What I didn't know - part 1

What I didn't know before I began this project:

-- Practicing a faith is as much about choosing a community as it is figuring out what you believe.

-- People raised in a faith rarely know why they do what they do. They just do it.

-- People who religiously practice a faith seem to find a comfortable way to navigate the schism between the way their faith tells them to interact with others and the way life actually unfolds, the way people should behave and the way they actually do.

-- It is very easy to use one's faith, the rites and rituals you are "supposed" to do, to feel bad a lot of the time for not "measuring up" to some ideal. My gut is that this is the source of a lot of the judgement of others' insufficiencies.

-- I have a lot of experience creating strife in my own life simply by thinking I know what the "right" answer is, or the "right" course of action. Get a group together, especially one trying to solve a problem, and my favorite defect appears in almost everyone.

I know that this sounds silly but, not having been raised in a faith, I just assumed that it would be different "there," in communities of the devout. It isn't....at least so far, partway along in this project's arc, whether it's people of a single faith who are trying to work together or interfaith organizations who want nothing more than to help and to understand each other. Is it any wonder people of faith are at odds with each other on a global level when in meetings everywhere, every day, we all suffer through all the ways in which we fail to work together in an open-hearted manner?

Or perhaps I'm completely misunderstanding what "getting along" looks like, what it feels like. I want no one to argue anywhere, ever. How idiotic is that? Perhaps the flip side -- of not expressing an opinion if it differs with someone to avoid an unpleasant conversation -- is just as destructive as imposing my "right" answer on everyone. I'm still very confused about all of this, but I cannot stifle my urge to run when discussions turn to community minutiae. I've gotten enough of that in the jobs I've had. My interest in what faith is and how it works in different religions was, I thought, completely unrelated to that. I'm beginning to think this is yet another misunderstanding I had before I began.

Truth and simplicity...

Whoever, clear-minded, knows me
as the Ultimate Person, knows
all that is truly worth knowing,
and loves me with all his heart.

Thus, Arjuna, I have taught you
this most secret doctrine; whoever
learns it, is wise, and has done
all that there is to do.

Bhagavad Gita 15.12-20

I read this passage of the Bhagavad Gita in the morning and it made me cry. Why, I don’t know, but it did. Maybe because it just seems so simple while I seem to make everything just as complicated as it can be. I’m still the sixth grader who could turn any routine school project into a multi-level medieval castle with a moat and working drawbridge. Out of toothpicks.

The Svetavatara Upanishad says “Beyond It, truly, there is nothing else to be known.” If something in that simple statement resonates so profoundly with me, why can I just stop right here? But I can’t.

With religious wars and wars of culture and belief conducted by people who say their beliefs leave them no choice, my personal beliefs just don’t begin to answer the questions I have. This isn’t just about what I believe but about what others believe, what others say leads them to do what they do. So long as I have no actual or gut knowledge I’m going to have to take at face value what the actors or the critics of the actors say. I am no longer willing to do that.

But I do wish I was someone else sometimes.

(12 October 2006)

Eat and run...

The relation between Hinduism and what is called Buddhism at the present day is nearly the same as between Judaism and Christianity. Jesus Christ was a Jew, and Shakya Muni (Buddha) was a Hindu. Hinduism cannot live without Buddhism, nor Buddhism without Hinduism.

Swami Vivekananda
Address to the Chicago Parliament of World Religions, 1893

Classes at night, services on Sundays – my temple obsession is cutting in to our family time. So, when Kevin said he wanted to go to the Thai Buddhist temple’s food market on Sunday to eat lunch, I agreed to take a day off from Hinduism, figuring Kevin, Matt and I could hang out together (Luke was out, as always, with friends) and I might be able to check out the monks, too. Buddhism’s next – that is, if I ever figure out when the time is right to move on from Hinduism. Pretty hard to imagine how I will ever be able to move on given how little I know now in spite of all my efforts.

The Wat Thai Buddhist temple is in North Hollywood. Now, North Hollywood might sound glamorous to some but its reality is anything but. It’s a haphazard section of San Fernando Valley full of straight anonymous streets with low, practical buildings so the temple, with its red roof edged in gold stands out. Its Sunday food bazaar has dozens of stalls selling grilled seafood and meat, noodle dishes, sticky rice and mango, and that sweet milky iced tea – with and without tapioca balls. Kevin loves going there.

It was crowded as usual when we got there so we had to park blocks away. Matt moved some noodles around on a plate as cover for his main meal: tapioca balls. He sucked those sweet black chewy balls through oversized straws. Sitting together, chewing and chatting, usually felt good but I was so distracted I was hardly there.

Matt wanted another boba. “Mom, can I have another dollar?”

I was thinking about the monks inside and whether or not I was going to walk up those steps to try to meet them.

“Mom?”

“Here, Matt,” Kevin said. He handed Matt what he needed then asked me, “Girl, what’s up?”

Matt stayed.

“I’m nervous. I don’t know why but I am.”

“Why?” Matt asked.

“I don’t know. I want to go in there, I know I should, but I don’t want to. It just feels too hard, like I don’t have it in me today.”

“Just do it,” Matt said, happy to be giving advice. “You always tell us to just do it.”

I might have been more careful with what I said to my children if I’d known that they’d store everything I‘d ever said to them – wise and foolish – to toss back at me with those gotcha smiles when I least wanted to hear it. The only compensation is it makes them very, very happy.

“Girl, we’ll just walk around a bit while you go in.” Kevin said. “It’ll be fine.”

Fine.

When I started this project, I knew it was going to be ridiculously hard to do but I was only thinking about logistics: how long it would take, how little I knew, how impossible it was to figure out how to even begin. I thought I was just going to learn about various faiths. It never crossed my mind how much I was going to have to deal with me, with my own fears and limitations, with the rising suspicion that I’m not fully aware of all the reasons I’ve become so determined to do this.

I picked up my cup, the pile of balled up napkins in front of me, and my paper plate and tried to tuck them into a stuffed trash barrel so they wouldn’t fall out on the ground, then walked towards the steps to the temple. What is my problem? I’ve been a journalist all of my life; I’m used to walking in to new places, meeting new people, yet there I was with the same dread I felt when I was a kid, when I’d waited too long to write some school paper. It felt like I was trying to lift my own dead weight, like I needed skills I just didn’t have, skills I knew were missing but couldn’t even name. Okay, so maybe I’m making this far more complicated than it needs to be, maybe I don’t have to plumb the depths of my being to figure out what, if anything, each tenet might mean to me – a lifetime’s task (a Hindu might say a task of several lifetimes) all jammed into months. Ridiculous. Just find out the rituals, do them, and see what happens, what I learn. I can do that, can’t I? Just do it. This belly-aching self-doubt is useless.

I walked up the stairs, looked inside… and stopped. A plump Thai woman with a jug of free orange juice and a plastic bag full of fruit was sitting on her folded legs, chatting with a monk on an orange cushion. A few other monks were scattered around the room. One look and I just turned right around and walked back down the steps again.

Kevin and Matt were just starting to walk towards a display near the Wat Thai school when I walked up behind them. Kevin said, “Oh! You’re already done?”

“For today.”

He put his hand in mine and the three of us walked back to our car.


(8 October 2006)

Emailing Hemu again...

I let Hemu know I wouldn’t be coming back to the Swaminarayan temple on a regular basis.

Hemu:

The reason I'm not sure about coming back to the service is I feel that, given the language problem, I am a burden to you.

I wanted so much to understand, for myself, why everyone was laughing last time. I could see the obvious passion, wit and wisdom with which the sadhus spoke so I felt a deep longing to be able to hear their thoughts for myself. That is the reason I so look forward to their responses to my proposal and my questions. I see such devotion, grace and compassion in your mandir while at the same time I feel at a bit of a loss, even with all of your generosity, to really partake in it. Perhaps if I learn some more of the basics through hearing the sadhus thoughts about my path, and learn the meaning of some basic Hindu practices, I might then be able to return to the service and get more out of it on a personal level.

Marley


When I talked to Hemu on the phone some time after, she said I wasn’t a burden at all but she also understood. “Do you want me to tell you when the big events and festivals happen anyway?”

“Of course.”

Hemu mentioned that the monk she’d asked to read an early draft of the first chapter, had tried and failed to read it at first because I’d seemed “so lost.” But sometime later, she sent me his thoughts when he was finally able to get through it.


Jai Swaminarayan
Marley:

I hope you are doing well.
It’s been a while since we communicated.

Below is (the sadhu’s) response on your writing proposal.

Initially it was stunning and confusing a little. After reading it again, it made more sense.

I re-read the package on my flight from Houston to Chicago. This time I wasn't shocked or stunned by the text but felt more comfortable reading what has been written. Aside from the personal confusions the writer has been through (to) date in terms of trying to understand God or religion, I believe that the project could be useful. I believe that by pursuing this project, the writer should definitely be able to better understand what different people of different faiths believe to be the purpose of life.

As far as the Hindu faith, I believe that the writer has come to one of the purest forms of Hindu practice and faith in the world today. The writer will be able to see people actually trying to imbibe or live the principles or teachings of Hinduism in their lives to the best of the ability. This book could maybe be viewed as a catalog for understanding different faiths.

This book could be of service to others IF each faith is portrayed correctly and totally.

This is what we have answered as of now. Have also sent the proposal to some senior Swamis for their input.

Sorry for the delay.

Jai Swaminarayan! Pallav Vaghashia for P. Kaivalyamurti Swami


Hemu!

I have been thinking of you a lot. I am so happy to hear from you.

And, wow, Hemu! What lovely and thoughtful comments from the sadhu. Please extend my sincere thanks for taking the time to both read and respond.

Marley


I missed Hemu.

Bike Riding

The soul...in its very essence, is free, unbounded,
holy, pure and perfect. But somehow or other it
finds itself tied down to matter, and thinks of
itself as matter. It is a fact of everybody’s consciousness
that one thinks of oneself as the body.

Swami Vivekandanda
The Chicago Addresses

(Swami Vivekanada, an excerpt from his opening remarks, the first World Parliament of Religions, 1893)

(Swami Vivekanada, an excerpt from "Why We Disagree", the first World Parliament of Religions, 1893)

Waking up to the first really cool Saturday, I decided to throw my bike in the back of the van to ride while Matt was in his three-hour theater class.

It was perfectly clear. The mountains that sit at the edge of the valley were plain, their features distinct: crags, trees, a ruffle of houses around their bases. The air slipped by my neck, my cheeks, my hair, and made the translucent yellow wind-breaker slick close to the front of my arms but sound like a sail behind. I rarely get on a bike without remembering how it felt to ride one when I was eight, a surge of power and independence, imagining that my bike was a car that could go anywhere I wanted.

No wonder I’m afraid to age, afraid to die. I like my body. I like having one. I like having this one. Sure, it’s had its share of defects: two lazy eyes that had to be surgically corrected when I was just two, some illnesses, but not many. And it heals quickly. After all, isn’t that the real miracle? Not that we get sick, but that, with all of these complicated interlocking systems that seem pretty fragile, we spend so much of our lives healthy?

And then, oh, those sensations…the touch, the smell, the taste, the beauty that seems to land like thunder deep inside; the sounds of tires humming, of a bird at dawn, of a tune played for the ninety-ninth time; the smell of my husband’s skin, of my sleepy cat’s fur; the slip of silk against skin, the cold of water in my throat, the fuzzy-soft of the pink angora sweater my grandmother used to wear, the squirm in my sons’ bodies when I tickled them. When I was still allowed to tickle them.

Yes, I am attached to this body. Very.

That these profound joys will become increasingly elusive and, finally, gone, is terrifying. I don’t remember anyone touching my grandmother in the years before she died except to help move her between the wheelchair and the bed and back. Accidental touching. No more touching with intent, with recognition, with communion.

I mean, I still have the same car I bought new in 1995 and I put every single one of its 130,000-plus miles on it. I don’t want a new car or a new body. I like this one. Its flaws are familiar, its resilience known.

But, whether I want or don’t want, whether I resist or accept, I know my car will not work one day. I’m not going to have a choice. It’s just going to be too expensive to fix one day. But the metaphor Swami Sarvadevananda uses doesn’t help that much. I’m not sure that the “I” that drives the next body, the next car, is the same “I” that’s in this one. As deeply pleasant as it sounds, the notion of personal reincarnation, of getting a body back (and, if you do a good job in this life, a better one in the next!) I simply can’t reconcile with Swami Sarvadevananda’s ocean metaphor – that we’re like ripples on a single ocean, rising up for a lifetime and then fading back in to the whole -- which does feel possibly true to me.

If we are like waves on the ocean, bits of the Absolute that rise up into form for the flash of a lifetime and then return to that of which we are made, then doesn’t it make more sense that it isn’t that I, Marley, would be reincarnated again, personally or specifically, but the root essence underlying each and every one of us – God, if you will – that “reappears?” I mean, even if you stick with science, you have to admit that the raw material we’re made of certainly reappears in other forms. But the idea of the me I think of, the me who likes drugstore marshmallow eggs and watered down orange juice, coming back again? That feels like pure wishful vanity. But I have a Swami now to ask such questions.

It was time to head back to pick up Matt so I headed out of the park, off the bike path and onto surface streets leading back to the studio where his class was. I’m still new to bike shoes with clips on the bottom so, at a major intersection, I squeezed the handlebar brake levers to stop at the red light and then, in slow motion, feet still stuck to my pedals, I fell over to one side like a cartoon character. The skin tore off the knee that caught me, my other shin got whacked black-and-blue by the handlebars.

Okay, maybe there are some sensations I can live - or die - without. Or maybe the key is to get to a place where it’s possible to feel that the sensuous and the painful, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ are equal, the same, no different; to not get too attached to either as neither one is permanent, eternal, meaningful.

But I have a confession: I’d rather have a skinned knee and contusions than nothing. I guess, by Hinduism’s terms, I have a few more lifetimes ahead of me.


(30 September 2006)

Telling them...

So I finally came clean with Mom and Dad.

I didn’t do it until just before I started all of this in earnest. I was afraid to tell them. I'm an alleged grown-up with kids of my own and I'm still worried about what they think about what I'm doing, even more fearful of what they'll say. To be fair, I've had decades of experience telling them things they didn't want to hear. When I came home from an expensive fancy college to tell them that I wasn’t applying to medical school, that I wanted to get a job in television, my mother said, “What did we send you to college for?”

Now this? They're going to think I'm an idiot.

I'd put off telling them for months. When I quit my job running the regional public television newsmagazine, I kind of forgot to mention that I knew what I was doing next, specifically. They heard “writing,” they heard “more time with Luke and Matt” and that my husband’s work was doing okay, so Mom and Dad didn’t really ask too many questions.

On the phone, Mom had said, “Maybe now you won’t have to work so hard all the time. I hate to see you run ragged.”

“Me, too, Mom.”

But I talk to my parents so many times during a week it just got plain weird not to tell them what was going on, especially when this project was becoming my life, especially when we were all going to be together for their fiftieth anniversary at their honeymoon spot in Florida.

__

In my suitcase, I brought two things to give them: a pair of patchwork pillowtops I’d made for them with their wedding photos ironed on the center squares of each and a copy of the pages I’d given to Hemu and her sadhu, the same ones I'd given to Swami Sarvadevananda. I took the pillowtops out right away – they were a big hit – but the manuscript stayed in the bottom of the empty suitcase until the day before we were meant to leave.

Not long after breakfast, I walked into their hotel room, handed over the paper held together by brass grommets, and took Luke and Matt to the beach.

Hours later, fingers wrinkled, salt baked into skin, I sent the boys ahead to take showers and opened the door to Mom and Dad’s room. Beyond the entrance hall, Dad sat with his back to the sliding glass door, scratching words into the squares of his spiral-bound double acrostic book. It wasn’t late but the sun was already behind the tall building we were in, its shadow crossing the pool and even the beach beyond. His pose was so familiar it was like a hug: one leg crossed wide over the other to support the hard pad, left hand curled around a pen, head down and slightly tilted. His hair might be baby fine and white with a whisper of tan skin beneath but the scene was the same since I was little. He seemed so happy when he was like this. He seemed so alone.

“Hi, Dad.”

Dad’s hearing is flawless for someone nearing eighty but his puzzle concentration is absolute. I tried again. “Dad?”

“Oh, hi. Boys have a good time down there?”

“Yeah, where’s Mom?”

“She’s getting ready.”

Screaming through my head was: Did you read it? Did she? Nothing in his eyes or voice said anything so I didn’t either. Forcing it felt wrong. Besides, I knew better than to start with Dad; he let Mom handle stuff like this. So I just asked, “When are we leaving for dinner?”

Looking up over his reading glasses, “Half an hour.”

After the fastest shower I knew how to take, I was back, a kid waiting for approval of a lumpy handmade ashtray.

I know I’m not supposed to care what they think, what she thinks. I mean, when am I going to get over this? I’ve investigated bad guys while at 60 Minutes, I’ve worn hidden cameras in dangerous places, I’ve interviewed a serial killer on death row and many other criminals in prisons and jails, in my last job, I’ve made decisions that an entire staff didn’t like, and yet I’m still tiptoeing around looking for signs in my parents’ eyes.

Why do I care? What am I waiting for? Permission?

And then I knew: the dread of having this very conversation and others like it is what’s stopped me dead for decades. I feel like I was born with only one subject on my mind: Is there a point and, if so, what is it? Is the visible all that’s real? Yet it’s taken me half a lifetime to become either stubborn enough or driven enough to make anyone else’s reactions meaningless…. that’s probably overstating it…to make anyone else’s bad reaction less important. But, for all that progress, I was still standing there, desperate to know what they thought.

The smell of Jean Nate and the sound of charm bracelets always told us when my mother was ready to go out. My parents didn’t go out often when we were little but, when they did, Mom loved dressing in red and black, sometimes with big wide belts or dresses she’d made, some dramatic. The bracelets were still there but the playful smell and dramatic outfits were gone. In their place were long pieces of silk and comfortable shoes.

Dad picked up the plastic hotel key from the table and called for the car while Mom finished putting a few things into one of her tiny sparkly purses. I gave up looking for them to say something. It was plain: she knew I was waiting, knew I wanted to know, but she either couldn’t figure out what to say or maybe she hadn’t even read it yet. Maybe she wanted to wait until she could figure out what she even thought about it.

Maybe she didn’t want to ruin dinner.

But, as I held the hotel room door open and turned off the light, Mom stopped and looked up at me and said, “I really never knew you had this problem, I really didn’t. I mean, you told me how you thought I should have taken you to art museums more and, you’re right, I probably should have, but I never knew about this.”

All I could do was laugh. I put one arm around her shoulder and kissed her jaw, the only part she would really let me near, as she continued with various permutations of this all the way down the long hotel hallway, with Dad following behind, until the elevator door opened and there were strangers inside.

And we had a really nice dinner.

Okay, here goes...

I've been at this for two years now and I'm getting buggy with all my time alone, keeping this all to myself, so I'm letting it out. My raw notes. As I go. Once I catch this blog up with real time, that is.

So, who am I and what have I been doing?

When my sons were six and four years old, they were arguing in the back seat of my car about whether or not God existed. Pretty soon a voice from the backseat asked, "Mom, what do you believe?"

All I could answer at the time was, "I don't know. I'm still working on it."


I am a blank slate. A tabula rasa. I come to the table with the fewest possible preconceived notions about any religious tradition because I was raised outside of any. Although there were rudiments of some religious traditions in parts of my extended family, my parents considered strong religious conviction the source of wars, hatred, and division among people. At the dinner table, on more than one night, they said religion was a crutch for those unable to handle the truth: that we're mortal, that “after life” we simply revert to the chemicals from which we're made. Nothing more.

Just chemicals? That's all we were? It didn't make sense.

One night, when I was twelve, I said, “I think I might want to, uhm, go to church.”

Forks clattered to the plates. "Well,” my mother said, “if you think you need that."

So, growing up, I knew nothing of any religious tradition. I tried to learn how to live, how to have a meaningful life, by reading books. Biographies were best; I was obsessed with them. Maybe if I could see the choices people made, and how it worked out for them, I might know how to live. The Bible was little more to me than a collection of stories that I learned about, one-by-one, when a teacher would point out allusions to them in novels or plays.

When it came time to get a job, I found one that allowed me to continue my obsession with the lives of others: I became a journalist. But my spiritual dissatisfaction didn’t go away. I just tried to ignore it. On occasion, a story would give me an excuse to learn about a religious tradition. A profile about the Archbishop of San Francisco introduced me to Father Miles Riley, who specialized in over-exuberant press management for the archdiocese at the time. We didn't get off to a good start. I thought all public relations people were only there to prevent me from doing my job with integrity. Our awkward beginning was made worse by my lack of experience with clergy of any sort crashing up against the vaudeville character of Father Miles, with his light yellow Cadillac convertible, his show-tune personality, and compendium of dirty jokes about his fellow clerics. He was not what I expected or even imagined as possible in a priest. We became friends, sort of. As friendly as one can be with someone wont to exclaim: “Oh, I love hanging out with the heathen!”

After that, I spent a bunch of years working on television newsmagazines which aren't very efficient tools for exploring faith.

Finally, in 2000, I decided to take two courses at a local college: an introduction to the Bible and a survey of world religions. By the end of the term, I felt relief: I had a basic grasp of what other people believed. I thought I'd taken care of this part of my life.

But I hadn't. I had factual knowledge but I found myself wondering what it felt like to actually practice a faith, to truly live by one. I went looking for books by beginners, people walking into a faith who might tell me what it felt like to learn how to practice it. I couldn’t find anything like that. And nothing came close to explaining the mystery of how a devout follower of any of those traditions could get from their faith, could get from the Golden Rule - some version of it is in every major religious tradition - to what I saw happening between people of faith all over the globe. If the faithful of different religions all believe they should do unto others as they would have people do unto them, if they were actually living lives based on doctrine, how could there be so much hatred and bloodshed in the name of those faiths? But, for all my newly-acquired, very basic understanding of the fundamental beliefs of various traditions, I wasn't one step closer to really understanding a thing I wanted to know.

Then I got one of those ideas people get while driving around or in the shower, the ones most people are sane enough to leave right where they found them. I began to wonder what would happen to me if I went through the conversion training - not to convert but to learn what a convert would learn - in the seven major religious traditions as identified by Huston Smith in his seminal work, The World's Religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Would I know something I couldn’t possibly imagine? Or might I end up at war with myself by the end, a riled nest of ideas, beliefs and practices in conflict?

Well, it's fine to have an idea, but actually doing this? I kept imagining my parents' reaction so I put it out of my mind and just confined myself to taking care of my two sons and doing my day job which was, at the time, running a regional public television newsmagazine.

Then 9/11 happened. My parents were the only people I knew who didn’t seem surprised at all; it was just one more item to add to their list of the damage religion has caused. But that act, and all that followed, finally made me feel like I had no choice any longer, that my personal confusion wasn’t something I could continue to shrug off as just that, personal. There was a life-and-death argument going on over the role of religion in our lives and I was disqualified from participating because I was an ignorant outsider.

And there was that question from my children, "Mom, what do you believe?"

So that's what I'm doing. I've decided to find out.

A note: If you're just joining up with me, especially for you first-timers to blog reading, it's in reverse chronologic order. You'll be grateful for this when you catch up to the most current post because the newest will always be what you see first when you come here but, if you've missed a lot, you might have a better idea of what's going in if you start with the oldest post and work forward.