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.

Tires and karma...

When a man has let go of his attachments,
when his mind is rooted in wisdom,
everything he does is worship
and his actions all melt away.

Bhagavad Gita , 4.23

So, tires and karma…

One of the devotional paths in Hinduism is called the karma path. Essentially it means that, while there are those among us who might worship, say Jesus or the Virgin Mary, and still others who prefer to read, coming to understand their faith through their study of the Torah, for example, there are also those who find it easier to express their faith through their work or their actions. Some examples might be Mother Teresa or, perhaps, my husband Kevin’s dad who became an orthopedist so he could help disabled children as Christ did, something he did all of his life…for free. Another would be Nick at my favorite tire store.

So it was way past time to leave for school and Matt was ready and waiting on the living room couch as usual when Luke came out of his room with his hair still wet from the shower, happily rattling off things he needed to know for a test later that day. “‘Araby’ was written by James Joyce. ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ is Garcia Marquez. ‘Good Climate, Friendly Inhabitants’ by Nadine Gordimer. and Chinua Achebe wrote ‘Dead Man’s Path.’”

On my toes to kiss the side of his face, I said, “That sounds good. Now, get into the car, we’re about to be late.”

I shifted my car into gear and started to drive immediately, something my eleven year-old car hates. I thought nothing of the shuddering as I pulled away from the curb but, when it didn’t ease up in four long blocks, it was clear that it was much more than that. Yes, anyone but a mother whose sole focus was on making up for a bit of lost time would have known within a few feet a tire was a flat. A very flat flat.

The good news: Kevin was still home with his car. The bad news: we were already too far to run home to get his car, given the boys’ ridiculously heavy backpacks, and have any chance of making it to school even close to on time. More bad news: Kevin had been up until one o’clock in the morning and wasn’t due to start his twelve-hour day until eleven so my phone call would wake him up. Did I mention he was fighting off a sore throat?

This was not the morning I had planned. To add to the scene, I was dressed in the embarrassing sort of clothes worn by mothers all over the country who plan to go for a run or go to the gym after dropping their kids off at school: flabby thighs on display underneath bright orange shorts leading down to gray socks popping up above brown slip-on Merrills because my running shoes were, of course, in my car trunk. After handing off my children to a grumpy husband, I accepted the fact that my exercise today would be changing my tire.

Excavating the trunk, I dug down beneath the old umbrellas and running shoes, flip flops and crumpled sun screen tubes to find, when I opened the spare tire well, that the spare was flat, too…which made not having a jack in my trunk moot. At least my cell phone worked so, after a call to AAA, I sat down on the curb, on top of my squishy spare tire, to wait with my newspaper and a bottle of water.

While flat tires, in general, aren’t happy occasions, I knew I was going to end up at my favorite tire store - yes, I actually have a favorite tire store. It's a small independent tire shop jammed in between car dealers on Van Nuys Boulevard. Believe it or not, I love that shop with a passion verging on groupiedom. Why? They won’t let me buy tires. Every time I come in with a flat, they tell me not to bother with a new tire, they can fix it.

“That’ll be ten dollars,” the guy behind the counter always says.

Once, when I finally insisted on buying tires after a certain point, they explained why I didn’t need the expensive ones. I love them. I tell them so every time I go.

This morning, the owner, Norm, whom I’d never actually met before, was behind the tall gray counter. I told him how I felt about his business. “You’re unique.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. I think most people do things the way we do. There really are only a few rotten apples in any line of work. At least, that is what I choose to believe.”

When Norm went out back to the work area, the other customer in the waiting room, a thin, gray-haired man who was sipping a cup of machine coffee, said he felt the same way. “This wasn’t what I had in mind for my morning either but I love coming here. And the new coffee machine is great; try it!”

Is this what’s meant by the karma path, the path of work? I mean, is it possible that something as simple as running a business selling – or not selling, in this case – tires can be invested with meaning if attention like this is paid? I doubt Norm thinks about it that way unless seductive girly posters with women of men’s imagination posing on impossibly clean, thrusting cars goes with a form of faith I’ve yet to encounter. But, if the point of religion, of spirituality, is to imbue our lives with a sense of connection, with a sense of the divine, I do know that way Norm chose to live and work gave me that sense of connection this morning and every time I even think about the tires on my car.

And my fellow tire store fan was a lovely man with whom to wait. “I’ve decided to get my wife’s car fixed after I’m done with mine today since this is what my day’s turned into anyway.”
Bob, I soon found out, is a respiratory therapist; his wife was a nurse named Louise. My father is a doctor named Bob and my mother, Louise, was once a nurse. It turned out that his wife worked for a national non-profit that tooks care of the elderly, something my father had done for years back east. Bob said the organization was expanding and might need part-time help from someone like my aging father, who is still a practicing doctor at seventy-eight because a combination of excessive generosity to his children and some bad luck means he and my mother can’t figure out how to afford to retire, can’t afford to figure out how to move closer to us as we had assumed they would.

When the owner, Norm, came back in, he cautiously interrupted my conversation with Bob to give the verdict on my flat. “You had a nail in your tire. I fixed it, fixed the spare and rotated your tires. No charge.”

“How do you stay in business?”

With an almost embarrassed shrug, Norm was out the door and back to the service area.

As I gathered up my things to leave, Bob said, “I’ll have Louise email you a contact for your dad.” And then he added, “It’s karma. We were meant to be here this morning!”

Karma, indeed.

(25 September 2006)

Thoughts to begin with....

I've been reading a lot of stuff of all sorts while doing this project and nothing summarizes my intent better than these two quotes....

The great irony is that American society is the most religious among industrial societies, in that more people call themselves religious. It’s off the charts. But the degree of ignorance Americans have about religion, often including their own, may be higher than anywhere. It’s a bizarre combination of factors which makes for uninformed strong feelings, most decidedly a bad mix.

Professor Harvey Cox
"Past, Present, and Future Tense"
Harvard Divinity School Online

In most traditions, faith was not about belief but about practice. Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they conform to some metaphysical, scientific or historical reality but because they are life-enhancing. But you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice.

Karen Armstrong
The Spiral Staircase

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.