killingthebuddha

[killingthebuddha]

[Editor’s note: Here be spoilers! If you have yet to watch the first three seasons of The Good Place and would like to remain spoiler-free, proceed with extreme caution.]

Humanity’s fate, as fans of NBC’s The Good Place well know, is a subject for moral philosophy, whether through stacks of frayed library books, constant references to philosophers, or tension-filled replications of famous thought experiments. Yet The Good Place relies just as strongly on another discipline, soteriology, or the study of salvation, which comes strongly into play as the four main characters, Eleanor Shellstrop, Chidi Anagonye, Jason Mendoza, and Tahani Al-Jamil, navigate the complexities of what happens to us after we die. 

Take, for example, the show’s core premise. Within moments of the very first episode—spoiler alert!—we learn that Eleanor’s fate has been controlled by a point system that measures the positive or negative worth of each of our actions until the day we die, at which point the powers that be tally up our total to determine if our eternal fate is “up there,” in the Good Place, or, you know, “down there,” in the Bad Place. No matter the strength of the show’s inquiry into morality and ethics, soteriology—the study of salvation—means destiny for the four humans. 

Initially, the show’s creator Michael Schur set out to explore the question of how to become a better person, as aided by the discipline of moral philosophy. The Good Place is well-known and well-regarded for relying the insights of professional philosophers, and the first two seasons drew heavily on the question of whether explicit moral instruction could help a rather amoral and self-centered individual, Eleanor, become a better person. In season 1, Chidi, the comically indecisive philosophy professor, gave Eleanor lessons in philosophy complete with chalk-dusted blackboard lectures listing headings such as “Ethics 101” and “Utilitarianism.” Season 2 continued the exploration of the utility of explicit moral instruction, hinging its climactic events on a “real” Good Place example of the classic philosophical “trolley problem.” 

Season 3 shifted the focus back to Earth and to the question of how to get humans to the Good Place. In other words, how will they achieve salvation? No matter what Schur and the writers themselves believe about the afterlife, the narrative they’ve set in motion relies on claims about what happens to us after we die, and season 3’s dramatic shifts emphasized not so much the twists and turns of ethics, but the secret details of the Good and Bad Places themselves: specifically, that the points system is “all forked up” (to use the special anti-swearing lingo of the Good Place); no humans have gotten into the Good Place for centuries, and no one in the Good Place is doing anything about it. 

Both the Good and Bad Places have their own heavenly and hellish bureaucracies. We’ve seen Bad Place admin before, a place of dark cubicles that feels like a grungy, run-down club, and we’ve seen the Judge’s chambers, whose sterility perhaps reveals the Judge’s potential ineffectiveness. The Judge spends more time obsessing over Mexican food and crime drama than worrying about immortal justice, and the doorkeeper between the Judge’s chambers and Earth wants nothing more than frog memorabilia from the real Earth. 1980s-style computers tally up the points, while futuristic floating screens spring forth from dusty ancient books inscribed with all our names. It’s a bit like stepping into a technological “Jeremy Bearimy,” the Good Place description of why time and space function differently there than they do on earth. Here, the technology of both the past and the future has an improbable grip on the fates of us all. 

The Good Place isn’t the only fictional take on the idea of heavenly and hellish bureaucracy; after all, our modern word “hierarchy” originates with an ancient Greek term referring to the “rule of a high priest.” The Jewish and Christian bibles include a ranked order of both angels and demons, and it’s no wonder that in these modern times of cubicles, skyscrapers, assistant VPs, and CEOs, interpretations of religious stories have turned more and more to bureaucratic representations of Heaven and Hell. I’m thinking, first, of C.S. Lewis’s mid-twentieth-century The Screwtape Letters, in which a young demon, Wormwood, receives letters from his better-ranked demon uncle, Screwtape, about how to tempt a particular human. While the made-for-TV version of The Screwtape Letters has yet to appear, heavenly and hellish bureaucracy received television attention recently with Amazon’s rendition of Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. In this miniseries, Heaven’s long corridors reflected ethereal glowing light and angels have retractable wings, while down in Hell, demons with pockmarked faces and worse tried, zombie-like, to escape their own darkened hallways.

In the case of The Good Place, the heavenly bureaucracy raises a host of questions. First of all, we know that the points system has become, to use one of Eleanor’s favorite phrases, a whole lot of “holy forking shirt balls.” As Michael has figured out, no one’s points measure up to Good Place standards anymore. Even the very “best” human they can find, one Doug Forcett who lives off the land in rural Canada, isn’t good enough, because each “good” choice has so many unfortunate repercussions. Life on earth has become too complicated and fraught with moral peril to permit entry to the Good Place. No matter what we do, we’re causing inadvertent harm, and the harm appears to far outweigh the good. 

This conclusion is the rare place where the show veers from its usual story-based approach to moral reasoning to something that more closely resembles a didactic lecture. If only we could get our collective “ashes” together well enough to avoid, say, pesticide contamination, mass species extinction, or extreme poverty, the point system might very well right itself again and we’d receive proper afterlife credit for our good works. 

Worse, as Michael realizes, no one in the Good Place’s “Accounting” department cares. The Head Good Place Accountant, Neil, is more concerned about birthday cake in the staffroom than the fact that no human has made it to the Good Place in roughly 500 years—roughly since the time of Copernicus or Galileo, or the dawn of the modern era, which is arguably when life started to become a lot more complicated. 

If Heaven, Hell (or both) has a “CEO,” we haven’t met him, her (or them) yet, and I’m left wondering if this absence has something to do with Good Place admins losing their sense of moral direction or corporate purpose. Neil is clearly a lower-level white-collar worker; surely he reports to someone in a business suit? Michael’s boss Shawn at least wears a coat-and-tie, which in managerial parlance means he’s a guy in charge, but is he In Charge? Do we need a Someone-In-Charge? Thus far, The Good Place suggests an existentialist world, one which, as so many philosophers have suspected, is indeed rather godless in general and Jesus-less in particular. 

Usually, The Good Place falls back on an existentialist explanation, despite the existence of a Good and Bad Place as an essential part of the plot. Sartre’s No Exit remains the obvious referent point for four humans meant to torture each other in an eternal, inescapable afterlife situation, except that here, we add a side of corporate bureaucracy to the existentialist main course. If all we can rely on are godless committees, and these heavenly or hellish bureaucracies are equally intent on preserving their own status quo, our actions on earth have as little value as they did for Chidi during his Peeps-and-M&Ms chili-eating crisis. 

Regardless of God’s existence, the fates of Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason rest not so much with their moral actions anymore, but with a dense and impenetrable corporate afterlife system that may or may not know what it’s doing. Good Place admins care more about their internal affairs (such as birthday cake) than the presumed mission of their organization of overseeing the Good Place. The Bad Place, for its part, remains fiendishly devoted to its core mission of torturing humans once they arrive at a pretty hellish-sounding Bad Place. 

For both Places, it’s unclear whether or not the mission of either Place involves getting more humans into each Place. Does the Good Place’s corporate mission encompass getting humans into the Good Place, or simply looking after the Place and the people once they’re there? Similarly, does the Bad Place’s core mission also include recruitment, or are both Good and Bad Place admins themselves cogs in the wheel of a system they didn’t set up?

Finally, it’s ironic that among Good and Bad Place admins, only Michael and Janet feel any passion about getting deserving folk into the Good Place. A rare visit to the mailroom of the actual Good Place introduced us to the depressingly sanctimonious Good Place Committee, which is so interested in cooperation and doing the right thing that it probably gets nothing done at all. The Committee promises to spend years creating various “elite investigative teams” to create more teams who will eventually form the Commission. Michael deadpans in response, “just so you know, the whole time you’re doing this, the bad guys are continuing to torture everyone who ends up in the Bad Place, which is everyone.”

To which the Committee responds sanctimoniously, “And that deeply concerns us. Have you seen the memoranda we’ve sent each other about how concerned we are?” 

Leaving the Committee behind, Michael and his demon ex-boss Shawn agree on one final experiment, one final Place, with new ways to torture the humans, which will be the setting of season 4. As we viewers anticipate this final season, I find myself wondering how the show will resolve its many philosophical questions. Will moral philosophy save our collective “ashes,” or will the solution to our salvation come from somewhere else? 

My money’s on the four humans finding their own way through this maze of moral philosophy and a moribund eternal bureaucracy. In countless books, movies, and television shows (particularly ones that pit humans against aliens, supernatural, or corrupt and corporate forces), what we do best is surprise our supposed superiors with unexpected ways out of the hells in which they put us. Time and time again, narrative has given us strength in the power of love, humor in the strangest and most inopportune times and places, and meaning in the face of deep existential crisis.

During the season 3 episode where each character confronts the futility of life after Michael and Janet reveal the truth about their recent deaths and various reboots, Tahani figures out a solution first: use her wealth to give others happiness. She travels the streets of Sydney blissfully handing out wads of cash and generous donations. Eleanor tries out selfishness again, but when she does one supposedly final good act, she realizes that she still can “try to do good.” Even if they can no longer get into the Good Place based on their actions, she realizes that “there are still people in this world that we care about, so I say we try and help them be good people.” 

Chidi, meanwhile, is stuck with philosophy, and he’s miserable, and not only vestless, but shirtless as well, not to mention wandering the streets of Sydney scaring passersby with quotes from Nietzsche. Later, he tries to start a sentence about Sartre, leaving us once again in the realm of existentialism and No Exit, but Jason interrupts. Philosophy tries to have the final say, but all-too-human Jason, with his stupidity and his sweetness, gets the final word.

In the scene, Jason begins a presumably lame story about “a guy from my dance crew in Jacksonville called Big Noodle.” The others smirk, expecting the worst. (“It was nice knowing you,” they start to say.) Big Noodle always showed up late to dance rehearsal, until one day Jason crashes at Big Noodle’s place and learns that his friend has to juggle several jobs in order to take care of his aging grandparents. “The point is,” Jason tells the Judge, “you can’t judge humans ’cause you don’t know what we go through.”

What we go through is special, and it just may be what saves us. As season 3 ended, Janet comforts Eleanor by reminding her that even if they’re in the pandemonium, John Milton’s place of “all demons” in Paradise Lost, she and Chidi found each other. Eleanor replies, “I guess all I can do is embrace the pandemonium, find happiness in the unique insanity of being here, now.” 

Eleanor’s heart, Jason’s stupidity, or Tahani’s surprising generosity: these human qualities save each of us time and time again. In The Good Place, moral philosophy may not be able to save us, but the qualities we bring to our lives may well determine our eternal fates in this world, or the next.

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[killingthebuddha]

A handful of years ago I spent half a day, all of a night, and another half day at a marathon reading of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick in New Bedford. It was a wondrous suspended state that I wrote about here on KtB in a piece called the Lingering Loveliness of Long Things.

One weekend this month, I stepped into that same time warp with a reading of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five Or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, his sixth novel and first bestseller, written fifty years ago. I only had to travel five minutes from my Cape Cod home to get to Sturgis Public Library in Barnstable Village, passing the white clapboard house where Vonnegut spent many of his best writing years on my way there. But once in the library, we – listeners and readers both – stepped back in time to . . . well . . . time is slippery in Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy Pilgrim slips between mid-twentieth-century decades: the early forties, the late sixties, the war years and the bore years between. At times, he is making love with his wife on his honeymoon as they conceive their first son, at other times he is sitting motionless in his frigid house as his grown daughter chastises him. Or he’s hunkering down in a cellar slaughterhouse as the beautiful city of Dresden and its 130,000 inhabitants are firebombed out of existence above his head during World War II.  

“All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.”

I can’t remember who was reading those lines. For five or six hours, it was a dream state in Sturgis Library, in seven-minute stints. I most liked when the reader at one podium stopped immediately at the sound of the timer and the reader at the second podium seamlessly stepped in, mid-sentence. I experienced the same suspended state that the Moby-Dick reading had induced, everything else falling away, me falling into each voice, the cadence and speed and pronunciation. The copy I’d brought sat mostly unopened on my lap. Instead I was completely absorbed in watching and listening to the string of people, some friends, most strangers, all of us brought together by the wampeter of the book, a unifying object that brings otherwise unlinked people together. I reveled in the missing “r”s of those with the thickest of Massachusetts accents, the thick baritone of a bearded man with a bowler hat, the ‘40s radio-announcer-voice of a slender giant, the composed voice of my elegant stepdaughter. I delighted when the octogenarian woman with liver spots made her voice gruff when she read, “‘Get out of the road, you dumb motherfucker.’”

To write is such a solitary experience, though every word is part of a love letter of some sort to someone. To read is solitary, too, even as we play out our parts as recipients of the letters, even as we seek out book groups and friends to discuss the stories afterwards. But to read, out-loud, vocal vibrations skipping each and every word across an enclosed space that feels like a castle surrounded by a great moat, everything outside of it meaningless, the airwaves arriving to our awaiting ears . . . that is to slip again into the primordial bodies of our storytelling ancestors.

But the story threads written so long ago still tied us to the world out there, like spider silk unspooling across the moat. We dream of other lives. Seek out old lovers late at night when the alcohol takes grip (but no longer have to ask the operator for the connection). Trauma still causes us to become unstuck in time. Babies are still being sent to war. Still, it goes. 

The night before the reading, Kurt’s daughter Edie, a friend of mine, had given a talk a few doors down from the library in a structure that was once a church and then a courthouse and is now home to the historical organization Tales of Cape Cod. It still feels more like a New England church, with stiff wooden pews and high windows that bathed the space in golden light until darkness fell. Edie shared stories of her family, their dog Sandy, the marsh tromps and the always-open door. Of the moment of realization, with the reading of Sirens of Titans when she was almost a teen, that the man who holed up in his office downstairs amid a cloud of Pall Mall smoke was no ordinary father. 

Then, she paused.

She was not-yet-halfway through her talk, and she gathered herself. “You came to hear about my father,” she said, “but it’s my mother I want to tell you about.”A few years back, Edie found a box of love letters from her soon-to-be father to her soon-to-be mother, Jane. They were complete with his doodles and colorings, his self-deprecation and his adulation of Jane (“Dear Much-Loved, Very Warmly Adored Woofy”) and his hopeful dreams of marrying her and being a writer. Edie has poured over these letters, organizing and ordering them, saving them from the mice and the mold and saving them to share with us. (The letters have been featured in the New Yorker, and they will be published next year by Penguin Random House.)

Only Jane saved her side of the correspondence, but her faith in his potential to become the writer that he did is clear, even with only the mirror-images of his responses. Twenty-six years before Slaughterhouse-Five was published, he wrote to her that he knew there was a story that needed to be written about his experiences during the war – Christmas in a cattle car on a train that would take him to a prisoner-of-war camp, that time in the slaughterhouse cellar. Someday. Somehow.  

She buoyed him, there in their house so close to Barnstable Harbor. As they filled their house with Edie and her siblings and then her cousins that became her siblings after tragedy struck, Jane never asked for credit. Never took it. Edie didn’t know of the support that encouraged her father to write in those formative years until she came across the letters, years after both her parents were gone. She realized that there would have been no Slaughterhouse-Five if Jane had not been there, not only keeping the riot of children alive but seeming to accomplish the much more challenging marital task of continuing to believe in the partner you’ve picked. Even when there’s no money. Even when the recognition comes decades after the work of writing has begun. 

But Jane’s name is forgotten now (along with how many other strong silent wives?), though she did write her own book, and her daughter Edie went on to paint women – domestic goddesses – in heroic states.  It is his name that lives on.

Back at Sturgis Library, the readers read on, the listeners listen on, my turn comes and goes. And even now, so fresh from the reading, I can’t remember who spoke the words from his pages:

“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”

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[killingthebuddha]

Habbakuk and the Angel by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Photo by Jennifer Nelson.

In the summer of 2016, my sister Cecilia and I took a road trip to see our parents. We drove from the Northeast to the Midwest, making our way through New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana (where I swore I would never ever live, and where I now currently live), and on to Illinois. We’d been looking forward to our time together, but our spirits waned as the trip continued, mine in particular. It took me so long to figure out what was wrong—why I couldn’t sleep, why I was sullen for long stretches of time, why I sometimes couldn’t breathe; why even now I can’t bring myself to write what exactly I kept thinking, hoping, wishing. 

The horrifying events of June 2016, when 49 people were murdered in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, were weighing on my mind and spirit, threatening to pull me under. Like me, most of the victims were young, queer Latinos, and I was lost in the aftermath of their deaths. My depression wasn’t just sadness, but something deeper, something abiding and heavy. It made me realize that I was fundamentally changing. My relationship to the world was eroding along with me.

I didn’t think that I could cope, but somehow I made it through. Several months later, when I apologized to Cecilia while we were walking to get some Thanksgiving wine, we bonded over the heaviness of our feelings: sadness and anger, bitterness, despondency. These emotions seemed like more than moods. They were deeper than personal despair, more unruly and unmanageable.

*          *          *

Right when I heard the news of the Pulse shooting, as Facebook has reminded me every year since, I looked up some Bible verses and posted them there:

I felt beyond distraught. I felt that nothing could ever change, that horror, violence, and destruction were the only possible outcomes of life. The verses were less like a balm and more like a lonely beer at a bar. They cooled something unnamable that seemed to steadily burn inside me; they quenched a thirst that seemed to be coming from my belly, not my throat.

What business does a profoundly Atheist person have in turning to the Bible in times of crisis? Though I have not kept the faith of my Catholic father or my evangelical mother, apparently I have kept their sacred text. I find the prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible (or, as I grew up calling it, the Old Testament) to be especially fascinating and disturbing, even unnerving. But I also find some of them oddly calming, especially in the face of disaster, bigotry, and violence. They provide me with a powerful anchor in the various storms of the twenty-first century. What emanates from these books lends words to the voiceless sorrow I feel, to the rage and helplessness that pin me down. They provide a strange solace when I can’t move, when it’s hard to do anything but overthink, or under-think, or hard even to think at all. 

*          *          *

Even as I turn to the prophets in times of national crisis and mourning, I’m wary of some of the ways that they have been wielded in this country. I’m wary even though I can sometimes feel the appeal.

One of my favorite novels to teach is John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck’s prophetic plea on behalf of America’s rural poor, displaced due to the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the changing economic and demographic realities of the United States, became an instant best-seller when it was published in 1939, so much so that it has become a cultural anchor. The title, suggested to Steinbeck by his first wife Carol, takes up the famous lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” written by Julia Ward Howe:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

These lyrics explicitly echo images of divine wrath and trampled grapes from the book of Isaiah. To my mind, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel form the linked strands of American exceptionalist rhetoric when it comes to motivating emotional and political reactions to injustice—messianism and millennialism intertwined to form a specifically American response to crisis. Like the God of these books, the United States judges, demands justice, and justifies taking vengeance on its own behalf: The nation becomes the “terrible swift sword” loosed upon the world, making sure that our version of truth marches on. 

Steinbeck’s book can be read as a classic example of a jeremiad: a national call to repentance that takes its form and name from the book of Jeremiah, and that describes Isaiah and Ezekiel as well.  Well before The Grapes of Wrathwas written, the jeremiad had a robust history in American letters. (Sacvan Berovitch’s The American Jeremiadremains the quintessential study of this American tendency from the Puritans onwards.) And, as I have seen over the last several years, the jeremiad remains a powerful presence in our contemporary life, continually providing an expressive outlet for our anger about injustice. It tempers the steel of Howe’s divine retribution, of Steinbeck’s anger at a nation hell-bent on rejecting migrants, and of much of our cultural anger right now.

Turning to the prophets in this way gives many Americans a seemingly secure knowledge of a future that will eventually benefit us: Though the moral arc of the universe might be long, it bends towards justice, right? I teach American literature at a Catholic university, and I can see how this interpretive tendency gives many of my Christian students a sense of hope and blessed destiny—the universe, for them, has a predisposition towards correction. All they have to do is believe the right things, fulfill the right prophecies. This is supported by the self-fulfilling Christian teleological progression, which informs the possible interpretations many of my students bring to the table: They know the New Testament is the fulfillment and correction of the Old, because this is, simply, what they know. This means that the Bible’s complexities are quite often ironed over. Isaiah and Jeremiah point towards Christian theology, and the other prophetic books, by virtue of being prophetic books, must do so, too. Everything, it seems, leads to redemption. 

*          *          *

I want to suggest that many of us—as American Christians, or as adherents of American civil religion—have been reading these biblical books the wrong way. Perhaps we’ve even been reading the wrong books of the Bible altogether. This is a self-derived realization, one that maybe has no power outside of my own feelings, but it’s a realization that I’ve come to trust, and even to cling to.

In recent years, I’ve mostly stopped turning to Jeremiah, Ezekiel, or Isaiah to provide words for my fury, because it seems the moral arc of the universe is taking too long to come to its just conclusion. Perhaps it is even bending awayfrom justice. 

The end of times may be coming, especially given the disaster of what Jason Moore has called the Capitalocene (a stronger term for what many of us have been calling the Anthropocene). But despite the power of Howe’s poem, I cannot bring myself to imagine God “trampling out the vintage” to extract the juice of vengeance such that it benefits the nation’s image of itself as God’s aggrieved people. Or, to turn to the original, I can’t understand the world in light of Isaiah’s mediation of Yahweh’s anger: “The wine press I have trodden alone, and of my people there was no one with me. I trod them in my anger, and trampled them down in my wrath; Their blood spurted on my garments; all my apparel I stained. For the day of vengeance was in my heart, my year for redeeming was at hand” (Isaiah 63: 3-4). 

God’s fury in this passage is terrifying, but it does seem uniquely suited to the American imagination: Isolated, God smashes the people arrayed against him, and their blood fertilizes the ground in waves of crimson. God stands uniquely above his enemies, alone in his moral certainty. His garments are stained, and his feet carry out his monomaniacal mission on “the day of vengeance.” This violent retribution, exacted through a terrible cosmic anger, creates an enormous mantle of outward-facing rage, one that the United States has cloaked itself with over and over again—exacting vengeance on the wrongdoers of the world, acting as the “world’s police force.” The world, which has wronged him/us, suffers God’s/our vindication through punishment. And, as in Isaiah, there can be no stopping the necessary anger of this solitary fury. As a nation, we’ve so often made a complete turn towards identifying with and as God, especially when it comes to vengeance and outrage on a national scale. Righteous and proud isolation, then, has so often been our chosen position: With or without the world, we willhave vengeance, and through this vengeance, justice. 

So, no: I do not turn to Isaiah anymore. Instead, I turn to two other prophetic books. Paradoxically, these books grant solace because they offer none, whether through anger or through satisfying justice. I don’t feel nihilistic when reading these books, though I feel that in reading them, I can admit the depth to which our out-of-balance world is, indeed, harming us. It feels right and important to acknowledge that what matters, matters now, and that we shouldn’t wait for a perfectly redeemed afterlife. These are books of keening, of sackcloth and ashes, of judgment that bends not only on our enemies, but the entire world: Lamentations and Habakkuk. 

*          *          *

Habakkuk and Lamentations cry out for justice—but it is a justice that cannot be rendered according to our dictates:

You see, O LORD, how I am wronged; do me justice! You see all their vindictiveness, all their plots against me. You hear their insults, O LORD, the whispered murmurings of my foes, against me all the day; Whether they sit or stand, see, I am their taunt song. Requite them as they deserve, O LORD, according to their deeds; Give them hardness of heart, as your curse upon them; Pursue them in wrath and destroy them from under your heavens! (Lamentations 3: 59-66).

The prophet here begs for vengeance, yearns for the vindictive destruction of his enemies. Yet, there is no righteous response from God. Indeed, the book ends thus: “You, O LORD, are enthroned forever; your throne stands from age to age. Why, then, should you forget us, abandon us so long a time? Lead us back to you, O LORD, that we may be restored: give us anew such days as we had of old. For now you have indeed rejected us, and in full measure turned your wrath against us.” (Lamentations 5: 19-22). 

Turning towards reparation, Lamentations offers a vision distinct from Isaiah or Jeremiah. As many Jewish commentators have mentioned, it is a vision that names a distinct temporal and ethical vision that is geared towards atonement and reparation, and not towards individual self-fulfillment through the redemption of grace. This is a vision that Christianity, writ large, has studiously avoided. Reparation, while not the antithesis of redemption, is nevertheless a different way altogether of atoning. It means acknowledging and redressing harm in the present. It means seeking forgiveness as an active presence in the world, rather than building towards an afterlife. Reparation does not see sin as something washed away; even when forgiven, it is not forgotten or left behind (and so, hopefully, it is not repeated).

 In October 2018, on another road trip, this time from Indiana to Connecticut, I spent the night in Pittsburgh at the house of my dear friend, Liz Reich. (It was exactly two weeks before the Tree of Life synagogue was violently attacked by a white supremacist.) On the night I saw her, Liz broke out a beautiful tequila, and we got to talking about our faith traditions. She explained, excitedly, that I was missing something important, and it was likely due to my cultural Christianity. Judaism’s robust attention to the prophetic books yields a form of atonement quite different from Christianity’s emphasis on salvation; the rituals on Yom Kippur, in particular, stress a communal repentance that forms a conscious act of reparation.

I realized that this longstanding attention to atonement and redress informs my friend Mollie Eisenberg’s Passover Seder, in which Alicia Ostriker, Emma Lazarus, Walt Whitman, Claudia Rankine, Joy Harjo, Audre Lorde, FDR, and Muriel Rukeyser form a constellation of justice-driven thought, all of them bearing witness and demanding repair. As someone outside of the tradition, I’m moved by how many Seder Hagaddot are collaboratively constituted by an accretion of thoughts and sympathies across time and space.

The recognition, in Lamentations, is of disastrous and grievous harm done to God; of the sundering of a covenant. Restoration is begged—but, importantly, it is a restoration that will not be granted according to our rules. Instead, it will remake the world, and not in any image we might conjure. Although “such days as we had of old” are begged of God, these days cannot and will not return. Lamentations is not a book of vengeance against one’s enemies, but a terrifying recognition of the slow violence being rendered unto usdue to the harms we ourselves have inflicted on others. In Lamentations, the prophet means how we have harmed our covenant with God. For the purposes of this essay, and for the purposes of life in the US in the twenty-first century, it may well be a book about the ways we have harmed our covenants with each other, and the commandments we have been given: To be loving, to be devoted, to refuse to harm.

*          *          *

I consider Lamentations’ spectacular keening a poem uniquely suited for our time.

We have harmed the world beyond all hope, we have harmed future generations in ways that are grievous to the extreme. 

We have refused to atone for the sins of chattel slavery, mass incarceration, and genocide, and have indeed built our nation in the valley of these dry bones (bones that, as Ezekiel reminds us, will rise up). 

We beg for restoration (for America to be “great again”) but we do not turn towards loving justice; instead, we demand that our feelings of exceptionalism be redeemed as our specific birthright.

We define righteousness for ourselves (and make it tautological and self-fulfilling), rather than as something larger, something external and communal. 

We celebrate freedom while we cage migrants (children, adults, asylum seekers, refugees, wanderers, hopers) in squalor and order those sequestered to drink out of the same toilet bowls in which they relieve themselves.

This kind of hubristic demand—for exceptionalism, for self-asserted righteousness—is looked upon in horror in Lamentations, and it is angrily condemned in Habakkuk. If Lamentations begs for forgiveness and restoration, recognition, and embrace, then Habakkuk shouts out a vision of justice, redress, and reparation. Habakkuk lays out a vision of world-shaking, world-remaking justice that smashes any scale of human recognition. There is no redemption, because there can never be redemption. There can only be reparation.

*          *          *

For the last several years, Habakkuk has been the book I have turned to most urgently and often. Even before I quoted Habakkuk on Facebook in the early morning of June 12, 2016, I turned to it after the murder of Trayvon Martin. Two years after Trayvon was killed, and a year after his murderer was declared not guilty, Michael Brown was killed. After no charges were brought against the police officer who murdered him, I mourned Michael with a Bible in my lap and the television blaring in front of me. Habakkuk, once more, lay open.

*          *          *

Habakkuk is one of those books of the Bible that’s often more notable for its name than anything else. When I was a child, it was one of those Vacation Bible School gems of knowledge that helped one win prizes for remembering all 66 books of the Protestant Bible (and still brings forth an image of a “Ha-backpack,” which is what I first thought the name was, which in my mind’s eye was a backpack that looked like a book, strapped onto an old, bearded man). To my adult mind, Habakkuk blends the early anger of Isaiah with the mourning of Lamentations almost perfectly: The prophet stands helpless, watching fury and grief wash by and through him. Habakkuk begins with a scream to the cosmos befitting Job in his hour of deepest pain: 

How long, O LORD? I cry for help but you do not listen! I cry out to you, “Violence!” but you do not intervene. Why do you let me see ruin; why must I look at misery? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and clamorous discord. This is why the law is benumbed, and judgment is never rendered: Because the wicked circumvent the just; that is why judgment comes forth perverted. (Habakkuk 1: 1-4)

Habakkuk was watching helplessly when Eric Garner’s executioner broke his throat and choked his breath. Habakkuk gushes forth as Sandra Bland’s blood still cries out for justice. Habakkuk screams when humans are encaged. Habakkuk shouts when the relatives of the Sandy Hook victims demand that something, anything be done to prevent gun violence. Habakkuk was the form my melancholy took when the Parkland shooting destroyed the lives of not only a school, but solidified a young generation’s traumas. My soul sought Habakkuk when the Pulse shooting rendered me sick with grief, imagining the desperation felt by the people at the club that night, who were there to find ways to give shape to the love they felt. I find Habbakuk in Orlando, Birmingham, Charleston, Pittsburgh, Poway, Christchurch, and countless other places woven together in the horrifying tapestry of white supremacist violations of sacred spaces. It’s what I was reading while editing this essay, refreshing the news from El Paso and Dayton. Habakkuk wails, “You do not intervene. Why do you let me see ruin?”

*          *          *

See who this reminds you of. After rendering his complaint, Habakkuk receives God’s word: 

Then the LORD answered me and said: write down the vision clearly upon the tablets, so that one can read it readily. … He who opens wide his throat like the nether world, and is insatiable as death, who gathers to himself all the nations, and rallies to himself all the people—Shall not all these take up a taunt against him, satire and epigrams about him, to say: Woe to him who stores up what is not his: How long can it last! He loads himself down with debts. Shall not your creditors rise suddenly? Shall not they who make you tremble awake? You shall become their spoil! Because you despoiled many peoples all the rest of the nations shall despoil you; Because of men’s blood shed, and violence done to the land, to the city and to all who dwell in it. Woe to him who pursues evil gain for his household, setting his nest on high to escape the reach of misfortune! (Habakkuk 2: 2, 5-10) 

Eat the rich, indeed. Habakkuk’s God censures anyone “who stores up what is not his.” The temptation, of course, is to turn immediately to the man elected president in 2016; yet he is no fulfillment of any prophecy. No, the “he” here, in our time, is more than that man: It’s capitalism, it’s the despoiling of nature, it’s violence against women, it’s racism, it’s genocide. It’s the United States of America, which set its nest on high, and through its supposedly virtuous anger and its vehement righteousness “despoiled many peoples,” built a world through “violence done to the land.” Habakkuk’s God deplores everything that the United States lays claim to in pursuit of its laudable ideals, the “evil gain for [its] household” in its quest to build John Winthrop’s shining “city on a hill,” an ideal that has morphed into the “nest on high” that God roundly condemns to the prophet.

*          *          *

Habakkuk ends with a canticle, and it gives me shivers to think about it sung aloud. It is to be sung “to a plaintive tune,” accompanied “with stringed instruments.” Watching God wreak his havoc on the earth, the prophet sings: “Is your anger against the streams, O LORD? …. Bared and ready is your bow, filled with arrows is your quiver. Into streams you split the earth; at sight of you the mountains tremble. A torrent of rain descends; the ocean gives forth its roar. The sun forgets to rise, the moon remains in its shelter” (Habakkuk 3: 8-11). As God tramples the nations, Habakkuk fearfully sings, “I hear, and my body trembles; at the sound, my lips quiver. Decay invades my bones, my legs tremble beneath me. I await the day of distress that will come upon the people who attack us” (Habakkuk 3:16). 

I love the phrase, “decay invades my bones,” and I looked up the King James Version of verse 16 to see how the archaic English would render the lines (to be frank, I also love that this is a “3:16” that sounds nothinglike the other, more famous one): “When I heard, my belly trembled; my lips quivered at the voice: rottenness entered into my bones, and I trembled in myself, that I might rest in the day of trouble: when he cometh up unto the people, he will invade them with his troops.” The KJV spells out the bodily effects of God’s vengeance: The belly quakes, the lips quiver, trembling abounds in the soul. “Decay invades my bones” is powerful, but “rottenness entered into my bones” is gratuitous and emphatic; it conveys a filthy sense of God’s rendered vengeance. God is not only creation, here, but visceral de-creation—he is not only abundance, but abjection, not only restoration, but rottenness.

*          *          *

In Habakkuk’s final chapter, God storms through the earth like the mythic vision of Lake Okeechobee that Zora Neale Hurston conveys in Their Eyes Were Watching God: 

Ten feet higher and as far as they could see the muttering wall advanced before the braced-up waters like a road crusher on a cosmic scale. The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles an hour wind had loosed his chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters; uprooted them like grass and rushed on after his supposed-to-be-conquerors, rolling the dikes, rolling the houses, rolling the people in the houses along with other timbers. The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel. 

God in Habakkuk destroys the world throughthe world; the world has turned against humankind, because humankind has turned against the world. It is Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joanand Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilationcombined: a world that can no longer be contained, that can no longer be understood and interpreted, and all because we have flayed it and betrayed it. This is a world in which our butchery has been turned against us, in which justice means that we must bear witness to and suffer the terrible, overwhelming shape that it takes. This is not because justice must always be awful; no, as Habakkuk notes at the very beginning, it is because the world is out of balance. There is no justice because the greedy, the violent, the bigoted, and the tyrannical have bent justice towards their own benefit. Justice has become a means of justifying wealth’s creation and sustenance; it is not about love or truth. Justice has been betrayed, and so it can no longer be used to address the broken world. Reparation, instead, is required.

*          *          *

Why do some of us have to witness and bear the destruction of a world—a destruction that we did not make? It makes no sense that those of us who have suffered through coloniality, white supremacy, religious fundamentalism, and the abusive ways that heteronormativity and patriarchy have been used as cudgels, must then also have the world collapse around us. But then another question arises: If that world isn’t torn asunder, then are we in danger of inheriting or continuing that very world? And another: Can a violent world ever stop being violent? Yes, Habakkuk and Lamentations tell us—but it must be undone, and a new world must be willed into being. The world must be repaired—and we must forget about our narratives of redemption.

Otherwise, we are left begging for mercy in the apocalypse, as the late W.S. Merwin expresses in his 1967 poem “For a Coming Extinction”(which my partner Brandon Menke emailed to his friends this spring for National Poetry Month). Merwin asks that a Gray whale (along with its calves, as well as sea cows, Great Auks, gorillas, and other animals he calls “Our sacrifices”) bear our witness to God. In his cutting final stanza, Merwin commands,

Join your word to theirs

Tell him

That it is we who are important

Merwin’s bitterness pervades the poem, and his prophetic witness demands that we join his lamentation, that we understand precisely the contours of the world we have created. Merwin’s fury, rejecting the structuring bounds of punctuation and order throughout the poem, tosses aside the redeeming god of human invention in favor of a terrible deity who, surely, will render only one judgement. The poem reminds me of how Lamentations and Habakkuk (in opposition to how the American Christian imaginary has taken and used Isaiah and Jeremiah) form twinned elegies. Their keening, wailing verses do not conclude with visions of fulfillment or glory. 

It is no wonder, honestly, that we do not often meditate on these books, and that culturally, we rarely search for consolation within them. These two prophets stare, open-eyed and weeping, as God tears apart creation. And they know, in that destruction, there is re-creation—but not redemption. What is left on the other side? What does paradise look like? 

In ocean hush a woman black as firewood is singing. Next to her is a younger woman whose head rests on the singing woman’s lap. Ruined fingers troll the tea brown hair. All the colors of seashells—wheat, roses, pearl—fuse in the younger woman’s face. Her emerald eyes adore the black face framed in cerulean blue. Around them on the beach, sea trash gleams. Discarded bottle caps sparkle near a broken sandal. A small dead radio plays the quiet surf.

There is nothing to beat this solace which is what Piedade’s song is about, although the words evoke memories neither one has ever had; of reaching age in the company of the other; of speech shared and divided bread smoking from the fire; the unambivalent bliss of going home to be at home—the ease of coming back to love begun.

When the ocean heaves sending rhythms of water ashore, Piedade looks to see what has come. Another ship, perhaps, but different, heading to port, crew and passengers, lost and saved, atremble, for they have been disconsolate for some time. Now they will rest before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in paradise. 

The final paragraphs of Toni Morrison’s Paradiseimagine reparation, rather than redemption; Lamentations and Habakkuk do, too. “Now [we] will rest before shouldering the endless work [we] were created to do down here in paradise.” Paradise is down,and not up; it is here, and not there. But in order to make paradise happen down here, the world’s structural violence must be un-created, and the world must be undone and refashioned through reparation.

*          *          *

There’s another prophetic book I should mention, one that an exceptional prophet of our age, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., consistently referenced: Amos. The night before he was assassinated, Dr. King gave his extraordinary “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” speech in Memphis, in support of the striking sanitation workers. About a third of the way through the speech, King looks out at the crowd assembled in the Mason Temple and gathers himself. With the crowd’s participation (which The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute wonderfully transcribes), King builds a vision of prophetic witness: 

We are going on. We need all of you. You know, what’s beautiful to me is to see all of these ministers of the Gospel. (Amen) It’s a marvelous picture. (Yes) Who is it that is supposed to articulate the longings and aspirations of the people more than the preacher? Somewhere the preacher must have a kind of fire shut up in his bones (Yes), and whenever injustice is around he must tell it. (Yes) Somehow the preacher must be an Amos, who said, “When God Speaks, who can but prophesy?” (Yes) Again with Amos, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” (Yes) Somehow the preacher must say with Jesus, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me (Yes), because He hath anointed me (Yes), and He’s anointed me to deal with the problems of the poor.” (Go ahead)

This whole essay, I’ve been suggesting in a wayward way that the problem with the dominant Christian interpretation of the prophets has been on insisting that Jesus is the messiah, that he’s the fulfillment of what has been re-titled, in an ambitious act of revision, the Old Testament. In making them subservient to Christianity’s interpretive directives, the prophetic books have had their remarkable heft distorted. 

Dr. King directly links Amos and Jesus not through messianic fulfillment, but through anointment and appointment. Anyone can be anointed, and anyone can be appointed. As a great moral philosopher, this is the link Jesus himself drew to the Hebrew Bible he knew so well, and it’s the heart of his radical message: Anyone and everyone can be the child of God, and anyone and everyone can be anointed. By insisting that Jesus’ anointing makes him the only messiah, American Christian civil religion has staked its hopes on salvation in a world to come, at the expense of the world that exists.

 What we should acknowledge instead is that we only have a partial vision, or, perhaps, many partial visions. And what Habakkuk and Lamentations give us is not redemption, can never be redemption—the gift is, instead, to always and ever repair and restore. And, indeed, the gift is one we share with our friends and our neighbors, in ever expanding circles of recognition and care.

Here, now, this is our task: Reparation. In the wake of endless harm, we must make reparations, and in doing so, admit that the world is larger than us. We must insist on and face towards truth and beauty even in their absence, and refuse to abide in a world built on the souls and bones of others. *

Thank you to Briallen Hopper for the in-depth editing of this essay, and for the kindness of including this essay in Killing the Buddha. Thank you, too, to Brandon Menke, for a patient and considerate eye. Thank you to Yolanda Robles and Jay Miller for their feedback on earlier versions of this essay. 

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“All of us become pilgrims at one time or another, even though we may not give ourselves the name.” –Richard Niebuhr

PJ, who presides over Dublin’s dusty shop Sweny’s, has read Joyce’s Ulysses 51 times in 6 different languages. Over a dark pint of Guinness, with the mist from the glass melting on his fingertips, PJ speaks about the lines from the book that are making his pulse race that minute. He doesn’t try to persuade you of their sacredness or its genius. He just smiles slightly, revealing coffee-stained and wayward teeth, and nods as he cites whole paragraphs. PJ loves Joyce. To PJ, Sweny’s, the shop where Leopold Bloom bought lemon soap for his wife Molly in Joyce’s epic, is an invaluable relic of Joyce’s Dublin, and he would do anything to protect its legacy. Even as rent steadily increases, PJ continues to sell bars of lemon soap in the chemist’s shop, now cluttered with old photographs, various editions of Ulysses, and hundreds of small glass bottles. PJ says with a wry smile, “the soap cleans the body while the book corrupts the mind.” 

Every year on June 16, the same date that marked Leopold Bloom’s walk around Dublin in 1904, a host of literary pilgrims visit the city to pay tribute to Joyce. Sweny’s was a sacred stop on the tour for people I met last Bloomsday, people who came from Australia, Japan, Bosnia, South Korea, the United States, Germany, Spain, Argentina, England, France, and Switzerland. 

In the Catholic tradition of pilgrimage, a location that is considered sacred is often referred to as a “thin place,” a place where the space between heaven and earth wanes, and becomes rarefied or thin. Such places typically mark the site of a saint’s ascension, a miraculous act, or some epiphanic moment. In other religions, places may be considered sacred because they have been saturated with meaning by God. What might a thin place be in a conversation about literary pilgrimage? Perhaps where the distance between an author’s imagination and a reader’s lived reality narrows and eventually collapses. And where the human being who generated meaning in the place—the author, the artist, the genius—begins to acquire divine status. Joyce certainly seems to assume deific qualities every year on Bloomsday as devotees travel to Dublin and re-enact the events from Bloom’s life, visit the places he walked, and read excerpts of Ulysses aloud.

In the home I grew up in, we consider all books sacred, and one of my family’s South Indian traditions has become practically reflexive for me. When someone accidentally drops a book or grazes one with a foot, we place our hand on the cover and gently touch our closed eyelids. We thus symbolically ask forgiveness for treating a book with inadvertent disregard. My parents instilled in me a deep appreciation for written words. Literary pilgrimage provides an opportunity to reflect on that appreciation, and on what happens when it extends beyond an individual gesture to a collective expression of reverence. Why do people become dedicated to one author, or one text? And how does that dedication evolve from fleeting infatuation to persistent devotion? 

Last summer, on a quest to reckon with these questions, I attended the Bloomsday festival, which is primarily organized by the James Joyce Center on Dublin’s North Great George’s Street. Deirdre Ellis-King, the chair of the board of the James Joyce Center, notes that the center is committed to providing “different points of entry” into the text, be it “music and song, drama, costume, or food.” The entry points Ellis-King referred to are visible throughout Dublin on Bloomsday. As I walked down North Great George’s Street, people were dressed for the trends of 1904—most men sported black top hats, and carried walking sticks, while women donned petticoats, lace gloves, and parasols. One man even tipped his hat, saluted me, and said with a melancholic tinge, “what a shame, poor fellow, Paddy Dignam,” referencing the character whose funeral in Ulysses occurs on June 16. 

When I arrived at Davy Byrne’s, a central pub in the novel, I witnessed a joyful uproar of Irish anthems and songs from the book. There were productions of Ulysses all over Dublin, from the Abbey’s adaptation of the entire epic to the Bewley Café’s staged reading of Molly Bloom’s monologue, and her famed finale, “and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” There were pub crawls across Dublin, not to mention food tours that took visitors down Bloom’s bizarre trajectory of consumption, from kidneys for breakfast to gorgonzola sandwiches and burgundy for lunch. All these events were meant to challenge the notion that Ulysses ought to be abstruse and abstract for readers. Bloomsday participants come with varying levels of Ulysses knowledge, but even if you haven’t read the book, you can still down a pint or digest a kidney. 

Sam Slote, a professor at Trinity College Dublin, who has organized an academic symposium on Ulysses, cites Joyce’s remark, “If I can get to the heart of Dublin, I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world.” Slote comments that in order “to get to the heart of Dublin, Joyce represents the city in all its specificities.” In this way, he “gets to everywhere else and all their specificities.” Deirdre Ellis-King agrees, remarking that “Joyce and Dublin are synonymous, it’s any-man and every-man, you could be in any city in the world and enjoy the same kind of experiences of the streetscape.” Paradoxically, by being so precise, the text becomes universal. This stylistic technique is analogous to the character of Bloom. “It’s not that every man likes kidneys for breakfast, but every man has his particularities,” Slote says. It is in this way that Ulysses speaks to any reader, any person in motion, any pilgrim—not in the specifics of every human being, but in the specificity with which any human being can be represented. No one is special. Everyone is special. Stephen Dedalus, the other main character in the novel, has a line, “every life is many days, day after day.” This could be the motto for not only the epic, but also the festival commemorating June 16—any day, in any life, could be Bloomsday. The annual convergence of time and place restores significance to every ordinary and individual encounter, to every overlooked dollop of time. 

Jessica Yates, who oversees the Bloomsday festival and manages the James Joyce Center, tells me she “converted” to Joyce (her word) because of Bloomsday.  Unlike people who embark on a pilgrimage to honor the text they love, Yates casually went out to a pub on Bloomsday eleven years ago without any prior knowledge of Ulysses. It was there that she met “someone special,” and they set out on a project to read Ulysses before their first anniversary. She says with a trill of laughter, “I got so into Bloomsday.”      

She recommends I sit in on one of the storied reading circles at Sweny’s. I do, and am struck by the variety of voices present. Some readers sit with a cane or walker leaning against theirs chairs, and others sprint over to the shop after class. As Joycean phrases echo in the small confines of Sweny’s, I hear accents from Argentina, South Korea, and France. One Dubliner named Paddy has been attending the reading circle on and off for about a decade. Paddy wears long trousers, a light blue button down shirt, and round reading glasses. He seems serious, but he also has a toothy grin. While some wanderers came into the bookshop after one or two beers, Paddy arrives early, eager to pour over the text he deems so valuable. He has read the book in 6-month cycles about ten or eleven times—he can’t recall exactly. He views Ulysses as a vessel through which he can access his own ancestors, a thin place with miraculous possibility. He explains, “I am from Dublin. My parents, my grandparents too. I have no non-Irish connections. I think I am deeply of Dublin, and there are few books deeply of Dublin. Ulysses is one of them.” He explains why the book resonates with him emotionally by pointing to its melodic qualities: “There is a music in the language, a rhythm in the speech. I can hear my parents who are now dead, my grandparents who are now dead, I can hear them talking, when I read it, I can hear their voices.” 

Yet another regular at Sweny’s is Finon, a former student at Trinity College. He has been attending readings of Ulysses for four years, and he loves how Sweny’s regulars move “in a loop,” how the book itself is like a “carousel, no fun unless you get to do the whole thing.” “After all,” he chuckles, “if you haven’t finished, it’s not worth the money.” Like many sacred texts, Ulysses contains philosophical reflections, surprising imagery, and beautiful poetry. And like many religious holidays, which draw pilgrims from all over the world to a holy site, Bloomsday too, according to Finon, becomes a “spawning day,” to which “a lot of people return.” Both re-reading and pilgrimage are rituals of returning.

Attempts to disavow the sacred aspects of the festival sometimes sound inadvertently religious. When Finon describes the goal of Bloomsday, he seems a bit like a defensive missionary: “The attempt to popularize the text is really an attempt to create an invitation into it. I mean nobody’s looking to actively spread it onto people, but to keep it as welcoming as possible.” Similarly, Jessica Yates says she wants to get people excited about the text, but she insists, “I don’t want to impose it on everyone.” They are enthusiasts who hesitate to proselytize.

Indeed, Professor Slote of Trinity College Dublin notes with a hint of smug amusement that many people were asking him what he thought of Bloomsday from a scholarly perspective and he was “about to say something,” until he realized, “I’m not going to be this guy.” It would be understandable, from an academic standpoint, to scoff at some of what unfolds. For starters, many of the most devoted participants have never read the book. Take John, the James Joyce lookalike who has stood outside the James Joyce Center every June 16 for the last seven years. He carries a cane, and wears a black top hat, a suit, a healthy gray moustache and a tiny square beard. He peers through large circular spectacles, and takes photographs with tourists. Originally a hat-maker, John grew up in Dublin. He explains the mass of people at the James Joyce Center in an assured tone: “People don’t have to be readers to enjoy Bloomsday, people just like the association.” When I asked John what he thought when he read Ulysses for the first time, his eyes stretched open, and he raised his brows: “Read it? I wrote it!” I smiled, and he conceded, “I’m afraid I didn’t read it.”

For Joyce, a writer who said that if “Ulysses isn’t worth reading, then life isn’t worth living,” John’s confession could be considered blasphemous. But returning to Professor Slote’s less judgmental perspective, it’s unnecessary to “be that guy” who reads and analyzes Ulysses in order to have a genuine relationship with the text. Slote analogizes criticism of Bloomsday to what “we have in America—the [rhetoric of the] war against Christmas … the secularization of Bloomsday is not a bad thing.” 

Is Bloomsday a sign that the religion of Joyce is somehow being compromised, challenged, thinned out in the public’s touristic, commercial and dangerously superficial imagination? Or is Bloomsday’s existence reaffirming the sacredness of Ulysses to its readers? After all, not everyone who travels to Lourdes has read the Bible, and not everyone who journeys to Mecca has read the Qur’an. The mastery of a text is not necessary, or at the very least, not a prerequisite for meaningful motivations. Pilgrimage provides a different kind of proof of faith.

As Slote elaborates on not wanting to be the Grinch of Bloomsday, he says, Bloomsday “is not a bad thing—usually it falls on nice, sunny weather,” and it’s “a pleasant excuse to have a bit of a lark.” He concurs with the organizers of the Bloomsday festival that it’s good to get people interested, and even though he says “my job is generally not to think about popularizing Ulysses,” he believes offering various points of entry for readers is noble. He elaborates on Joyce’s mission with Ulysses: “While it is a book that is studied at universities, it’s not just for those people. It has a wider audience. The way culture has moved, these things tend to be more academicized, [and] something like [Bloomsday] is a good counterbalance.”

Leslie Daugherty, from the North Side of Dublin, plays Leopold Bloom in the James Joyce Center productions of Ulysses, and he agrees that the so-called “secularization” of Joyce is a good thing. He describes the text as “a fabulous read,” but takes issue with some of the academics who treat Ulysses with the wrong kind of “reverence,” effectively “making Ulysses unattainable.” He objects to the notion that Ulysses is for “the posh people,” and shook his head as he said, in a throaty voice, “No. Ulysses is for everyone who has a mind of his own.” 

 Marty, a man from Donegal, Ireland, who is a marketing and events coordinator at the James Joyce Center, first encountered Joyce when he read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and he says with a chuckle that “a lot of teenage Catholic dudes in Ireland identified with it.” He describes being deeply moved by the part where Stephen is called to the priesthood but says, instead, that he is an artist. The tensions between religious tradition, devotion, expectation, and the inclination towards the life of an artist resonate with Marty. 

Leopold Bloom, Ulysses, and Bloomsday itself are all fraught with similar tensions. Bloom is a man who loves his wife and preaches love but deceives her and behaves disloyally. Ulysses contains styles that contradict and challenge one another—clean prose, experimental stream-of-consciousness, advertisement jargon, and saccharine romantic-novel satire. Bloomsday has attendees who have read the text 51 times and people who have never heard of Joyce. The idea of “literary pilgrimage,” too, brims with ambiguity. Are books meant to be read, or to be revered? And does a book find its meaning in an isolated experience, or in a collective celebration? 

In 1996, Jonathan Franzen revised an essay initially published as “The Harper’s Essay” and retitled it “Why Bother.” In it, Franzen laments the demise of a reading-culture, and describes his “despair about the American novel.” He writes about one novel he read in reverent prose, marking his gratitude “that someone besides me had suffered from these ambiguities and had seen light on their far side—that Fox’s book had been published and preserved; that I could find company and consolation and hope in an object pulled almost at random from a bookshelf—felt akin to an instance of religious grace.” The experience of literature, of reading as an act of worship, is often seen as an individual one, as it is in this passage. Indeed, the collection for which Franzen revised his essay is called How to be Alone. 

 Yet Bloomsday’s beauty is in its social activity. As many literary pilgrims have pointed out, Joyce wanted his text to be democratic. The point of Bloomsday is for “any man and every man,” and the text is about bringing reverence to our everyday. Ulysses itself, in various bodily and granular descriptions elevates the profane to an esteemed status. For example, in one instance, Joyce satirically describes a man seated at the foot of a large tower as a “broad-shouldered, deep-chested, strong-limbed, frank-eyed, red-haired, freely-freckled, shaggy-bearded, wide-mouthed, large-nosed, long-headed, deep-voiced, bare-kneed, brawny-handed, hair-legged, ruddy-faced, sinew-armed hero.” And just as Joyce plays with his characters, gifting them gallant qualities (albeit in a sardonic tone), so does Bloomsday toy with its visitors and their expectations, until people find communion in a collective, at times gimmicky, at times reverent experience. Ulysses motivates its readers enough that they want to change their physical circumstances, embark on an embodied passage, and develop another vantage-point—beyond the systems of logic and reason that we so often subscribe to. The book inspires people to find one another, to derive solace and soul, from an admittedly kooky community. This somewhat paradoxical combination of the sacred and the irreverent is what permeates Dublin on Bloomsday. There are pub crawls and exclamations of Joycean passages made shriller by grand glasses of Guinness. But there is also something reminiscent of what we see in churches and memorials—pilgrims, persons in motion—seeking answers, inspired by something that has no neat ending, maybe realizing as they wander, that they too, will never be complete. 

Despite all the ambiguity and insecurity that is present when one sets out on a pilgrimage, there is also a yearning. People embark on a pilgrimage in search of something, be it healing, obligation, or understanding. And whether it is religious or literary pilgrimage, we can discover havens in vagrancy the way we do in words. As Franzen puts it, “to write sentences of such authenticity that refuge can be taken in them: Isn’t this enough? Isn’t it a lot?” There are not often clear answers in literature, but when paragraphs protect you, it doesn’t so much matter, does it? There are not clear lines drawn between the drawbacks and merits of Bloomsday either. Tourist Destination or Holy Site? One could easily say that the merits of Bloomsday are inits campiness, its accessibility, and its rendering a “thin place” palpable to readers. Franzen ends his essay with the image of a character discovering in a broken ink bottle “both perdition and salvation.” He writes, at peace without real resolution, “The world was ending then, it’s ending still, and I’m happy to belong to it again.”

Finon, one of the regular members of the Sweny’s reading circle, also embraces contradiction in Bloomsday. He believes that the festival is meaningful, but remarks with a knowing smirk that “on Bloomsday people like to drink and eat strange meat … [but] no one’s really talking about metempsychosis” (a concept of great significance in the novel). Finon asks if I had read Station Island by Seamus Heaney when I press him on the benefits and caveats of literary pilgrimage. I answer that I have not. He is keen to explain, “it’s a poem about revisiting a Catholic pilgrimage site, a catholic shrine …based on the idea that St. Patrick had a vision of purgatory there.” Finon outlines the context of the poem. “He was revisiting the place as a secularized figure … returning to a place he no longer believed in.” This raises an interesting question within a framework of literary pilgrimage. Is it possible to have a jarring return to a place you have lost faith in if all you have lost faith in is the sanctity of the literature (and not, for instance, the existence of God?) 

In Heaney’s poem, various characters appear from disparate significant moments in the history of Ireland. And at the “dead center,” Finon narrates in a thrilled whisper, “he meets the ghost of the dead James Joyce.” Heaney doesn’t name him. He refers only to the storied image of Joyce that impersonators and photographers and readers and writers have memorialized for a century: a tall man with a cane, and the voice of a singer. Heaney writes that the figure held out his hand— “whether to guide or be guided I could not be certain,” because the man seemed blind. In this poem, an itinerant soul reckons with the loss of meaning in a formerly faithful location. That a hero of literature, a genius, artist, poet, is ambiguous in his leadership—that it is unclear whether he wants to lead or be led, demonstrates the deterioration and dismantling of Joyce as an idol, of Joyce as a God. Here Joyce’s hand is “fish-cold and bony,” and the onlooker knows him “in the flesh …wintered hard and sharp as a blackthorn bush.” This is a weathered, human being, a worn body, tired, old, nothing divine or eternal-seeming about him. 

In many ways, this encounter could represent the ultimate challenge, a revisiting and reckoning with the sacred ground on which a metaphorical shrine to Ulysses was erected. In Station Island the character of Joyce does not seem wholly self-assured. He says, “your obligation / is not discharged by any common rite. / What you do you must do on your own … You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.” In this imagination of Joyce, the source of Ulysses’s genius, is not, on the surface, a divine force, because he feels entirely human. Yet, isn’t there something god-like in the command to strike out alone, to stop “listening,” and to embrace a new “rite”?

Considering Joyce as a simultaneously godly and ghostly figure is pertinent to the paradoxes of Bloomsday. Finon notes some logical dilemmas he observed on June 16 every year: “It’s a strange map in itself. I came to the real pub where a fictional character didn’t set foot. I came to the place where nobody bought the bar of soap. (laughs) It’s quite odd.”

Nonetheless, it seems hard to contend with the fact that Ulysses renders Dublin “a thin place.” It is the destination for wandering minds and bodies to relish and find refuge in words that feel mimetic of reality: the ugly, disturbing, devastating, and remedial stories that make up most of our lives. Letting Bloomsday be a thin place extracts communal joy from that solitary act of reading (or even of not-reading!) which can at times be isolating, and that private worship of Joyce, which can at times be embarrassing. A shared human soul pieced together from infinitely complex and individual particularities. One may plumb the mundane for miracles. 

Niebuhr describes pilgrims as people “passing through territories not their own—seeking something we might call completion, or perhaps the word clarity will do as well.” I was passing through a territory not my own, and when I walked the streets of Dublin on Bloomsday, I felt both spiritual and giddy. 

My very first interview, in the early morning of June 16, 2018, was with a couple from Trieste, and it felt like a moment of grace. I saw them loitering by the James Joyce Statue on the main street of the north side of Dublin. They were smiling and taking photos. It turned out that the man had read Ulysses as a young academic forty years ago. He matter-of-factly stated, “It was the text that inspired me to become a professor of literature.” As he spoke, his wife started laughing. I turned to her quizzically. She said, “Oh I’m sorry, it’s just my husband is really downplaying what this book means to him.” I asked her what she meant. “Well, when my first son was born—when I went into labor, what does my husband take along to the hospital? The thick fat book—Ulysses! He read it to me for twelve hours.” I turned to the man, now in his late 70s, a small smile playing on his lips, while a plum flush spread across his cheeks in patches. “Well,” he stuttered, “it’s sizzling…and brilliant…and so human.” This man wanted the very first words his son heard to be those of Joyce. What better anecdote could I have to demonstrate worship of this text? Yet, when I asked if he believed visiting Dublin for Bloomsday would lead to a more intimate understanding of Ulysses, he said, as his forehead creased slightly, “that would be too much, too big a claim.” His wife nodded knowingly. He added, “We’re here for more profane reasons.” 

Literature enables both profane pleasure and reverence. On Bloomsday, no one has to choose. 

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[killingthebuddha]

Upon initial glance, Pee Wee Herman’s ill-fitting striped suit looks dorky, childish even. Gary Austin, founder of the iconic improvisational company The Groundlings, wore this suit on the rare occasions he had to go for a formal job interview or a nerdy audition. But otherwise, this suit sat in his closet as Gary lived his life in white cowboy boots, a cowboy shirt, and blue jeans.

One day while teaching an improvisational acting class, Gary led an exercise where students were told to put on a set of clothes and then assume a character. Paul Rubens needed something to wear so Gary lent him this suit. Then, as if by magic, the character of Pee Wee Herman was born. As the cliché goes, the rest is history. 

At the memorial service for Gary, who died on April 1, 2017, Rubens relayed the origin of his iconic Pee Wee Hermansuit. That simple moment in class changed his life. 

His horse whisperer moves guided hordes of artists to discover their singular voice. If you’ve laughed at the original cast of Saturday Night Liveand performers from the other casts that followed, then you’ve experienced his behind-the-scenes magic. And like George Bailey from It’s a Wonderful Life, no one really knew how many people Gary impacted until he was no longer in the wings.

Such was the essence of Gary, an artist who left behind the fundamentalism of his Nazarene childhood in Corpus Christi, Texas to pursue a career as an actor/singer. Early success with the legendary San Francisco improv group The Committee led to Gary’s ego rising until it burned in an alcohol-fueled blaze of glory.

When I met Gary in 1996, his recovery from alcoholism had transformed him into a softer, more spiritual soul—his classroom became his chapel and it was through here that he ministered to his students. 

At this time, I was a budding religious satirist based in New York City. I had been writing for now defunct The Wittenburg Door, the nation’s oldest, largest, and only religious satire magazine. Here I put my MDiv from Yale Divinity School to good use as I offered reworkings of the Bible and other theological texts through pieces like “The Book of Revelation According to Dubya,” “South Park Salvation,” and “The Ten Commandments According to the Clintons.” Along the way, I interviewed a range of Christian figures from Betty Bowers to William Buckley, and took perhaps a bit too much pride when my role as Senior Contributing Editor would grant me access to such venerable events as the 2004 Republican National Convention.  

Even though I was deconstructing the institutional church, I remained a practicing Christian, in contrast to Gary, who by then had left his childhood faith. Given my family history, I was relieved to have missed his hard-drinking angry atheist phase. The man I met possessed tenderness toward his students, all animals (especially those in need of rescuing), and his second wife (who incidentally became my vocal teacher). 

While my work was smart enough, I knew I needed a teacher who could help me how to physicalize my words and get me out of my head and into my body. Gary took away the intellectual safety net that I relied on to make my work witty and wise. He made me let go of being cool so I could get to this vulnerable place of being me. Then taught me the importance of bombing when I had to venture into the unknown.

Through him I learned how to stay on my breath, write on my feet and go. According to Gary, if I tried to make sense, then I would end up with boring, predictable sense. But if I stepped out and made choices that didn’t make sense to me, then I would be surprised at how the audience would make connections to justify my nonsense. 

Some of his exercises, like starting a scene in mid-sentence, struck me at first as jarring. But then I realized that this technique stripped away all the expository talk that attempts to explain life instead of just living.   

More importantly, Gary taught me that I am enough—all I have to do is “be.” I don’t have to try to create something interesting, for I am interesting enough as is. The first few times he made me just sit there and not try to think but be, I got bored to tears. Surely the other classmates must be yawning as well. But no, Gary was right. Simple is better. 

When I began working with Gary, he was developing a one-man show, Church, which chronicled the role the Nazarene Church played in his life as a child. By using seemingly simply actions such as changing his posture, his voice would then change as he assumed the persona of his father, mother, and other characters from his childhood. By staying on his breath and remaining true to his essence, these characters became fully-fleshed human beings and not just another stereotypical rendering of fundamentalist Christian parents.  

During each visit, I’d share my latest contributions to the Wittenburg Door. Under Gary’s guidance my work went from jokey top ten lists to using satire to explore the underbelly of the institutional church. The more I practiced his teachings, I found myself distancing myself the religious dogma imparted by religious institutions. Along the way, I learned how to love and laugh as I too was losing my religion while finding my soul. 

Off stage, we became friends bonding over our mutual love of Kinky Friedman and Bill Hicks, and my failed attempts to convert Gary to try craft beer that in my estimation was more refined than Widmer Hefeweizen. So far, this remains the only time I saw Gary choose commercial over craft.

Every few months I trekked up to Seattle where Gary had been coming up from Los Angeles to teach since 1992. By now I had left organized religion and was finding my way in the sacred sexuality and spirituality that defined the Pacific Northwest. While I found my unique voice with Gary during my New York City days, in Seattle, I found a family and a faith that sustained me. In coming here, I felt I could finally come into my own free from the Christian trappings that defined me as a professional Christian author when I lived in the Northeast. 

But something else also changed when I moved to Portland. Gary had developed a form of blood cancer that could be treated but not cured. Suddenly our work took on an urgency because we had to make every moment matter. As he told he, “I no longer teach beginning improvisational acting but PhD work.” In particular, Gary hated when people used the English language incorrectly or didn’t know who Nichols & May and other comedic legends were. “I would love it if before I left that people woke up and realized they really need to learn something.” 

He had no patience or time to work on any projects that weren’t up to par. Our most heated arguments came about over how to present my grandpa’s stories as a coach for the Navy Ford Islander football team based in the Pacific during World War II. Finally, we came up with a structure that let my Grandpa’s stories sing. When I read the first chapter during a staged reading of student works, I could feel him smile.

By the time I was ready to send him the fourth chapter, he was in the ICU. He had been hospitalized intermittently in 2014, so I thought this was just another short blip and he’d be back again.

But on April 1, 2017, he died. I would never hear him sing his country songs or listen to yet another animal tale. And he wouldn’t be guiding me on the completion of my World War II book. Cancer killed my creative collaborator. No amount of Disneyesque hocus-pocus would enable us to reconnect in some heavenly realm. No, Gary was gone. 

When I saw the memorials to Gary spouting up on social media, I realized that while he wasn’t going to appear before me angel-like, his work remained infused in me. While I hurt to my very marrow at the loss of my teacher and friend, I had 21 years of his wisdom embedded in my bones.

As I was penning this piece around the first anniversary of his death, I spoke to Wendy MacKenzie, Gary’s widow, who informed me that she is now teaching Gary’s work. She isn’t Gary, obviously, nor can any supernatural intervention bring him to me through her. I don’t have delusions about Gary beside me like a cardboard character in some cheesy children’s Jesus song. But I now know that through his widow, his work will live on. 

Those of use connected to Gary would often use nonsensical words in our conversations that would cause any waiter or other outsider to shake their head in wonderment. But this shared language connected us at a much deeper level and brought us to a more profound truth than if we had been communicating using words that were merely witty and wise. And so I say:

Thanks be to Gary. Lung.

An earlier version of this piece was originally printed in American Atheist magazine, 2nd Quarter, 2018.  Previously, I wrotefor Killing the Buddha about Gary’s life as a spiritual atheist. 

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[killingthebuddha]

KOCHI, India — When I get to the goddess temple, the last thing I want is to meet a public relations officer.

I’ve traveled from Los Angeles to India to report on religion and politics in the country’s looming 2019 elections. A couple days into my short, university-funded trip, a country called the “land of stories” has produced nothing but dead ends.

At the 800-year-old Chottanikkara Devi Temple outside the city of Kochi, I expect to interview a government official. The state of Kerala uses temple management boards to oversee publicly owned Hindu worship centers. I need a high-ranking board member to comment on a religious controversy at another site. Instead, I get handed off to Meena Jayraj, a spokesperson.

She reminds me of a former boss when I produced P.R. videos several jobs ago. Jayraj is wise from years of experience and skilled with people. That’s what scares me. I worry she’ll mind-trick me into puff pieces, and I’m already losing confidence in the story I came to cover. It’s my own fault. Overly ambitious and underprepared, I’m struggling to find my way in Kerala, the one place in south India I don’t have any extended family.

Jayraj invites me to lunch in the dining hall. I don’t have time for this, but it’s bad luck to refuse prasad, temple food. The red matta rice and creamy sambar soup on my plate have already been offered before an image of the goddess, seeking her blessings. This meal is holy. And now my journalism is in conflict with my Hinduism.

Jayraj tells me the temple lore. I’m still on guard. But it becomes clear she believes every word she’s saying. Judging by the lines of devotees filing in and out of lunch, she doesn’t need my help to promote temple tourism.

In the legends of the Chottanikkara village, multiple images of the devi, or goddess, self-manifested where the temple now stands. At the large religious complex, stone walkways and wooden structures connect and mark these sacred spots. Depending on the time of day, temple-goers worship the central statue as Saraswathi, Lakshmi or Durga, three aspects of one supreme being, the female God in the Shakti branch of Hinduism.

Like the goddess with many names, the state of Kerala juggles its identities. With its secular politics and a public education system producing a 93 percent literacy rate, religion still thrives in the state. Reason and faith coexist here.

The appeal of the Chottanikkara temple has only grown in recent years. Visitors flock here from neighboring states and from the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, according to Jayraj and other temple authorities. Even non-Hindus, who aren’t allowed in the inner sanctum, can sit in the outer courtyard and pay the temple priests to perform the guruthi pooja. Why would they do this? The nightly ceremony is said to cure mental illnesses. When conventional medicine and therapy fail, some turn to the goddess.

Two minutes into lunch, Jayraj says something to make me stop chewing mid-mouthful. “Come back tonight,” she says. Through her glasses, her eyes are steady, her neck anchored toward me. “And all your negative thoughts will go away.”

I can’t decide if she means the generic “you,” as in anyone’s negative thoughts, or if she’s reading my mind. Does my face give away my frustrations as a reporter? As a 40-something grad student making a mid-career shift?

Depression, the main problem (along with schizophrenia) that’s treated at Chottanikkara, runs in my family. I think I’ve avoided that gene. I am discouraged, maybe, but not depressed.

If anything, I suffer, however mildly, from a half-remembered sadness common to Asian Americans, what Neo-Freudian cultural theorists call “racial melancholia.” Disconnected from the “motherland,” I feel like a guest in someone else’s house, wherever I am.

How can a temple fix that, except as a diversion?

I follow Jayraj to her office across from the main shrine and ask her how the devi helps people with mental health issues. She gives a recent example.

A few weeks ago, a twenty-year-old woman arrived from Bangalore with her mother and father. The parents told Jayraj their daughter was hearing voices and had stopped eating. Psychiatric treatment hadn’t helped, they said. The woman was about to drop out of medical school.

Five days in the temple changed everything, Jayraj says. On the priest’s orders, the woman woke at 3:30 every morning and followed a regimen of chanting, prayer and meditation, ending with the guruthi pooja each night. Now, she’s a “new person” and, most importantly to her Indian parents, back in college. They’ve called Jayraj twice to thank her, she says.

Over the course of the afternoon, I hear similar stories from temple priests and volunteers, but I have to see the guruthi pooja for myself.

“I’ll come back another night,” I tell Jayraj on my way out, still thinking I have better, more urgent leads to follow elsewhere.

*

Devotees gather in the evening after visiting Durga in the main temple. (Photo by Krishna Narayanamurti)

When I return, I wait in line to enter the inner sanctum. Adorned in a white sari, the golden statue of Durga waits at the end of the walkway. A warm smile runs across her sculpted face. I’m told this is her maternal form, blessing believers with her grace.

But as darkness falls, Durga has a fierce twin at the far end of the temple.

I descend a sloping staircase to a separate shrine for Bhadra Kali, an alter ego of the goddess, where the guruthi pooja will take place.

In myths, both Durga and Kali fight to defend heaven and earth. But Kali is the more violent and morally ambiguous warrior. She slays demons that the male gods cannot handle and demands blood sacrifices from her devotees.

Kali’s idol is smaller than Durga’s. A wide space in front is fenced off for tonight’s ceremony. Through the dim lamp light and the distance, I can’t see her face clearly. I think she’s scowling, but maybe I’m projecting my expectations onto her.

Every evening, the doorways to the shrines are opened so that the Durga and Kali statues can gaze at each other across the temple complex. A divine face-off, the two halves of the goddess balance their peaceful and warlike energies, according to devotees.

I sit cross-legged on the floor to the left of the Kali shrine. The families paying for the ceremony are front and center. At 8:30, the proceedings get underway, but only 40 of us are present. That number will grow to a couple hundred by the end of the evening. Even at sacred events, Indians like to show up late.

A man draped in a salmon-colored dhoti leads the audience in the “Lakshmi Narayana” hymn, a litany of the goddess’s nicknames. I find out later the singer’s name is Bhaskar. With no formal training, he sounds like a fusion of James Taylor and Stevie Wonder. The CDs of religious music sold at temples never sound this good. The singers never hit the mids and highs with this much range. Bhaskar needs his own record deal, or at least a booking agent.

After each verse, the crowd joins Bhaskar for the chorus:

“Amme Narayana, Devi Narayana, Lakshmi Narayana, Badre Narayana.”

These divine names pair the goddess with her husband Vishnu (“Narayana”) and praise her in four manifestations: Amme, the mother of all life; Devi, protector of the world; Lakshmi, provider of wealth and knowledge; and Badre, destroyer of the universe.

The call-and-response lasts a half-hour, while assistant priests set up a variety of tall and short deepas, pointy brass candle holders. They add ghee, or clarified  butter, to keep the flames at a steady blaze. A banana tree stands inside a square pit to the left of the platform. Behind the pit, an offering of coconuts, rice and small fruits rest on beds of banana leaves.

So far, the ceremony doesn’t feel that different from the typical Vedic rituals for the male gods—a lot of chanting, lighting lamps and offering flowers or food. For sure, the music relaxes and soothes me. But how does that help people with more serious, deep-rooted problems?

When the singing ends, the mood changes. I realize that we must be done worshipping the goddess in her “peaceful mother” form. It’s Kali’s turn.

Two men with beards running down to their chests walk out and sit by seven large copper pots, staggered on the ground in front of the shrine.

The head priest is the older and grayer of the two men. Lines of white ash and a red circle of kumkum powder mark his forehead. He looks like a mystic from an Indian comic book. He’s not messing around.

He begins to manipulate the items around the pot, snapping twigs in a fluid motion. In between, he washes his hands and ceremonial instruments with water from a large conch. Unlike the prayer services I’m used to, the priests say and chant nothing, or if they do, their lips don’t move.

The elder priest starts to offer the contents of the copper pots into the pit by his feet. Each vessel is filled with guruthi, a mixture of water, red dye, dirt and flowers, meant to mimic the flesh and blood of the animals that Kannappa, the medieval forest dweller believed to have founded the Chottanikkara village, would offer to Kali.

In one myth, Kannappa wants to sacrifice a baby doe, his daughter’s pet. The daughter asks him to stop killing animals and offers herself in the doe’s place. Kannappa relents, but soon after, both his daughter and the deer pass away mysteriously. Later, two stones representing the goddess Lakshmi and her husband Vishnu appear in the spot where the child and animal had died. Today, these stones are cordoned off and worshipped in a corner of the temple.

Bhaskar, the singer, may have disappeared, but the night’s music is far from done. A band of percussionists takes over. Three tabla drummers and a cymbalist begin a slow, staccato rhythm while the priest continues to stir and offer portions of the pot to the fire. It’s like experimental music, purposely disorienting, but I start to get into it. The elaborate performance of it all is new territory for me, but old for India; this is a Tantric ritual of conjuring and summoning.

From the crowd of people to my right, screams and cries of women pierce through the music. A young woman in a blue sari sways where she sits among the families who have sponsored the pooja. Near her, a middle-aged woman in purple stands up and thrashes her long, curly hair in a circle. Another woman dances with her eyes closed. Things are getting weird. Has Kali taken over, chasing the spirits out of these women?

On other trips to India, I’ve seen people in a trance, claiming possession by gods or goddesses. It was terrifying. I’m not close enough to these women to look in their eyes, to test their conviction, or my own.

The drumming accelerates to the point of frenzy.

My pulse is many beats behind. Somehow, all the excitement calms me down. My mind, normally restless, is locked into the music and the screams. The anxiety and pressure I began my trip with has moved outside of me.

Another thirty minutes pass. Two more performers come out and blow a pair of horns on bowstrings. The drumming comes to a crescendo as the priest’s surgical movements quicken. He empties the remaining pots with a fury, hurling the mud and red water into the pit until all the contents have been dumped out. A drop of red paste splatters on my leg. I taste it. No flavor.

The twirling, thrashing and screaming women have gone quiet. They’re hidden behind their families and the onlookers crowding around, anxious to get the prasad from the pooja. I don’t know if the women are “cured” or if they still have more work to do at the temple.

Across the way, I see a girl in white, maybe 11 or 12 years old. A spectator like me, she doesn’t stand with the people who sponsored the event. She is sobbing — howling really, like a coyote caught in a bear trap. Either she is traumatized, or she’s feeling the secondhand effects of the therapy, an emotional release.

Afterwards, Anil Namboodiri, one of the temple priests, tells me “you have to stay for five days” for the full experience.

I ask him if the pooja is only for women. Can boys and men benefit as well?

“Sure,” he says, “you can sit for it, if you’re having mental problems.“

I assume he’s teasing me. I say “OK” with a smirk.

He corrects me sharply. “Don’t laugh. You could have them.”

Like Meena Jayraj, he’s either a telepath or an exceptional marketer.

Negative thoughts can easily penetrate the subconscious, Namboodiri tells me. Most problems come from the outside, when we let other people manipulate us, he says.

In a “land of stories,” I know I should investigate and interrogate what I’m hearing, following the way of the Western academic, the way of the journalist. For a while, I leave it alone.

*

Later, I call up Seema Lal, a Kochi-based psychologist, looking for any science to supplement my Hindu faith. Lal suggests that, on the one hand, a lot of temples promote these cures now, and it can become a way to make money. On the other hand, many people have said the routine and ritual at Chottanikkara made them feel better, and the results matter more than their reasons. In a 2017 study, other psychologists have concluded that Chottanikkara’s methods can be an effective part of a holistic approach to mental health issues.

Praying and chanting “is not causing physical harm,” Lal says, “and it’s cheaper than medicine, so why not?”

I ask Lal about the women in a trance state. Was that real?

The external stimuli from the music and ritual action can bring about a catharsis in the patient, Lal explains. For women in very traditional, repressive families, it might be a chance to express themselves freely, since the goddess will take the credit (or the blame).

“Suddenly, you get this freedom to just be,” Lal says. “Some people find it very liberating.”

As a man who grew up in a laissez-faire house in suburban New Jersey, my experience of the ritual can’t test Lal’s theory. But that night I still felt the power of Kali-Durga, the balance of chaos and order, the longing and love from a community of believers in a doubtful present.

Maybe it was dumb luck that the political story that brought me to Chottanikkara never panned out. Maybe it was the goddess, calling me home.

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[killingthebuddha]

The blossoms are here, and they are fleeting.

As a stage IV colon cancer survivor and a liberal Jew, I am finding that my spring is haunted by echoes and anniversaries from this time last year, but that they don’t always sync up to the Roman calendar dates. My “cancerversary” was April 26, but my memories of that day were triggered weeks earlier, because what I recall most vividly, from Diagnosis Day into the weeks that followed, is: blossoms. This year, everything bloomed a few weeks earlier than it did last year. The brilliant magnolia trees I stared at while frantically calling friends for advice and processing the news are already losing their flowers. The tree in Cedar Creek park that my daughter climbed the day before we told her about the cancer is already a flurry of white.

Passover, which came much later this year than last year, was a challenging anniversary, too. It has long been my favorite Jewish holiday, but I was powerfully relieved not to host the seders this year. Last year, I was frightfully fatigued while I was cooking, and started to notice a pain in my lower right side that would not go away. I pushed through it to get past the seders, assuming it was just stress, or too much matzah. Then I spent the middle days of Passover in the ER and the hospital. I had an emergency surgery to remove a 20 cm ovarian cyst, a surgery in which we didn’t yet know it was cancer, or the cancer’s origins: but I had experienced those frightening words —”there is a mass in your abdomen”—and got a Very Bad Feeling. I did not worry about whether the food in the hospital was bread or not. I was too shocked and ill for it to matter. In terms of Jewish law, at that point it didn’t really matter, either.

It was hard to experience Passover this year, try as I did to engage in its joys. How do I reclaim a holiday of liberation when I feel like I’ve spent the last year entrapped by a frightening cloud of uncertainty?

I know that is a melodramatic statement. Remarkably, I currently have no evidence of disease. The chance of recurrence remains high, but 50/50 odds are perfectly good ones. Treatments are available if there is a recurrence. My next scan is still over 2 months away. But the fear lingers, and is amplified by the sensory memories of last spring.

I am deeply aware of the fact that my writing about cancer is an attempt to impose order and a narrative onto something I cannot actually control. I’m also starting to realize that there will never be closure on this experience. We try to write ourselves into happy endings and then to act accordingly. But that, too, is a kind of narrow strait. My push to run a half marathon this spring—to make up for missing the same race last year and to celebrate a (ptuey! ptuey!) year of survival—is an attempt to give this year’s narrative a “happy ending,” to impose a through line on lived experience. It’s hard. The training is so hard. My body is simply not what it was before surgeries and chemo. I still want to run a marathon, too. I want to persevere in spite of everything. And yet, I am so tired of projecting strength, after almost a year. 

The blossoms this year are shot through with fragility. Of course they are. They always have been. That’s why there is always something so wistful about the turning seasons, spring and fall. The new colors and smells are marked men. Blink and you miss them. I need to walk over to my favorite lilac tree on campus because I saw on a social media post that it, too, has already bloomed. Blossoms herald the rebirth of the tree but they are gone in an instant, especially on a windy day. Even in the return of life there is loss.

Hadeish yameinu k’kedem, I thought to myself, walking to my office a day before Passover, pondering prayer and bottles of kosher wine. This line from the Torah service liturgy can be translated as “renew our days as in the past.” I sang this prayer by rote for many years as a child before I learned more Hebrew in college. When I learned Hebrew, this prayer literally came to life (chai) for me. Yameinu—”our days.” Hadeish—”to make new.” Although I usually think of this liturgy more in connection with the fall High Holy Days, right now it seems fitting to spring. It is sung to a plaintive, almost pleading melody.  The world is being made new and I want to be made new with it—but I cannot pretend that the last year did not happen. The cancer has been removed from my body like chametz, the leavened items Jews remove from their houses in the days before Pesach, but the physical and mental scars still pulse.

Yameinu, a first person plural possessive. Again, I return to community. Those renewed days do not happen alone, and we do not experience the blossoms alone either. In early April, I was walking guests across campus and found myself getting emotional as we passed the biggest magnolia tree and saw its blooms. It’s the one I saw while I cried on the phone with a friend who is a cancer survivor, the lifeline friend who knew all the places to call and that they were indeed on our health care plan. I apologized for my lapse in conversation, but didn’t explain why that tree meant so much to me. Perhaps there is no need to apologize for emotions, if they do not cause harm to others. “Hadeish yameinu,” renew our days, is the wish of a lot of people, but it resonates differently after cancer. I have so many friends struggling with so many kinds of pain right now—and I hope for a renewal, however fleeting, for all. We can never fully rid ourselves of the chametz in our lives, literally or metaphorically. The best we can do is to try.

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[killingthebuddha]

KtB’s co-editor Emily Mace spoke with author Susan Katz Miller about her newly released book The Interfaith Family Journal, published by Skinner House Books. Our conversation ranged from multi-sensory religious experience, atheists and agnostics in relationships with believers, and how to handle death, Miller’s intention is to help interfaith couples and families “figure out how to be the most joyful and creative and successful interfaith family that you can be, whatever that looks like.” Their conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Emily Mace: Tell me about your first book, Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family, for those readers who may not be familiar with it. 

Susan Katz Miller: My first book, Being Both, was a work of memoir, journalism, and qualitative research. I’m an interfaith kid with grown interfaith children, but I didn’t see my mostly positive experiences reflected in the literature, which tends to be dominated by a narrative that problematizes interfaith families.

I was interested in and part of a grassroots movement of families deciding to honor, practice, and even affiliate with both [Judaism and Christianity] rather than feeling forced to choose one. The book is based on surveys of hundreds of Jewish and Christian interfaith parents across the country who were doing both, and also on a smaller survey of young adults who had been formally educated in both by trailblazing communities offering dual-faith religious education for children in cities including Chicago, New York, and Washington D.C. The book was very controversial, because religious institutions and most clergy still urge families to pick one religion. There was also a strong negative reaction to the idea of normalizing a complex religious identity, even though religious fluidity is far more common in parts of the world other than the U.S.

EM: When did you have the idea to create The Interfaith Family Journal, which is more of a workbook or activity-style book?

SM: After Being Bothcame out, I began traveling around the country speaking, and I became more aware of how interfaith families other than Jewish-Christian families are on the rise. The largest group is actually Christian and “religious none” couples. 

Then, couples began asking me to coach them. I’m not a therapist, but sometimes they sought me out because they wanted to hear about my experience as a grown interfaith child, and as a parent who has adult interfaith children. After a while I realized I can’t help everybody individually, and I thought, “I need a tool that will help people everywhere.” And that was the idea behind the journal.

EM: Can you say more about how the journal is written, and what kind of families it’s helpful for? 

SM:It’s specifically written to be helpful to families whether they’re atheist, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish… all the way to Zoroastrian! It’s written for all families, not just young, heterosexual, white couples. The book works for empty nesters who are re-evaluating their own desire for ritual and spirituality after their children have grown and flown, or for a single parent who has an adopted child from another culture or religion and wants to honor that heritage, or for parents of a teenage child who’s made their own decisions about religion and the parents are trying to figure out what to do about that. 

There are creative activities in each chapter, some of which are designed to have roles for children. I’ve been deeply influenced by S. Brent Plate, religious studies scholar and author of A History of Religion in 5 1/2 Objects: Bringing the Spiritual to Its Senses (and KtB e-book author of By The Way: Dispatches, Devotions, and Deliriums from the Camino de Santiago) and the idea that the multisensory—that smells, sounds, and tastes are these touchstones that have incredible power for a lot of people, whether they consider themselves religious or not. I tried to approach figuring out how to be an interfaith family through the five senses, to stimulate people to think about what were the smells and tastes and sounds of religion in their backgrounds that feel most important them, and which they want to maintain and pass on. 

EM: I’d love to talk more about your inclusion of atheist and agnostic people in your approach, particularly because of the statistical rise among younger people of unaffiliated “religious nones” or those who identify as “spiritual but not religious”—people who may not think of religion as playing a large role in their lives. Are atheists, agnostics, and humanists finding the journal to be useful? 

SM: Atheists have told me that it is going to be equally helpful to them. The goal of the book is not for you to pick a religion. The goal of the book is to figure out how to be the most joyful and creative and successful interfaith family that you can be, whatever that looks like. If you’re an atheist, you still have a religious heritage, unless you’re a multigenerational atheist family, which does exist, but the majority of atheists come from some religious heritage. Our experiences are formative even if we rebel against them. 

EM: Could you talk us through the chapters so we can get a sense of the Interfaith Family Journal’s process?  Perhaps staying with the example of the atheist in a couple, since that’s one of the pairings that might be of interest to some of our KtB readers?

SM: The book is structured around the idea of working through each chapter during one week. The first chapter, “Honoring Origins,” is about your background, your experiences, your formation. The second chapter, “Creating Home,” is about your dreams, your visions, your desires for how you want to be as an interfaith family. It’s going to be helpful to work through that, even if the answer is “I want nothing to do with religion; I don’t feel spiritual in the least,” et cetera. 

The third chapter is on “Finding Community.” It helps you go through a process of thinking about, for example, “What is Ethical Culture? What is Sunday Assembly? How do atheists feel in my local Unitarian Universalist community, and what are my options? Do I want a community? Do any of these feel right to me?” 

Week four is “Marking Transitions,” on life-cycle ceremonies. If you are a secular humanist, you still are going to experience births, coming of ages, marriages, and deaths in your family. The question here is, how are you going to mark those? It doesn’t presume that God has to be part of the celebration. 

The fifth chapter, “Reaching Out to Family,” is on dealing with extended family, which is relevant for a lot of atheists who have extended family who are more religiously oriented. The book helps you frame those relationships in a really positive way, or reframe them if they’ve been negative. 

EM: Yes, as I was reading through the book, I was amazed at how many questions there are. It goes into so much depth!

SM:The people that did beta testing said it was very powerful to just answer a lot of questions in a short period. It stimulates your brain to think about it in a different way than just once in a while wondering about one of these questions. 

EM: Can you say more about how The Interfaith Family Journal may be helpful to families who may already have children or who already have chosen or fallen into a way of doing things? 

SM: A lot of the couples who felt that they already had talked about interfaith life said, “oh, but yeah, we really hadn’t talked about death.” And you can’t assume you’re not going to face it until you’re eighty. A death in the family is one of those transitional moments when often people reevaluate religion, spirituality, culture, and the ritual practices in their lives. Too often you have to make some pretty big decisions fairly quickly in terms of officiation, burial, cremation, how you’re going to eulogize, or what liturgies you might use, what readings you might use. One activity in the chapter on marking transitions is to write up what you want for your own funeral, which sounds macabre, but it’s actually incredibly practical and also empowering to say “these are the hymns or readings I like, but not these,” and realize that somebody actually might honor that.

EM: There’s also something about facing those things that we really fear and giving them structure, which makes them more manageable.

SM: Another activity that a lot of families found useful is interviewing parents and grandparents (if they’re still alive) about their religious histories. When you ask them to tell stories through the lens of religion, you sometimes learn about changes, conflicts, or discoveries they made in their lives about religion or spirituality, and you begin to realize how religious identity is not a static, lifelong, unchanging, affiliation for a lot of people. That process can be a really enriching way of interacting with elders and honoring them, especially if they are dubious about what you’re doing or not doing with your life religiously. 

EM: I’m curious about the choice to make this a paper workbook that couples will write in, in pen. 

SM: A lot of people have said, “Oh, if you want to reach people under the age of 30, it shouldn’t be a book. It should be a website.” And I wonder if we will keep printing books on dead trees. Despite this, I think there is a beauty to having the book when you’re done. I’m imagining your adult children finding the journal as they clean out your house someday, with this recordabout your history, your beliefs, your practices. It would be incredibly valuable for future generations to have it in that format. 

EM: You’ve mentioned some of the aspects that readers and test couples have found most helpful, such as doing the questions in such a focused space of time, the death activity, and interviews with elders in the family. But what have they found to be particularly difficult or challenging? 

SKM: The Interfaith Family Journalgives people a structure in which to have difficult conversations. The format of doing the writing prompts on your own, then having your partner read what you wrote, and then engaging together over it, creates a safe space in which to have some of those uncomfortable conversations. Often one partner wants to be more religious in some ways than the other, or they feel there’s a conflict in the religious practices that they each want to bring for some reason, either theologically or practically speaking, and being able to work that out in the format of the journal is helpful to people.

EM: I love the cover that you have for this book. The cover for Being Bothhad two intersecting circles, but The Interfaith Family Journal adds so many colors, almost like stained glass.

SM: The cover has circles overlapping in all different ways and they’re translucent circles of color, as if light is coming through them. You can see the layering and the texture, and this represents communities and people and the ways we overlap and interplay. I didn’t want a cover with a bunch of little religious symbols on it because that’s going to exclude whoever’s symbol we forgot to put on there. I wanted it to be metaphorical, and it is. Someone elsesaid to me justthis week that it looks to them like stained glass, and it’s funny, maybe because I was raised Jewish, that this actually didn’t occur to me at first. ButI guess it’s obvious for people who have a more Christian formation.

I wanted the colors to signal that this book is more multiple and even more open. My first book was primarily about a very narrow slice of interfaith families, Jewish-Christian families who are doing both. ButI always say all families are interfaith families because no two people share identical experiences or beliefs or practices. As I’ve been going around talking about the book,people have been saying to me, “oh, that’ll be really helpful, we’re an interfaith couple,” or, “hey, we’re both Jewish, but that sounds like it would be helpful anyway.”

EM: We have one of those overlapping holiday times coming up soon, Passover and Easter. I’d like to end with a question specifically about how The Interfaith Family Journal helps families handle these high-drama times of the year. 

SM: The book helps you to figure out how to and whether to celebrate a holiday or multiple holidays occurring in the same timeframe, which they often do. This year the first night of Passover falls on Good Friday, which can be a theological, emotional, and practical issue for families where there’s a Christian partner observing Good Friday. The book stimulates you to bring your family histories forward and to wrestle with them when these holidays come around. 

Editor’s Note: Find out more about Being Bothand The Interfaith Family Journal, including a list of helpful resources for interfaith families and couples, at Miller’s website, susankatzmiller.com. Susan Katz Miller is a former correspondent for Newsweekand New Scientist. She spent years in West Africa and Brazil, and now lives in the Washington DC area. Find her on Twitter @susankatzmiller. 

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[killingthebuddha]

Editor’s Note: KtB wants to know: What are your memories, associations, and thoughts about the fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral? How has the fire at this historic sacred space and soul of a city affected you?

I was walking through my kitchen yesterday when I saw the pictures on my in-laws’ computer. Notre-Dame Cathedral in flames.

I didn’t realize until that moment I had a Notre-Dame-shaped hole in my heart, the part that feels like jet lag on the first day of my honeymoon, which we’d left for just the day after the wedding, of course. We’d stopped for espresso and croissant as soon as we got off the train on our way in from the airport; we needed something quintessentially Parisian as soon as possible. After the quick bite, we carried our traveler’s backpacks to our cheap-ish hotel with no A/C, dropped off our bags, and headed for the île Saint-Louis, and Notre-Dame Cathedral. We’re not Catholic, but as religious studies scholars, we put cathedrals on the top of our sight-seeing list every time.

We snapped a picture from the bridge, the famous rose window looking small as a lollipop from several blocks away. The spire stood just visible above the tower on the right.

Jet-lagged, we joined the crowds staring up at the twin towers. This was back in the days before cell phones, when we lugged a bulky and not particularly great digital camera as part of our baggage. Crowds pressed up against the carved wooden doors, eager to get inside. I leaned as far back as I could without falling over, trying to capture the height of the towers from just underneath, and couldn’t. We marveled at the ornate carvings, at the crowds pressing in at the doors, and joined them, eager to get inside.

Once inside, it was dark, surprisingly so. For all the Gothic era’s advances in bringing light into formerly dark, heavy churches, I was surprised at how dark the interior felt. Almost as dark as if there had just been a fire.

Yesterday, I realized that the the hole in my heart felt like the hush when you step inside a place that seen a thousand years of prayer, pilgrimage, and power, a hush that’s there beneath the murmur of hundreds of tourists trying to be quiet. The hole I didn’t know was there felt like the sudden, possible absence of almost a millennia’s worth of art, religion, and history, the space that’s left by the world being a better, more complete place because it has something like Notre-Dame in it, because I and countless others could go there and lean our heads back and try to capture all that it in the shutters of whatever cameras we’d brought, and fail. Paris is burning.

My KtB co-editor Briallen Hopper tweeted yesterday, “Literally teaching Paris is Burning tomorrow which is an elegy to so many beloved children prematurely dead. This life is loss and loss. Going to take a long fast windy walk to try to outrun it for a while.”

The two towers standing above the cathedral’s entrance didn’t fall in yesterday’s fire, unlike the other two towers whose burning fall came all-too-readily to mind. How could we not wonder if another doubled symbol for a city and a way of life would fall, even if I try not to read too much into the supposed symbolism? One history is not the same as another.

The spire fell, still, and last night, thousands of people–Parisians, and others who would have cathedral-shaped holes in their hearts–stood outside to sing hymns as the fire burned, and was extinguished. The structure remained surprisingly sound, now with gaping wounds in the roof revealing seared of stone and wood. The hole is not the whole, not as large as it could be. We are all Paris, I thought, any of us who have cathedral-shaped holes in our hearts. Rebuilding is not the same as loss; scar tissue is not the same as history.

Years ago, my then-new husband and I left the cathedral, awestruck, stepping out into sunlight from darkness and blinking our eyes. We stumbled to a cafe nearby and tried to read the menu, ordering salade niçoise because we were reasonably sure we understood the words. Behind us, fresh in our memories, a cathedral stood. I wonder if the next time I have a salade niçoise, it will taste ever so slightly of ash.

*

KtB wants to know: What are your memories, associations, and thoughts about the fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral? How has the fire at this historic sacred space and soul of a city affected you? KtB would love to hear and share your reflections in the coming weeks. Send your thoughts to submit [at] killingthe Buddha [dot] com (and read more about submitting, here).

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[killingthebuddha]

ideation

Great article on suicidal ideation.

At 27, I’ve settled into a comfortable coexistence with my suicidality. We’ve made peace, or at least a temporary accord negotiated by therapy and medication. It’s still hard sometimes, but not as hard as you might think. What makes it harder is being unable to talk about it freely: the weightiness of the confession, the impossibility of explaining that it both is and isn’t as serious as it sounds. I don’t always want to be alive. Yes, I mean it. No, you shouldn’t be afraid for me. No, I’m not in danger of killing myself right now. Yes, I really mean it.

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[killingthebuddha]

Fight or Flight

Great post on fight or flight from The Realistic Autistic:

This reminded me of a theory I read years ago regarding deer, humans, and human society. Deer have two modes: calm and upset. They mainly live in calm, unless predators or some kind of threat occurs. At which point they switch to upset, and fight or flight their way through the situation until they’re out of it. After which they switch back to calm.

Humans used to work similarly. When threats occurred, we fight/flighted to deal with them and then returned to being calm. The theory goes that as human society developed, we also developed things that register as a threat but can’t be dealt with appropriately using fight/flight. Money problems and angry bosses at work, for example. These situations put us into fight or flight mode, but because they can’t be dealt with so simply, we can get stuck in fight/flight instead of returning to calm.

The theory posits that this is part of where depression and anxiety come from, and possibly other forms of mental illness as well. Heart disease, poor sleep, and other physical symptoms follow as well. Living “on edge” all the time has costs to your mental and emotional health, after all.

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[killingthebuddha]

God’s Blessing / God’s Wrath

From 2009 Xanga entry

God’s blessing is never given by the cupful.  It is always given in more–the cup overflows.  When you are given the blessings of riches and success they always spill over (you find a significant other who benefits).  The whole social system benefits as you produce a net gain on the system.

Conversely God’s wrath is never given by the cupful.  It is always given in more–the cup overflows.  Mental illness and disability drag the people around you down.  Someone stays single because you are forced out of the dating pool.  You are a net drain on the system, your needs being paid for by loved ones and/or the state.

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[killingthebuddha]

Repeated Albums

These are the two albums I listen to over and over again.

Durufle Requiem (Robert Shaw Atlanta SO version) – some of the best classical choral arrangements, there is so much going on that it keeps things fresh.

A Hidden Wholeness by Luke Brindley – This is an album for orphaned believers if there ever was one.  You really have to pay attention to the lyrics to get the full effect of this album.  A Christian site gave it a good review.  It’s not a Christian album, it’s not a non Christian album, it’s kind of somewhere in the nether regions between the two.  Ultimately it’s about struggling through life without giving up hope, something I do not practice in my own life.

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[killingthebuddha]

For years I’d been meaning to attend the Friday meditation class at my father’s retirement community.

When my parents moved to Piper Shores in 2001, meditation was not on the schedule. They were in their mid-70s, and everyone assumed my father, a workaholic with heart problems, would be the first to go. When my mother died of ovarian cancer a few years later, the order of events seemed incorrect. My father was alone in a way he never expected to be. I visited every month, driving the hundred miles to Maine on Saturday mornings and leaving Sunday afternoons.

While there, I meditated in the guestroom. Sometimes I’d tell my father what I was doing, other times I just closed the door. After several years, a sign saying Quiet Room appeared on a door near the dining room. When I asked my father about it, he said it was a place where families could meet with bereavement counselors or people could meditate.

I’d always thought of my parents’ generation as being dismissive of meditation. Born in the 1920s, these men and women grew up during the Great Depression and came of age in the midst of World War II. Though my parents came from different backgrounds, they were both bright, ambitious, and ill-suited to sitting still. There was always so much that needed doing. So much to be done.

My parents met at night law school in the 1950s. After a brief courtship, they married, had my two brothers, and moved to Maine. My father wore a suit to work each day, drove a Ford, and voted Republican. He became a success not because he was daring or charismatic, but because he was the opposite—calm, measured, and considerate to anyone who asked his advice. Although my father wasn’t closed-minded, I’m not sure he ever heard of the Beats. He simply wasn’t a counter-cultural kind of guy. He attended attended a neighborhood Episcopal church, where I was baptized in 1960.

*

During the same decade as my parents’ courtship, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder famously explored Buddhism. My meditation teachers all came of age in the 60s and 70s, the heyday of the Hippy Trail, when young Westerners trekked across Asia in search of meaning and adventure. Some of this groupof students, dropouts, seekers, and malcontents journeyed to Bodh Gaya in northern India to learn how to meditate at the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment. Some found their way to Dharamshala and befriended the young Dalai Lama. Others flew to Thailand, shaved their heads, and were ordained as Buddhist monks. Eventually, almost all of them ended up back in America.

I wish I’d been old enough to hitch a ride to Boulder, Colorado in 1974. The kickoff of the Naropa Institute that summer became the Woodstock moment of American Buddhism. Chögyam Trungpa, a “crazy wisdom” guru, invited other unconventional teachers to lead workshops. Ram Dass, who had just published Be Here Now, was there. The poet Allen Ginsberg and the composer John Cage attended, as did Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzberg, all recently returned from Asia and trying to figure out how to teach mediation to “Young Americans”—a song Bowie recorded that summer in Philadelphia. Their first students were mostly middle-class, college-educated kids like themselves.

Like me in the 1980s. I tried to meditate during the Reagan Era, but didn’t mention it to my family. My parents would have regarded it as another affectation, like my becoming a vegetarian years earlier. My brothers would have made jokes. I was ambivalent myself. Though I agreed with most of what I read in Buddhist books, on the cushion, nothing seemed to be happening except boredom, frustration, and pain. I wondered if sitting was a complete waste of time.

I took my first meditation class in the early 1990s and learned that my struggles were common. I meditated everyday for a year, then quit for several years, then started up again.

By the 2000s, I had established a consistent practice. I told my family about my practice in 2005. My mother had died the year before, and my brothers and I were worried about my father. Before I drove to my first retreat, I had to explain where I’d be, what I’d be doing, and why my phone would be turned off for a week. I sent an email with emergency contact information.

Every year after, I sent almost the same email. My retreats became longer, sometimes stretching to several weeks. Getting away was never easy. As my father got older and deafer, I worried more and more about being away.

*

The first time I opened the door to the Quiet Room, I had to feel around for the light switch. The room, illuminated, was the size of a small living room. Three blue armchairs were arranged in a semicircle. The paintings on the wall were seascapes in muted blues and browns. It could have been the waiting room for a spa or a funeral home.

I sat in one of the blue chairs, somehow feeling guilty, as if I didn’t have the right to be there. Every time I heard footsteps or voices in the hallway, I tensed, thinking someone was about to open the door and ask, “What are you doing here?”

But nobody did. Not that first time. Not the next. I got comfortable on my monthly visits to the Quiet Room. After a while, a meditation cushion showed up in the closet, but no other meditators. If I opened the door late at night, I worried I might surprise staff members having sex in the darkness, but nobody was ever there.

My father never asked about my practice, but when meditation started to become mainstream, he clipped articles out of the New York Times and mailed them to me. It was a sweet gesture. I thanked him when we spoke on the phone. I didn’t mention I’d read the articles online.

Those last years, I often went to church with my father, though we both knew I wasn’t a believer. When he turned 90, he finally allowed me to drive. He still had his license and drove surprisingly well. I wasn’t worried that he’d cause an accident. I worried someone would hit him and he’d be hurt and unable to hear.

When a friend his age died, my father learned that donations in the friend’s honor could be sent to the meditation center I frequented. At the funeral, my father sought out the man’s daughter to ask her about it. She said her father had gotten a lot out of going to the Buddhist center, but rarely spoke about it.

When my father told me this, I asked him if he wanted to try the Friday meditation class. I offered to come up early to go with him. “Probably not,” he said politely, which we both knew meant no.

*

My father’s own funeral was last April, shortly after his 92nd birthday. “I don’t want to linger,” is what he always said after visiting bed-bound friends in the nursing home. “I don’t want to linger.” And he didn’t. He died a day after being rushed to the hospital and three days before a scheduled meeting to discuss his moving to assisted living.

The Friday after his funeral, my brothers and I gathered at his apartment to take, give away, or throw out all his belongings. Everything: from the almost empty box of bran flakes to the king-size bed he’d shared with my mother and then slept in alone for 14 years.

This would be my last opportunity to go to the Friday meditation class. I took it. The group had outgrown the Quiet Room and now met in the big lecture hall. I introduced myself to the two women who were teaching, both residents. They were welcoming and looked disconcertingly close to my own age.

I took a seat in one of the rows of folding chairs facing the windows. There were already a dozen people there. Some residents maneuvered their wheelchairs close to the folding chairs. Some arrived on motorized scooters, then carefully made their way to chairs. Others rolled in on walkers to join the group. No one sat on a cushion. Outside, the wind whipped the flag and clanged the rope against the flagpole. Most of the snow had melted, exposing the hay-colored lawn. Spring was still weeks away.

It wasn’t until I was sitting with the residents that I realized I’d expected the class to be something of a lark, not quite the real thing.

I’d been amused when mindfulness classes first showed up on the schedule at Piper Shores. The image of genteel seniors sitting in a semi-circle of cushions seemed ridiculous, as likely as their learning how to pole dance or build a bong. Yet as I sat with the men and women who were so like my parents, I felt an overwhelming sense of love and connection. We were all there for the same purpose—to understand our own suffering and maybe find some relief.

For the first time, I appreciated how generous Asian teachers had been to the young Westerners who knocked on their doors. How odd and comical those kids must have seemed to the elders who welcomed them in.

The doors of the room were propped open. As we meditated, the quiet was interrupted by voices in the hallway. I could picture the table outside the mailroom which held framed announcements of the residents who had died that week. Usually there were two or three. The notice of my father’s death was already gone..

I opened my eyes and looked around the room, knowing I’d never be there again. Most people had their eyes closed. One man was snoring. Several years ago, my father had delivered a Veterans Day talk about the Gettysburg Address in the same room. My nephew and I had driven up to hear him. After the talk, he got a standing ovation.

I tried to meditate, to be a part of the group, rather than an observer. I closed my eyes, then opened them again. My brothers were two floors up, working hard, probably annoyed with my absence. There was so much to be done. I closed my eyes and wept. Had my father been there, he would have been embarrassed for me. But he was not there. I was in the midst of his world, and without him.

By Sunday afternoon, we had dismantled the apartment. There were still clothes to take to Goodwill and furniture marked for the movers, but the space was no longer my father’s home.

I took only a few objects: some old photos, a gray cashmere vest, a glass polar bear I’d given him years ago. I also took the watch my father wore when I was a child. The crystal was scratched, and when I wound it, it wouldn’t tick, but I could so clearly remember it on his wrist. I thought briefly about having it fixed, but I didn’t want to wear it so much as have it near.

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[killingthebuddha]

The Novembers

Japanese shoegaze black metal.

The Novembers – To (melt into)

from Aspie Lessons https://ift.tt/2EOJdup via IFTTT

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[killingthebuddha]

I was a morose child, but I’ve always been determined to capture light. Summers growing up in Alabama, I’d demand to chase fireflies. Granny Mil would look after me in the yard until after dark. She’d help me put the ones I caught into a mason jar. She’d cut holes in the lid so they could breathe. I’d put them by my bedside so they could help me dream.

Now that I’m grieving her as an adult, I’m stitching together our little ritual of making firefly nightlights. I’m trying to remember her alive. Granny Mil had a way of suspending time, of holding magic up to the light. 

I’m looking for flashes that could bring her back. I don’t need signs and wonders, just subtle sparks to soothe my heart’s desire to see her again. 

But you can’t hold light in a jar. You can’t find the seam between living and dying. And so you stitch and try to remember.

*

The last time I saw Granny Mil alive, she was in the ICU, with fluid in her lungs. She’d developed pneumonia in the hospital, after a fall that caused a hematoma in her leg. She was drifting in and out of a tenuous lucidity.

She was 96 years old. She was ready to go. “I never thought I would live this long,” she kept saying. The oxygen tube kept falling out of her nostrils when she would sigh. She didn’t pity herself. She was just tired.

She’d already marked in her Bible the verses she wanted to be read at her memorial service: Let not your heart be troubled… I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also. (John 14:1-3)

She’d marked those verses years ago, when she was still mobile enough to go to the little Baptist church where her son-in-law was the head pastor. The day he preached on the way Jesus said goodbye to his disciples, she wrote funeralin blue pen next to the verses, in that looping cursive Palmer method of penmanship she’d learned in school. 

During her last stretch in the hospital, she was spry enough to joke sometimes. When her great grandson talked about drinking hot toddies to treat a cold, she looked over at him, all but winking, and said, “Slip me one.”

If she was awake when the breakfast tray came, she’d drink the coffee, after it cooled, through a bendy straw. She’d flash me a mischievous look, like she was getting away with something.

One time, a nurse came in and said, “Can you tell me your name and birth date?”

“428-8506,” Granny Mil said, as if that set of numbers were a reflex for her to say. 

“Mother, that’s your phone number,” her seventy-five-year-old daughter Ceil said, almost in a scolding tone. Ceil had been taking care of Granny Mil at her house for over a year. Every day was a battle of wills: Mostly over the compression hose Granny Mil was supposed to wear to prevent blood clots. And coffee: Ceil wouldn’t let her have caffeine at home anymore—said it made her rowdy, with the Gabapentin she had to take for her neuropathy. That’s why the coffee that came on the ICU breakfast tray was such a treat. “Mother, say your birthday, like we practiced for going to the doctor.”

“9/13/21.” Certain numbers were easier for her to retrieve than precise words sometimes.

“Yes, Ma’am,” the nurse said, lifting Granny Mil’s bruise-blue wrist. That’s what it says on your hospital bracelet,” “Now, how about your first and last name?”

“Granny Mil,” she said.

“What do people call you who don’t know you well?” Ceil chimed in, “like at the bank.”

“Granny Mil,” she said, quick on the uptake, and a bit more emphatically this time. 

Everybody did call her Granny Mil. In the forty years since her first grandchild started talking, Granny Mil had pretty much become her name: to her daughters, to her sons-in-law, to the younger ladies at the beauty parlor, where they would sit and reminisce under those helmet-shaped hair dryers. Even the postal worker who’d been delivering her mail since 1982 had taken to calling her Granny Mil. I wouldn’t put it past a familiar bank teller to do the same.

She’d always been Granny Mil to me, even though I’m not one of her biological grandchildren. She came, when I was just under two years old, after my parents’ disastrous divorce. She’d answered an ad in The Birmingham Newsfor a live-in babysitter for a 22-month-old girl. (Granny Mil had retired from her job selling curtains, and she wasn’t necessarily looking for work, but she read every inch of the paper every morning, even the classifieds, even when she wasn’t seeking anything in particular.)

Some of my earliest memories are of Granny Mil’s voice singing me to sleep: “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, how I wonder what you are…” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily…” And whatever scared or hurt me would drift off into “life is but a dream…”

Granny Mil’s life was far from a dream. When she was nine years old, she witnessed her mother die suddenly. One of her adult brothers took her in, and her sister-in-law basically treated her like a servant to take care of their young kids. By the time she came into my life, she’d buried two alcoholic husbands. But Granny Mil had a way of mending history, of stitching up and moving through. She had an ease in believing that everything would turn out alright: Like Jesus, we walk with our wounds. When we die, it’s time to go home to the Lord, who has prepared a room for us in heaven. And so she sang the hardest parts of life into a dream for me, when I was too young to know how to grieve. She wasn’t lying. She was giving me a lullaby to heal by.

“The Lord is lookin’ after you,” she would say, and that became a refrain of my childhood. When I was nine, she gave me my first Bible, an illustrated King James, with a picture of Jesus on the front surrounded by children. The cover zips up, as if to provide extra protection for the pages that are so thin you have to lick your finger to turn them one at a time. Jesus’ lines are in red, just so you know what’s most important. The front cover has pictures of the flora and fauna of Galilee inside: myrrh trees, locusts, antelopes. And the back pages have “Spiritual Memory Gems,” the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes, with decorative crests and big calligraphic first letters whose looping shapes thrilled me.

I loved that Bible as a treasured object, as a gift from Granny Mil, and as my very own illuminated manuscript of the book everybody I knew in Alabama believed you were supposed to live by. I didn’t question it, but I didn’t read it, either. I was fine with sound bites I’d hear in church and in the grocery store check-out line and the variations on “Jesus Saves” I would see on giant signs on the side of the highway. I didn’t feel compelled to study the scriptures. I had the vernacular Bible in my child psyche. And I was more into sci-fi: The Neverending Storyand A Wrinkle in Time, my first favorite chapter book. I realize now as an adult that Granny Mil was like Madeleine L’Engle’s Mrs. Whatsit character for me: a disheveled old lady who seemed to have come from a starlit sky, to help the family through a hard time. 

In the mix of swiftly tilting planets and neverending stories, I had some darker obsessions as a child. The Old Yellermovie that depicts the shattering story of a family and their beloved dog who gets rabies. I would watch it over and over and cry every time at the end, when the boy has to shoot Old Yeller.

During one of Granny Mil’s especially lucid spells in the ICU, I asked her a question my dad would ask every once in awhile before he died. He would reminisce about my habit of watching Old Yeller over and over, as if reliving his fascination with the little girl he didn’t understand, as if I might have an answer as an adult. He’d say to me and my brother, laughing and somewhat rhetorically, “You knew he was going to die. Why did you cry every time?”

When I asked Granny Mil why I cried every time I watched Old Yelleras a child, she said, “Reckon you wanted to cry.” 

I spent the last night before I had to fly back to Connecticut with Granny Mil in her hospital room. We made a little slumber party of our last time together: I fed her the chocolate cake from her dinner tray, and she asked them to bring another piece for me. “Let’s look at TV,” she said. I turned on the wall-mounted monitor and flipped channels until I found The Golden Girls. When we decided it was time to go to sleep, I muted the television, but left the screen on in case she woke up during the night and wanted something besides the IV bags and the heart monitor and the hazard-orange “Fall Risk” sign look at. She kept asking if I had enough pillows in the recliner chair beside her bed. And we laughed about how awful the hospital blankets are. She kept saying, “Now just get as comfortable as you can, and let’s doze on off to sleep.” Even when she was dying, she was taking care of me.

After awhile she said, “I cain’t hardly keep my eyes open.” And as she drifted off to sleep, I sang back: “Life is but a dream…”

*

Since I lost Granny Mil, I’ve been looking hard at the stars. I’m looking for the ones that died, whose light is still traveling here.

I felt a sacred freight when I realized Granny Mil’s death day, one year since she passed, falls on Ash Wednesday. It’s my favorite holy day: The only day you are marked by dying. You get an outward sign of the loss you carry inside. And from the time you receive the ashes, two black smears in the shape of the cross, until they wear off, you walk around with a stun of loss on your face. 

I love crying like I love Ash Wednesday. Tears and ashes on your skin, a sensation you can barely perceive, the luminous presence they leave. The Orthodox conceive of Lent as a “Bright Sadness.” That’s how grief happens for me: as an alchemy of mourning and remembering and celebrating. A hollowing out of the heart that makes way for light. 

On her death day, I’m glad to have ashes on my face. I’m reading a poem I love, “Blessing the Dust,” over and over. I’m celebrating Ash Wednesday with these lines:

This is the day we freely say we are scorched.

This is the hour we are marked by what has made it through the burning. …

So let us be marked…

for claiming

what God can do

within the dust,

within the dirt,

within the stuff

of which the world

is made

and the stars that blaze in our bones

            —Jan Richardson

            from Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons

            janrichardson.com

Grieving is not dark to me. It’s a bright sadness. It’s a lit cave in my heart. 

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[killingthebuddha]

The State of Alabama recently executed a Muslim man after denying him the right to have the religious counselor of his choice, an imam, present at his death.

Alabama routinely allows a Christian chaplain to attend death row inmates at the moment of their executions. But in Domineque Ray’s case, his request to have an imam by his side as he died was rejected at the state level and then rejected again in a terse 5–4 decision by the Supreme Court (Dunn v. Ray). In the words of Justice Elena Kagan’s fiercely worded dissent, “to justify such religious discrimination, the State must show that its policy is narrowly tailored to a compelling interest. I have no doubt that prison security is an interest of that kind. But the State has offered no evidence to show that its wholesale prohibition on outside spiritual advisers is necessary to achieve that goal.”

Kagan’s exasperation is understandable because the case is preposterous. Ray did not contest his sentence. He merely asked for the bare minimum of time for his chosen spiritual advisor to receive the training necessary to formally attend at his death.

In the wake of Ray’s hasty execution, religious freedom advocates have followed Kagan in arguing that the decision amounts to the establishment of Christianity as a state religion. I agree with the critics. But the Court’s ruling does not just inscribe Christian majoritarianism into law. It also continues a longstanding practice of rendering America’s religious minorities invisible to the law. The anniversary of an earlier Supreme Court case involving Japanese American Buddhists aptly demonstrates this point.    

On February 21, 1927, the Supreme Court affirmed Japanese Americans’ right to educate their children in extracurricular Japanese language schools (Farrington v. Tokushige), in addition to the children’s attendance at the (English-speaking) locally operated public schools. Compared to the infamous 1944 Korematsu v. United States decision that found the wartime incarceration of Japanese Americans constitutional, the relatively obscure February 1927 decision seems like a feel-good legal win for a wrongly vilified and widely misunderstood ethnic minority. But behind this apparent victory lies a complicated story regarding American religious freedom, Buddhism, and debates over immigration that sound eerily similar to contemporary controversies about travel bans, border walls, and executive orders.

Here is that background.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a huge number of Japanese laborers emigrated to Hawai`i. Japanese workers staffed the lucrative sugar industry there, earning paltry wages that allowed white sugar plantation owners to pocket enormous profits. Although a 1907 “Gentlemen’s Agreement” between the United States and Japan had curbed Japanese immigration as a way of assuaging white Americans’ fears about rapid demographic change, the practice of recruiting Japanese “picture brides” for male Japanese laborers contributed to a quickly swelling Hawai`i-born Japanese population. Since the American empire had officially incorporated the Territory of Hawai`i in 1900, birthright citizenship law guaranteed these second-generation Japanese (nisei) not only the right to vote, but also the right to own property.

When a flood of patriotic sentiment known as “Americanism” swept the United States during WWI, white landowners began claiming that nisei posed a dire threat to the delicate caste system of racial and religious difference that undergirded Hawai`i’s plantation economy. Equating Japanese “mikadoism” (emperor worship) with Buddhism and Buddhism with Japaneseness, these white elites argued that ideologically unassimilable nisei threatened whites’ fragile hold on Hawai`i’s valuable real estate. Because Hawai`i’s future prosperity demanded that Japanese Americans stay in their “proper” place as docile workers, they argued, Buddhism had to go.   

These fears about labor, religion, and American values erupted in local debates about education. In January 1919, College of Hawai`i Professor of Biology Vaughan MacCaughey argued that Buddhist-run Japanese language schools interfered with the crucial project of cultural assimilation: “The variety of Buddhism dominant in Hawai`i is medieval, ultra-superstitious and intensely Japanese. Mikado-worship and veneration of antique superstitions are prominent features of the system. Its inimical effects on the efforts of the public schools toward genuine Americanization are obvious, even upon cursory examination,” MacCaughey wrote in the education journal School and Society. “The ideals and political life of the United States depend ultimately and absolutely upon the Christian American home,” he continued. “True Americanization can not bloom in a Buddhist Oriental household. Hawai`i can not be American until she truly Christianizes her population, and makes dominant the Christian home.”

Little in MacCaughey’s published research suggests that he was an educational expert, although his ideas were generally consistent with the contemporaneous assimilation tactics of mainland Native American boarding schools that aimed to “kill the Indian … and save the man.” Despite his lack of expertise, Governor Charles J. McCarthy appointed MacCaughey as Superintendent of the Territorial Department of Instruction shortly after the School and Society piece appeared. MacCaughey immediately invited a team of experts from the Department of the Interior to survey the islands’ school system, with the objective of developing a rationale for eliminating the Buddhist-run language schools once and for all. Though the report’s torturous diction was infelicitous, MacCaughey must have been particularly happy with one line: “Although the commission recognizes the inherent right of every person in the United States to adopt any form of religious worship which he desires,” the authors intoned, “nevertheless it holds that the principle of religious freedom to which our country is unswervingly committed does not demand that practices and activities must be tolerated in the name of religion which make the task of training for the duties and responsibilities of American citizenship a well-nigh hopeless one. The commission, therefore, … [recommends] that all foreign-language schools be abolished.”  

Eliminating the schools outright was politically impractical in a territory where Japanese people held a degree of social clout even if they did not hold the reins of political power. The white-dominated territorial legislature got around this issue by establishing onerous restrictions on the schools that technically allowed them to exist but made it virtually impossible for them to operate. Teachers now had to pass an ideological purity test, parents had to pay an exorbitant annual tuition fee, and pupils were not allowed to register until they had received a minimum amount of “proper” patriotic education in Hawai`i’s English-language public schools.  

Even as these legislative changes made it difficult for schools to operate, Hawai`i’s white elites stirred up fears that Japanese language schools served as training camps for little insurgents who threatened not only Hawai`i, but mainland America as well. In November 1921, for example, former Governor McCarthy complained in the Los Angeles Times that Japanese people would soon supplant whites as the dominant landowners on the archipelago: “A Japanese boy born in Hawai`i and therefore an American citizen is … taught by his parents and also in the Japanese foreign language schools that his first duty is not to America but to Japan. This allegiance is doubly strong in that it is interwoven with and fostered by the national religion [that is, Buddhism] of which the Mikado in his heaven-born descent is the head.” A graphic included with McCarthy’s article depicted the archipelago’s shifting demographics by showing a Japanese laborer towering over other ethnicities, while a simple map of the Pacific showed how Hawai`i might serve as a forward base for a Japanese invasion of the American mainland.

The image comes from the November 6, 1921 issue of the Los Angeles Times.

To challenge the anti-Japanese offensive, prominent Honolulu-based Buddhist priest Imamura Yemyō wrote deftly argued tracts in both English and Japanese stressing that the American promise of religious freedom extended to Japanese Americans and guaranteed their right to maintain the language schools. In his 1921 Japanese-language tract On the American Spirit (Beikoku no seishin o ronzu), for example, Imamura acknowledged that the Constitution granted others the right to freely critique Buddhism, but he exhorted his readers to mobilize the American principle of religious freedom in fierce defense of their faith.

His readers listened. Led by Honolulu-based newspaperman Fred Kinzaburō Makino, with white attorney Joseph Lightfoot’s fees partially funded by Imamura’s own Buddhist sect, Japanese American parents of language school students filed a case against Governor Wallace R. Farrington in December 1922. The plaintiffs, led by one T. Tokushige, easily won their case at the Territorial Supreme Court and then again at the Ninth Circuit and federal Supreme Court. But the territorial and circuit courts bypassed the issue of religion entirely, focusing instead on the government’s “compelling interest” to maintain order on the islands. The Ninth Circuit court, for example, explicitly addressed the question of whether the territory’s “police power” (that is, the power to suppress potential insurrection) superseded citizens’ constitutional rights. It did not mention religion at all.     

When Japanese Americans finally won their case at the Supreme Court on February 21, 1927, they did so without the help of religious freedom. The court upheld Japanese Americans’ right to run language schools as they wished. But, in keeping with the decisions by the Territorial and Ninth Circuit courts, the Supreme Court ignored the religious animus that drove territorial education policy, reaffirming Japanese Americans’ place as second-class citizens who did not actually deserve religious freedom. Buddhists are generally not maligned today the way they were in the 1910s and 1920s, but it is easy to see similarities between this earlier case and our present moment. The Supreme Court’s tersely worded order this month refusing to temporarily stay Domineque Ray’s execution made no explicit reference to his religion. But the American ideals of religious freedom and disestablishment were clearly at stake. Although the historical circumstances of Dunn v. Ray and Farrington v. Tokushige are quite different, it is clear that the court’s silences and omissions concerning religion continue to relegate some American minorities to the hinterlands beyond the land of the free.

*

This essay is based on chapter three of the author’s Faking Liberties: Religious Freedom in American-Occupied Japan (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming April 2019).

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