd made a choice to go suddenly instead of a visible slow decline in a hospital. He wanted his body gone the moment he died. And I thought my mother felt that way, too. 

There's a Buddhist practice - I think meant mostly for monks - of sitting in a crematorium until you truly accept how impermanent you are. And a story Swami Sarvadevananda told me about a Hindu abbot or head of a monastery who was throughly fed up with how distracted all of his monks were by a particularly beautiful woman so, when she got sick and died, he made his obsessed clerics sit and watch her body decompose so they understood how empty and meaningless their obsession had been. Gruesome to think about.

But here, in this country in 2013, we have almost no contact with death and as little as possible contact with the sick and dying, like it's an embarrassing and unseemly thing to do, best kept out of sight. Even here it wasn't always like this. But medicine has gotten so good at keeping us alive to an old age and then medicalizing our final decline, that most of us have precious little experience with death. My grandparents all died suddenly so my only experience of their deaths was a phone call. Two of them had no funeral and my parents kept us from the two funerals that did happen. The only funeral I attended as a child was that of a great-aunt I adored, my father's favorite aunt. Her body was on display with make-up she never wore looking like she never looked in life. It was horrific. My father thought so, too. 

I’d decided to walk Mom to the door and then wait for her outside. My younger brother helped her up and then she took my arm, looked up at me, and said:  “I want you to come in with me.”

My mother, who talked about open caskets like they were for ghouls and crazy people. My mother, who thought people who needed some belief structure to cope with death were weak. My mother, who hated maudlin emotional displays. My mother, who never went to funerals. This was the woman who said: "I want you to come in with me." 

“Uhm, okay, Mom.”

We walked around the corner and into a room only marginally less rundown than the rooms we’d been in before and there, at the far end, was my father’s body under a fake pieced quilt, the kind with the squares printed on them, the top edge folded back as though he was lying in a bed. But his face was gray, rigid. His cheeks, sunken. Aside from the blanket, the only other thing they’d done was to comb his baby-fine white hair. It had comb lines in it but it wasn’t the way he combed his hair. And it was straight down to the pillow and then it hung, shaggy, above the top edge of the pillow. There was no other attempt made to pretend he was anything other than dead. We hadn't paid for it.
        My brothers and husband were back by the door. Mom hadn’t given me that choice.

I felt embarrassed to look at him. He wouldn’t have wanted anyone to look at him like this, so helpless, so defenseless, so lost. So dead.

That wasn't my father lying there. But it was. But it wasn't. He, the him I knew, wasn't there. But what wasn't there? That was his body, his face, his hair, his neck with the scar he'd gotten in the Korean war when he'd stepped between two privates having a knife fight, but...
         I would have given anything for any shred of faith, for any story that I could believe, that would make it stop being this.  

When she got close to Dad, Mom let go of my arm to put her hands on his chest. She bent down to whisper, “You know how much I love you, don’t you? You knew, right?”

I felt like I was watching something I wasn’t supposed to see, a child walking into a tangle of bodies in the dark, something that shouldn’t have had any other eyes, any other witnesses, an act sacred because of its privacy. But I was standing there, listening, watching.

My mother said to my father’s body, “I’m really not ready for you to leave me. Not yet.” She kissed his cheek, softly patted his chest and said, “But I’ll see you soon.” Then she turned away and left me there.

I would have given anything to have a ritual other than this.

I looked at my Dad. I didn’t know what to do.

I touched his soft white hair. 

I don’t think he’d have minded that.
         

What to do?

So have you noticed I haven't been round these parts for a while? I'm not loving it, I must say. Turns out I haven't figured a way to help pay for two boys to go to college while working on The Heathen fulltime.

I never set out to write a blog. Several years ago, when I was confused by the believers at war with each other all over the globe, I set out to learn what each of the seven* major religious traditions teaches its newcomers, its potential converts. I was no longer willing to remain on the sidelines, ignorant.

I am still confused and I am still unwilling to just let it go. But I began this blog when it became apparent to me that this task was going to take at least three more years and it seemed a shame to go on that long alone, without sharing the ride, without company and feedback. I guess I also had some hope that, by going this public, I might figure out a way to support The Heathen and my sons' college educations....not so easy to do when allowing advertizing seems wrong and other potential support eludes me.

So I write this to say that I've taken a new job, one that will take most of the summer to sort out. I'll catch The Heathen up to where I actually am - "finished" Hinduism and Buddhism - but I am going to take the next couple of months to consider whether or not to continue with a public blog or to take it down and continue it in private until my effort is complete.




* as identified by Huston Smith in his seminal work The World's Religions.

Tenets or actions, which come first?

I've started reading Karen Armstrong's book The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions. Armstrong's writing about the remarkable period she calls the Axial Age (900 and 200 B.C.E) in which most of our major religious traditions began: Confucianism and Taoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Just a few quotes from the introduction:

"It is common to call religious people 'believers.' as though assenting to the articles of faith were their chief activity. But most of the Axial philosophers had no interest whatever in doctrine or metaphysics... All the traditions that were developed during the Axial Age...discovered a transcendent dimension in the core of their being, but..most of them refused to discuss it."

Armstrong says the essential spirit of the Axial Age was this:

"What mattered was not what you believed but how you behaved."

The Bowing Controversy - or To Bow or Not to Bow

I knew I had a hard time with the whole idea of bowing (see the end of the Path of Love) but I thought it was just my personality quirk. Then came all the hullaballoo over President Obama bowing to Saudi King Abdullah on April 2nd. You'd think President Obama had floated the idea of making the king a cabinet member.

I thought it was my little old outsized ego that kept my spine rigid, unwilling even to try out this bowing thing just to see if I could at least come to appreciate why it's so important in both Hinduism and Buddhism but here I find it isn't just my problem, it's cultural. We're all raised to think bowing down before someone implies weakness or, worse, fealty or subservience to another.

It seems to me that how we greet one another is less important than that we do. I know that when I'm concerned more about how someone else sees me, more about making clear my power and its importance to me, more about making sure my position seems dominant from the get-go, my relationships don't go very well. I've lived most of my life with that first in my mind and, boy, was that a waste.

All I can say is, the whole angry storm over the President's bow at least made me feel that I am a real American, not just a real egotist.

(In case you're interested, here are links to previous posts with some of my bowing challenges: Hemu's Morning Rituals, First Teacher, Path of Love, Doing It, The Destroyer of Time...there must be a few more but, you get the idea. Most of the bowing is at the end of the posts...)

Mumbai

Does this really have anything to do with faith? With religion? If someone robs a bank but says the devil made him do it, or Jesus, or God, a jury sees that for what it is and convicts him. We don't blame the faith the bank robber happened to choose to use as an excuse for his indefensible acts, right?

In the middle of the chaos, Mumbai still under seige, a woman interviewed on the radio pleaded for all people of faith not to use this crisis to pull apart from each other but to join together, to use it to rise above, to see what we share not what divides us. I hope her voice is heard and her prayers are answered.

Breaking loose...

It's over. In less than a day. I knew the short-term monastic retreat was coming to the end because one of my suitemates, the woman behind me in line, has started to tease me. How do you tease someone without saying a word? Believe me, she could do it. Mostly it involved poking me at times when my reaction, if seen, might embarrass me. Grown, married women, both of us. I loved it. I hated it. I was embarrassed by it. It was unbelievably funny.

What is it about rules, serious rules, that make breaking them so delicious? Especially after trying to hard for so many hours, so many days, to follow them. Or is that just me? Is this the part of me that keeps me shallow...or keeps me sane? Is humor the enemy of spirituality? Of religious practice? It kind of feels that way to me sometimes.

In the two sessions in which we let people know who we were, I found out my playful tormentor was a flight attendant who'd been raised in a Hindu family.

12 July 2007

My new name?

When you become a Buddhist monk or nun, you get a new name. Mine was "Ben Ri." For the rest of the Hsi Lai Eight Precept retreat, that was what I was called and how I had to sign my name. Our entire group was "Ben" something. When they gave me my new name tag, I decided that, when I got a chance to talk, I was going to ask Venerable Miao Hsi how to pronounce it and what, if anything, Ben Ri meant.

This idea of getting a new name... I guess that happens in a number of different religions. At least some Catholic nuns change their names when they become nuns but I think they get to choose their own. I'm not sure how I feel about this idea of a new name, of leaving the one I was born with behind.

Before I got married, I never felt all that strongly one way or the other about the whole name change thing, perhaps because I really only ever use my first name anyway. It's unusual enough, it usually doesn't require a last name to separate this Marley out from all the rest. So, I figured that, if I got married and if I liked my future husband's last name better than mine, I'd change it. If I didn't, I wouldn't. But, when Kevin and I decided to get married and it turned out that I actually did like his last name, I found I just couldn't do it. I'd been "me" too long. It felt weird to change my name, the implication seemed too great, like I was going to have to give up my very identity just because I'd decided I could spend the rest of my life with this guy and I didn't think that's what being married meant, giving up my separate identity. I thought it was more like deciding to go down the same path together.

Now, this may explain some of why we had a pretty rocky time of it our first decade together. But, just a few months ago, as a twentieth anniversary present, I told Kevin that I was finally -- and officially -- going to take his last name. He burst into tears. He'd been pretty cool about it when I'd decided not to back in 1987 so I was shocked it meant so much to him. I can't finish all the paperwork to make the name change official until the end of the summer but I put a ribbon around the initial social security forms and gave them to him as my present. Just in terms of reaction, it may be one of the best presents I've ever given.

I wonder what it'll feel like, how much it'll matter, that my name will be new, different. I mean, I even have to get used to a new signature when my pen seems to write the name I was born with almost automatically. I guess I'd better start practicing...

But I'm not writing about marriage...although, perhaps, the problem I had letting go of my old identity and the effect of that unwillingness is exactly why ordination comes with a new name. I guess I have a pretty strong notion of who "Marley" is and what it means to be me. I always assumed that that was a good thing, something to work for. And it's important to me, this name: it was my mother's mother's last name. There have been consequences of the choice of this name for me, a story that went with it, a story that I love, that has become mine because my name is Marley. So, when I consider the possibility that I could, if I wanted to, live the rest of my life without that name, I find it completely confusing. There is part of me that's sitting here demanding to know who I might be, then, without that name? Would I be "me?" Should I care that much about something that's the definition of superficial? I mean, my name isn't me, is it?

My Hindu teacher, Swami Sarvadevananda (who also got a new name when he became a swami) refused to talk about his previous name, the name he was given at birth. He'd left that person behind along with his old life, his old concept of himself. Do I want to leave mine behind? Is it even possible?

How much does my name have to do with who I am anyway? Who I really am?

During the time we were supposed to be taking our showers, I went looking for Venerable Miao Hsi. She was answering email at her desk. "Can you tell me how to say my name?"

I cannot even pretend to replicate here how Ven Miao Hsi said to pronounce Ben Ri: it's pronounced nothing like it looks. The "Ben" part is pretty straight forward but"Ri" involves some teeth, mouth, and throat action we don't use in English that I could never quite master.

And how did she choose mine? "We just give out the names at random. From a list. 'Ri' means 'now,' so Ben Ri means: 'beginning' or 'starting now.' "

Beginning Now. Pretty perfect, eh?

10 July 2007

I knew...

...it was time to move on. I thought I was writing two different, unrelated posts. I was wrong.


Post 1

The clearest vision of Brahman is possible only in this life.
As one sees one’s reflection clearly in a clean mirror, so one sees Brahman in the buddhi…the intellect purified by self-control and contemplation. After death…the vision of Atman is indistinct…since one is engrossed there in the enjoyment of the fruits of past karma.

Katha Upanishad II, iii., 5

Reading this was a revelation. Here’s why.

Swami Sarvadevananda sat in class, his legs crossed under the low wooden table he used for the more formal evening classes, slowly moving through one of Swami Vivekananda’s books on the purpose of devotional worship. Every week, the same people sat scattered throughout the chapel, one, maybe two to a pew. When the subject of heaven and hell came up, Swami Sarvadevananda said, laughing, “We’re very organized, we Hindus. There are many, many levels to heaven, many levels to hell!”

While I can tell you I have experienced moments of heaven and hell in my life right here and now, I can’t get my head wrapped around the notion of a single, literal, afterlife heaven or its opposite, let alone an entire hierarchy of heavens and hells. But Hinduism’s concept of heaven and hell seems different from the Christian idea of heaven and hell. While Hinduism does believe in an afterlife and in a fairly complex and stratified heaven and hell, these are all only waystations, intermediate steps on a multi-life journey, not a final destination.

The swami cheerfully described a heaven where those who wanted to be rich, for example, could go to heaven after death and, assuming they’d done good during their lifetime, enjoy their wealth. They could even return in their next life as a wealthy person.The catch is: desires like these, for wealth, for human love, for good health, even for a long life, keep us subject to the law of karma, meaning, we keep coming back over and over again until we fully enjoy and no longer want these things.

I’ve had glimpses of that truth. I’ve worked past reason, I’ve knocked people over, trying to get to some goal, some new rung on the imaginary ladder I chose to climb, only to get it and realize it wasn’t The Answer I thought it would be, that it didn’t and could never make “everything all right.” Buying stuff, owning stuff has never mattered as much as it did when I was, say thirteen. Getting rid of stuff feels pretty good but that feeling doesn’t last either. Financial concerns come and go but, if I’m honest, I can get pretty disconnected from my own life when I’m comfortable and, while I don’t want financial anxiety especially when my parents are aging and my kids are about to go off to college soon, my life has often actually improved during the stress of those times.

There’s some glimmer of “it” inside the decision to worry less about what other people think of me and also in the very real love I have in my life – two sons who have remained people I admire and a marriage to someone who knows everything about me and yet still loves and likes me. Our marriage has weathered inconceivable storms.

I am a very, very spoiled person with unfathomable good fortune so Hinduism’s description of the limits of heaven actually makes some sense to me. But the Hindu notion of heaven is even more radical than that. Swami Nikhilananda, in his commentary (CHECK) on the Katha Upanishad, says that “The clearest vision of Brahman (of the Infinite) is possible only in this life.”

This life? This flesh-and-blood life? This is the only time we can have the “clearest possible vision” of the Infinite? The passage goes on… “As one sees one’s reflection clearly in a clean mirror, so one sees Brahman in the buddhi…the intellect purified by self-control and contemplation. After death…the vision of Atman is indistinct…since one is engrossed there in the enjoyment of the fruits of past karma.”

See, according to this passage, the entire point of being alive is to finally come to realize the truth: that there’s nothing but (insert your name for God here), nothing but the Absolute. And, you need to be alive to truly see this, in other words, not asleep, not dead, not even in heaven. In fact, in heaven you’d be too busy enjoying your stuff to see much of anything else. “The clearest vision of Brahman is possible only in this life.” However, “this life” can only function as a clear vantage point if our “buddhi,” our higher mind, is free of the clutter and confusion of what we tend to think is important in our day-to-day existence.

If you think about it, this pretty deftly deals with the question everyone asks any spiritual leader they can get their hands on: why does bad stuff happen? Why is there evil? If you believe that our job here, in this body, in this lifetime, is to “clean our mirror”, to purify and cleanse our vision so we might see “Brahman” reflected in us, then any challenge we face could be seen as a squeegee for that mirror, right?

- - -

So here's the other entry I wrote that day...

Post 2

One of the enormous and, as yet, unanswered questions I’ve had in this project is: how will I know when it’s okay to move on to the next tradition? It’s absurd to think that I will ever be “done” with Hinduism so, what yardstick, what sign, am I looking for? Maybe this is part of the answer…

There’s a library where I went to college whose main floor is actually the third floor of the building. There are two floors above and two floors below the entrance level. It was utterly confusing at first. I didn’t know how to find what I needed in it, where the card catalogue was, or whether to go up or down if something was on the “second” floor. But, by the end of the first few weeks, I knew. I didn’t know where everything was and I certainly hadn’t read more than a handful of books inside it, but I knew, generally, what subjects were housed there and how to find what I needed, and that I walked downstairs if I needed to get to the first or second floor. I could then focus on digging into the material instead of dealing with the logistics of finding it.

I’m starting to know where the card catalogue is in Hinduism. I don’t have a mantra but that’s probably as it should be. I do know how to get one. And I know why I should want one.

- - -

When I finished typing up these two entries, it was time to go home. I turned my computer off, cleaned my tea cup, tossed a pitcher of water into the ficus, took out the trash, and locked my office door. But, in the middle of the night I found myself waking up, laughing. (My poor husband.) The tradition I plan to concentrate on next?

Buddhi-sm.

I got this much clarity: I’m not moving on, I’m adding. It’s time.

Later that morning, while taking off a windbreaker with elastic bands at the wrists, Hemu’s magenta puja string broke and fell off.

I tied what was left of it to my keychain.

12 March 2007

86 hours of silence

Can a man get pearls by floating or swimming on the surface? He must dive deep.

Sri Ramakrishna, The Gospel of Ramakrishna

Silence and withdrawing for a period of time are an important part of Hinduism but I am one of the loudest, least solitary people I know. Don't get me wrong: I actually like being alone, at least, I think I do, but most of my working life I've spent in television news and, aside from a couple of years in my twenties, I've never lived completely alone. And the house I grew up in was loud: had three querulous brothers and we lived in a neighborhood filled with guys who never seemed to stop yelling, laughing or teasing. Now I live in a house with two boys and a husband, none of whom could be described as quiet. But I have liked being alone. The very first few words I put together on this project came when a girlfriend backed out of a cross-country skiing trip we were supposed to take together and, instead of canceling, I went alone. So, I figured it was time to see what a few days in the Vedanta Society's retreat house might be like.

With a letter from Swami Sarvadevananda, I got permission to go to the retreat center in Olema at the very end of January for four nights. It seemed like a good time to go, given that Luke’s and Matt’s finals were over and Kevin had just finished a project making that week a light one for him. Four nights meant I was going to have to keep my mouth shut from Tuesday dinner through Saturday at dawn. But it wasn’t just no talking: the rules of the center said no cell phone or computers either.

The retreat center confirmation also said to bring towels, linen, and all of my own food, that the kitchen was well-stocked with utensils and plates but “retreatants” were on our own for just about everything, including cleaning. So, on Tuesday morning, I dropped Luke and Matt off at school and drove six hours north through farmland and alongside the state’s endless aqueducts to Olema.

To get to the Vedanta women’s retreat center, you have turn onto a dirt road just outside the intersection that is Olema and follow it past the farmhouse that serves as the men’s retreat center, then through uncertainly fenced fields with muscular black cattle chewing in them. At the very end of the rutted road was a fairly new building built expressly for its purpose.

The kitchen was, indeed, well-stocked and cleaner than almost any kitchen I had ever seen. The open dining and living room had polished wooden tables, couches and armchairs and opened onto a wooden deck with a view of pastures bordered by trees. There were eight bedrooms off two short corridors, each opening directly to outside and a carpeted meditation room, Just off the kitchen, there was a small room for the caretaker – it was Noelle while I was there - who gave me keys to front door and as well as a “silence bead” to let the other women know that, even in the few hours we were allowed to talk (around dinner time), that I would be silent.

Not talking for eight-six hours is a lot easier if you’re in a beautiful place without cell phone service or internet or anyone you know. I brought nothing in with me except the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna,

the puja kit Hemu had encouraged me to buy, the small handbook Swami Sarvadevananda had suggested – Worship of Sri Ramakrisha - and a journal, although I was determined not even to write in that. And I kept my meals simple: nuts, yogurt, some spinach salad, fruit, nothing that required major preparation.

Not talking wasn’t so bad; not doing was my problem. Watching the day flow by from a bench on a hill instead of being immersed in it was hard. I do so I don’t feel. I do to convince myself there is a point. I do to distract from the fact that doing isn’t the point but I have no idea what is. Days directed by sunlight, wrist stripped of its handcuff of time, were long, deliciously long when you stopped fighting them. When the to-do lists and the doubts came, I simply watched the storm clouds gather, the mental winds whip around and then pass. Thoreau and his sunlight kept coming to mind as I sat overlooking the valley, measuring time by the shadow’s spread from one tree trunk to another, by the layers of clothing needed to stay warm, by the herd of exotic deer’s slow climb from the valley into the hills just after dawn. The deer’s ancestors were left behind more than fifty years ago by men who planned to hunt them but now they overrun the place.

Comic relief: the first two mornings my wake up call was a gang of wild turkeys gobbling and complaining just outside my window as they scuttled across the grass at first light.

I tried to use the puja kit but its complexity, even with plenty of free time, even with the help of the step-by-step instructions in the Worship of Sri Ramakrishna, stumped me again although there was one revelation: in the directions for the daily ritual, devotees are directed to dip their fingers into purified water and then to draw a triangle inside a circle and then a square around both on the ground.

Sound familiar? It did to me. At home, I googled: “Alcoholics Anonymous symbol” and saw, on an AA-related website, the very same image (minus a square around the outside) and the following statement quoted from AA literature: “That we have chosen this particular symbol is perhaps no accident. The priests and seers of antiquity regarded the circle enclosing the triangle as a means of warding off spirits of evil, and A.A.'s circle and triangle of Recovery, Unity, and Service has certainly meant all of that to us and much more." I had forgotten, until seeing this image, Swami Sarvadevananda’s telling me that the founder of AA, Bill Wilson, had been a devotee of this particular form of Hinduism, at least for a while.

But most of the time, when I wasn’t wandering the grounds or trying to meditate, either inside the meditation room or outside on the bench on the hill, I read the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna.

He sure was tough company. The Gospel is really more of a biography or journal written by one of Ramakrishna’s devotees under a single initial: “M.” What’s interesting about it is the degree to which “M” simply took notes rather than making a concerted effort to mythologize the man he came to believe was an actual incarnation of the Divine. It has a warts-and-all feel, a very human picture which, for me, made it all the more difficult to consider the idea that this man could be a “capital I” Incarnation. I mean, this was a man who shamelessly guilted some of his married followers into living away from their wives and children for months at a time; who was unschooled, perhaps close to illiterate, and who spent the first years of his adult life weeping at the feet of Kali, sometimes without clothes on, demanding that God actually appear before him, live and in person.

Who can measure up to that standard? Do I want to literally see God, if such a thing were possible? Sure, I’m driven to do whatever it is I am doing – I sometimes feel like a carcass and an intellect being dragged along by this drive of mine – but to weep for it? To stand naked in a temple and demand a Visit? To threaten to kill myself if God didn’t seem interested in complying? It isn’t just that my passion isn’t strong enough to follow Ramakrishna’s example, to disregard all inbred societal norms. If I’m very honest, I’m not so sure I would choose to see God even if I believed such a thing were possible.

In the Bhagavad Gita, the terrifying passage where God finally revealed just part of Itself to Arjuna, made me not so certain any of us really would choose to see the Divine if we could. That awe-filled description takes my breath away. I was clear on this point: at that moment I felt wholly incapable of even imagining myself ever having the courage required to have that kind of desire, that absolute and laser-beam faith. Alone, for days of silence with Ramakrishna, the mountain of faith felt too sheer, too high to climb, without better spiritual equipment than I had.

Perhaps it’s enough, in any given moment, to act on faith “indifferent to results, content with whatever happens.” Or take the actions of a faithful person just to find out something I might not learn otherwise.

When reading Ramakrishna got too much, I wandered around the woods, following overgrown paths wherever they led. At one point, so many branches had fallen, the path was impossible to follow. Clearing the ones I could move, I wondered if it was possible my purpose might be just that, to clear those branches on that particular day so that some modern day Ramakrishna might be able to find his or her way to their bodhi tree, to their epiphanous spot, and it was just my job to move those branches without ever knowing the effect. Could that be enough? Would it matter if it wasn’t?

By the time Saturday morning came, I was packed up in my ice-coated car, waiting for the caretaker down at the men’s retreat center to open the gate at seven in the morning, the moon still high in the early morning sky. I was going to meet Huston Smith. When I got to an area where my cell phone had reception, I was relieved to find no message canceling our visit.

How will I know?

…when it’s time to move on to Buddhism, to Confucianism, to Daoism, to Christianity, to Judaism, to Islam?

Humility, patience, sincerity,
nonviolence, uprightness, purity,
devotion to one’s spiritual teacher,
constancy, self-control,

dispassion toward objects of the senses,
freedom from the I-sense, insight
into the evils of birth,
sickness, old age, and death,

detachment, absence of clinging
to son, wife, family, and home,
an unshakable equanimity
in good fortune or in bad,

an unwavering devotion to me
above all things, an intense
love of solitude, distaste
for involvement in worldly affairs,

persistence in knowing the Self
and awareness of the goal of knowing—
all this is called true knowledge;
what differs from it is called ignorance.

Bhagavad Gita, 13.7-11

I was in Swami Sarvadevanada’s tiny office, trying to understand more about the specific elements of the Kali puja when I tried to ask him some personal questions again. Old habits die hard.

“What was your name…before?” I asked.

The swami was behind his desk.

“Why do you want to know that?”

“I don’t know. But I do.”

Cool fall air was coming in the window behind him. There was a long pause before he answered. “We want to forget our past identity. This is a monastic identity. I am a monk. I am for the whole world. My name is Sarvadevananda; I am a priest ‘of the consciousness of all gods.’ That means universal. I don’t give any attachment to my family.”

“None at all?”

“No. Wherever I am, that is my family, eh? So, to get over our personal identities of little things of life, we left that (his original name) back and I don’t want to go back to that identity and remember ‘Oh I belong to this. I was born here and this and that.’”

“And if you miss--”

“What shall you miss? If you get something higher, you don’t miss.”

I tried to imagine doing this to my family: I just couldn’t. But then, I didn’t grow up in India or in a household where religion comes before everything so I can’t possibly get an accurate sense of the meaning or the impact of Swami Sarvadevenanda’s decision on his family. I do know that Swamiji’s so firm about the insignificance of names that it’s been the source of one of our only intractable disagreements.

I’ve had Swami Sarvadevenanda (along with several other people) fact-check everything I’ve written and will write about Hinduism and he’s asked for only one change I’ve refused to make: Swamiji wanted me to remove every mention of his name, Sarvadevananda, except for the very first time I introduce him, and simply refer to him as “the swami.” The reason: the message is what’s important, the message of Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda, not the person delivering the message.

I said I understood his point but I thought it’d seem awkward and a bit odd if he became this anonymous shadow rather than the flesh and blood person that he is. And it’s that flesh and blood person who is my teacher. Okay, so it’s really (according to Vedanta) the teachings of Ramakrishna, of Swami Vivekananda, of Brahman coming through this teacher sitting in front of me in his orange robes and big glasses but, still, he is the teacher before me and it’s his way of communicating these ideas that brought me to the Vedanta Society in the first place.

I decided to move from the personal family history to safer ground.“What does – Sarvadevananada mean?”

“First word ‘Sarva’ means ‘all’. ‘Deva’ means god, gods. And ‘ananda’ means joy, bliss. So you have: ‘the bliss of all the gods’. That means you are reminded you are not a man, not a woman, you are (imperishable consciousness) and you are awakening to that consciousness.”

I looked down at my hands. Ink from my pen was on my fingers. “I’m so grateful to you for what you’ve been giving…”

Swamiji interrupted me with a wave of his hand. “Spiritual life is like that, to share, eh? If you eat good food, you want to share with others.” He laughed.

I said, “All the different temples I went to and ...I end up here, a temple where Ramakrishna has done, obviously in a much deeper way, what I’m trying to do.” (Ramakrishna spent some time practicing both Christianity and Islam.)

“I think that is the way God is taking you in different experiences and brought to the right place. That’s all.”

In some of the classes, the swami had discussed other religions so I said, “Buddhism has come up a little bit and you’ve talked about the point of religion is to see God, to have that real sense of a Presence. Doesn’t – again, I don’t know that much about Buddhism yet but doesn’t Buddhism say there is no god?”

“Yes. But the question is the definition of God. What do you mean by God?” He paused for effect. “Buddhism says: don’t talk about it. Buddha took the Vedantic idea – he (Buddha) was born Vedantic – he said: ‘Look at the world. What is permanent? By the time you sit for some moment, the thing changes. Every fraction of a second everything is changing. So, if everything is changing, it gives the illusion of reality.’ For example if you take a fan blade: when it moves very fast you don’t see the blade. Does it mean that there is no blade?”

“No.”

“Vedanta says negate, negate, to come to one Absolute Reality.” The swami was talking about the Hindu idea of going through everything your senses can perceive to realize, one-by-one, that these were not the Divine. “Buddha didn’t say that. He said only: ‘Be a lamp unto you.’ What Buddha said – he didn’t want to get caught into that trap of God, God, God, what is this, that? He wanted to emphasize: go back to the source of the light - consciousness. Eh? So, his language was different (but) go to the realization— When he got the realization, look at his face. He was beaming in joy. Where the joy comes from if there is no joy inside? So what’s the difference between (the Hindu definition of God and the Consciousness of Buddhism)? The effect we see the same. So the words are just labels.”

I then brought up a subject that had been on my mind since I started this whole project. “So how will I know when it’s time to go on to another (faith?) If I’m going to do this work, at some point I have to say, ‘Okay, it’s time to turn my attention to the next tradition.’ What is your suggestion about how I will know?”

“This is your project. Writing about this is one thing, that’s a project. But your spiritual sadhana, you should have to go deep with one thought, one idea, one practice. Otherwise, it is like digging the ground to get water: you dig ten feet here, you dig ten feet there and you never get any water. You have to be persistent in going down and down. Your spiritual life should be dedicated to one idea, one principle.”

“But can’t this (project) be of service?” I asked.

“This can be a great service,” the swami said, “to bring this concept is a great thing because harmony is the need of this age. So, you should have to study the others and put their views forward with as much emotion and connection in that particular practice as you can. Here is a person, Ramakrishna, he individually practiced all these religions and came to the same conclusion: that all roads lead to the same conclusion.”

“What is your suggestion about how will I know when it’s time?”

“You’ll have to figure it out.”

I laughed. “I knew you were gonna say that. I was just kind of hoping there’d be something more, I don’t know, you know….”

“You pray inside and say: ‘Oh Lord guide me from my heart’ and your mind will say. Or some opportunity will come or, as you say, you didn’t know about us or anything and you happened to be in Kumbha Mela. So, I am saying something like that may come up and God will show you the path.”




Sri Ramakrishna & Swami Vivekananda























The Hollywood Vedanta Society main office and chapel

Fake

Children – they force you to deal, don’t they?

Do any action you must do,
since action is better than inaction;
even the existence of your body
depends on necessary actions.

The whole world becomes a slave
to its own activity, Arjuna;
if you want to be truly free,
perform all actions as worship.

Bhagavad Gita 3.8-3.9

Luke, Matt, and I sat at the breakfast table eating. I told them all about the Kali puja and the overwhelming display of food at the Swaminarayan New Year’s celebration.

“Well, Mom,” Matt offered, “I’m sure when you get through with your spiritual quest you’ll know what religion to choose.”

From the other side of the table, Luke attacked: “She’s not on a spiritual quest. She’s on a fake spiritual quest. Maybe once she’s done, then she’ll start to figure it out.” Luke turned to me for verification, “Right, Mom?”

I said nothing at all back.

And the vacuum was filled with fraternal verbal swordplay over whether what I’m doing is real or fake and what real or fake means anyway and whether the other could possibly understand anything at all in the first place and getting words in “edgewise” and who was interrupting whom.

I was taken aback by Luke’s words. It was almost like he was asking me to reassure him I wasn’t actually on a personal spiritual search but just engaged in a safe exercise in journalism - the look on his face, his full blue-eyed question, the morning light on the tiled floor, on the corner of the yellow table cloth, the complete momentary pause in the conversation.

Why can’t I answer? Is what I’m doing fake? And what could fake possibly mean when I’ve dropped everything in my life to do this and only this?

I have to admit I’m on some kind of personal search. If “fake” means I don’t know whether I’ll get anywhere, if “fake” means I might not get to any definitive place, any definitive faith by the end of this, if “fake” means I might find out I don’t have the ability to be what people call “spiritual” within me, then I guess I must accept that label as possible. What I’m doing is nothing more than what every single human being, aware of their own mortality, must go through in one form or another.

But I want something more from this than digging up my own personal belief system. I want to understand what’s happening in a world beset by violence that claims religious doctrine as its source and that obsession of mine is very real. And, whether global or just personal, I do have faith that my effort will be worth something in the end even if I can’t know right now in what way precisely. That faith isn’t fake. That faith I have. That faith is real.

Seeing God...

This passage of the Bhagavad Gita freaked me out when I read it. Don't judge, just read and imagine what it describes...

Arjuna said:
Tell me now, in detail,
the divine manifestations
by which you pervade these worlds
and grace them with so much splendor.

How can I know you, Krishna?
Which of your many forms
should I visualize, Lord of Yoga,
as I focus my thoughts on you?

Give me some further examples
of your glorious manifestations;
for I never can tire of hearing
your life-giving, honey-sweet words.

The Blessed Lord said:
All right, Arjuna, I will tell you
a few of my manifestations,
the most glorious ones; for infinite
are the forms in which I appear.

I am the Self, Arjuna,
seated in the heart of all beings;
I am the beginning and the life span
of beings, and their end as well.

Of the sky gods, I am Vishnu;
of the heavenly lights, the sun;
Marichi, chief of the wind gods;
among stars, I am the moon;

of the Vedas, I am the hymns;
Indra among the gods;
the mind among the six senses;
the consciousness of all beings;

of the storm gods, I am Shiva;
of demigods, Kubera;
Agni among the bright gods;
and Meru, highest of mountains.

Know, Arjuna, that among
priests I am Brihaspati;
of generals, the war god Skanda;
of waters, I am the ocean;

of the great seers, I am Bhrigu;
of words, the syllable Om;
of worship, I am the mantra;
of mountain chains, Himalaya;

of trees, the sacred fig tree;
of divine sages, Narada;
of the high celestial musicians,
Chitraratha; of saints,

the wise Kapila; of horses,
Ucchaishravas, Indra’s
favorite, born of the sea foam;
of elephants, Indra’s winged

Airavata; of men,
I am the king; of weapons,
Indra’s thunderbolt; of cows,
Kamadhuk, the wish-granter;

Kandarpa, the god of love;
the king of reptiles, Vasuki;
of divine serpents, I am
Ananta, the cosmic serpent; Varuna

among the gods of the ocean;
of the blessed forefathers, I am
Aryaman; of the controllers,
Yama, the god of death;

of demons, the devout Prahlada;
of things that compel, I am time;
the king of animals, the lion;
Garuda among the birds;

of purifiers, the wind;
of warriors, I am Rama;
of sea monsters, Makara;
of rivers, the holy Ganges;

of creations, the beginning and the end
and the middle as well, Arjuna;
of knowledge, knowledge of the Self;
of orators, I am the speech;

of letters, the first one, A:
I am imperishable time;
the Creator whose face is
everywhere; death that devours all things;

the source of all things to come;
of feminine powers, I am
fame, wealth, speech, and
memory, intelligence, loyalty, forgiveness;

of chants, I am the great Brihat;
of poetic meters, the gayatri;
of months, Margashirsha,
the first month; of seasons, the flower-lush spring;

of swindles, I am the dice game;
the splendor of the high and mighty;
determination and victory;
the courage of all brave men;

of the Vrishi clan, I am Krishna;
of Pandavas, I am Arjuna;
of the sages, I am Vyasa;
of poets, the sublime Ushanas;

of punishers, I am the scepter;
the astuteness of the great leaders;
the silence of secret things;
and I am the wisdom of the wise.

I am the divine seed
within all beings, Arjuna;
nothing, inanimate or animate,
could exist for a moment without me.

These are just a small number
of my infinite manifestations;
were I to tell you more,
there would be no end to the telling.

Whatever in this world is excellent
and glows with intelligence or beauty –
be sure that it has its source
in a fragment of my divine splendor.

But what need is there for all
these details? Just know that I am,
and that I support the whole
universe with a single fragment of myself.

Bhagavad Gita, 10.17-10.40

It's October, Happy New Year!

Now, this was something to see. I had no idea what Annakut was and, frankly, I didn’t bother to look it up because, if Hemu invited me, that was enough for me so I didn’t bring my camera. But I did find a few pictures on line... just wait.

By worship you will nourish the
gods and the gods will nourish you in turn;
by nourishing one another
you assure the well-being of all.

Bhagavad Gita 3.10

When I got to the Whittier BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir (temple) in Whittier, Hemu was easy to find. Although crowds of people were talking in small happy groups or wandering in out of the hot late fall sun, I had now her cell phone number and she had mine. I was by her side in a moment and, when I bent down to touch her feet – or at least show some effort to get down there while we were standing on the black macadam- she grabbed me and laughed, “No, wrong person. I should be the one doing that to you!”

That wasn’t true, of course -- the student always bows to the person with the knowledge -- but we settled for a quick hug. Hemu is one of the only people who makes me feel tall. Her neat, shiny hair was parted in the middle and she was wearing yet another elegant sari in honor of the festive occasion. She said, “You know, I really feel like I’ve always known you.”

I knew exactly what she meant. “Me, too, Hemu.”

“Come. Let me show you something.”

I’d finally learned that you never come to a temple empty-handed so I’d brought flowers which, Hemu gently pointed out, was a perfectly fine offering on most days and was even perfectly fine that day as well but, on Annakut, the first day of the new year, what people were supposed to bring was food. As we walked in to the mandir, I found out why.

There are not enough excessive words to describe what was in that room. The entire length of the altar was blocked by a wooden, stepped platform covered with hundreds of individual plates of food, perfectly presented, as if ready for a commercial photo shoot. A second showcase for still more plates was actually a fountain with four separate sprays of water, each lit a different color by underwater lights. The variety of the food was astounding.

I asked Hemu, “What's this all this about?”

“This is the first day of the new year,” Hemu said, “and we are offering all this food to God so he will give it back to us all year. The target was like nine-hundred to twelve hundred items.”

“How many did you bring?”

“I brought like seven or eight.”

“I’ve never seen so much food put out like this.”

“It’s our way of saying thank you to Lord Ganesh for everything he will provide this year. There are about seven hundred items here today.”

And it turns out, seven hundred plates of food requires two rooms, two enormous stepped platforms to display because there was even more food, on an even larger stepped platform, in the main prayer hall where people were sitting, watching a video transmission of the sadhus officiating the service in the other hall – there were just too many people there to use just one.

I loved being there with Hemu, loved that she'd thought to invite me but I struggle in the midst of big pageants like these. It's hard for me to respond in anyway other than as an observer, a parade-watcher, a gawker. I'm certain I'd have a much different feeling about all of this had I stayed up, night after night, probably with family members, making one special dish after another to contribute to the offering. It'd be a family ritual, then, like decorating our Christmas tree or our nearly annual attempt to make a gingerbread house. (It's a good thing ours aren't ever meant to be on display.) But I think Annakut offers more than just annual ritual, if you're open to it.

So much of Hinduism involves treating whatever your idea of God is kind of like a revered corporal figure. Most of these rituals involve the symbolic feeding, bathing and clothing of whatever form of God you worship so there's an opportunity to develop an intimate, on-going relationship - not so easy when I find myself truly incapable of imagining any form that might even serve as a stand-in for the Divine. Not only that, I think I have a hard time with the display portion of organized religion. It might just be that I haven't had enough experience with it to feel comfortable but there may be more to it than that: the moments I've had in my life where I've felt something I might identify as the first rumblings of the sacred have always occurred in quiet, in solitude or something close to it, only on occasion in the midst of an event and usually those events involved a story that made me see things a different way - events like plays or movies, even songs.

I do know I was so much more comfortable being there with my current frame of mind than the one I've lugged around with me all of my life. I sat next to Hemu while she translated the service in in my notebook just trying to understand and to appreciate, to find what I could in it that might have meaning for me while accepting that whatever might not resonate still was beautiful and possibly moving to others. Boy, that hasn't been my natural state until recently. If I'd ended up some place like this decades ago I would have tried to soothe my feelings of dislocation and fear by cataloguing all that was "weird" instead of just taking the time to understand more. What a sad way I've lived some of my life.

As the service continued, I began to wonder if any of the sadhus I was seeing on the big screens (although they were just one hall away)was the one who’d read and written his reactions to my project. I pointed to one and asked Hemu, “Is that the one who answered my email?” Why I needed to see the face of the monk originally shocked by project, shocked by me, I didn't know but I did. I guess I wanted to see the face of someone my upbringing could shock.

Hemu answered, “No. That isn’t him.”

“Is the one who answered here?”

“Yes, I’ll show him to you.” We watched the screen showing the ritual in the other room for a while when all of a sudden Hemu said, “That’s him. He was the one just singing. He was born here.”

Just before the camera panned away, I caught a glimpse of a tall, thin man with a close-cropped beard, probably in his mid-thirties, possibly forty, but I doubted it. He didn’t seem all that shockable but, as alien as Hinduism was for me, my upbringing outside of any faith and practice must have been alien – and even shocking – to him.

I sat on the floor next to Hemu who, without discussion, had taken my notebook and was busily translating whatever was said. Around her right wrist were at least five of the magenta puja strings like the one she'd tied on mine at my very first "puja" or worship service, the string she’d told me was supposed to symbolize our devotion to God. Hers were all different shades: some new and bright, one pale and about to break. My single strand had frayed and faded a bit but was still, more than a month later, strong on my wrist. Hard to believe but, in all this time, no one had asked me about it or even seemed to notice it; it was just a piece of cotton kitchen string tied to my wrist and slowly losing its once uneven shade of magenta. I’d been wondering what I was supposed to do about it. Was I supposed to cut it off or what? But it felt strange to just call Hemu up to ask.

Now I had my answer: it's supposed to stay on until it falls off.

Well, okay.

22 October 2006

More Annakut pictures from various BAPS Swaminarayan mandirs around the country....

Cleveland & Houston....














Boston and New Jersey...