Those Wacky Chinese Nestorians

and their very cool art. This one is in Guangzhou.

What Would a Unicorn Do?

On Got Medieval, there was a 'contest' back in July to see what seven words readers would come up with to describe the Middle Ages. The origin of the idea, which is described here, was a disheartening day in class when the new crop of students was asked to free-associate their way to a picture of the era. They came up with 'knights, knights, knights,' 'other knights,' and 'things about knights,' basically, and the writer of the blog uses the story on social occasions to set others at ease when they start to apologize, upon hearing his profession, for their lack of knowledge about Ye Olde Medieval Tymes.

I don't think it's particularly odd that nobody here knows anything about the Middle Ages, because I would imagine most people at cocktail parties would be equally hard pressed to come up with much about the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment. (...Uh, Luther, yeah, Martin Luther!, em, art! there was lots and lots of art! The Crusades! no, em, no, those big skirts with the hoops in them? no, wait.) I may sound more generally pessimistic than is warranted, perhaps, but I will give him this: I do think the Middle Ages probably are a more complete void in most people's understanding of history than are other periods. Before reading his account, though, I hadn't really thought about how thoroughly jousting, heraldry, and ladies-in-waiting with long pointy hats encapsulated the era for most.

The lazy explanation is that it's down to The Media, since any film set in that time tends to have Chain Mail in the leading role, with horses, maidens, and scrofulous serfs filling in the gaps. But if after watching Le Weekend I don't feel I have a complete understanding of 20th-century French history, is that really Godard's fault?

Still, the reality is that most Americans think that, like, nothing happened in Western civ for ten centuries or so. Other than the Black Plague and jousting, that is. Plato or somebody died, and then everyone went to sleep - in really dirty clothes - until da Vinci, or maybe Martin Luther woke them up. (At which time, of course, they then wore hoop skirts and codpieces and really ugly hats with buckles on them and everyone had syphilis.)

But, although the whole thing makes me sad, as does the idea that his (very hilarious) blog gets lots of hits from people looking for sexy chainmail pictures, I like to think of what my list would be, and it was fun to read other lists, because it shows how unique our own perspectives or prejudices are. I would probably put:
-neo-Platonism
-monasticism/orders
-Norman Conquest
-Sacking of Constantinople
-East/West
-books
-The Church

There's repetition, and there's no form of 'music,' or 'law' or even 'Law,' but I think if you take what themes I do have, you end up with those anyway, and much more besides. I suppose you could just say 'The Church' and come up with my whole list incidentally, not to mention unicorns and guys in chainmail, but with a book-banning vice-presidential candidate, I can only muster so much self-loathing.

Sarah Palin's Hairstyle: Leave It Alone!

Sarah Palin as VP candidate may or may not prove to be a brilliantly maniacal move. We will see what happens; in the meantime, riveting though her story is, and as complex a figure as she may be, I am sad that my own most-favored hairstyle (see above; way, way above, up in the header) is being pilloried ceaselessly by cosmetological hatemongers.

It is not a beehive,

as journalists, bloggers, editorialists, and other such ill-informed numbskulls continue to call it. It is, however, a hairstyle that adds a little height, which some of us can benefit from. Additionally, being an updo, it conveys slightly more sophistication, and the weest soupςon of gravitas when necessary, than long, loose hair does,

while not suggesting the prudery that people seem to read into tightly-pulled-back chignons.

Mind you, I can pull off the archest of chignons and ballerinabuns, but I have eyes the size of pancakes, so it is only with extreme effort that I can manage to look 'hard' or severe under any circumstances.

Nonetheless, I resent the fact that every time henceforth I hastily put together a French-Twist-with-a-Pouf with nothing but hope, two bent bobby pins, and a rearview mirror to guide me, I run the risk of being accused of sporting 'A Sarah Palin.' It is a sad year for grooming indeed.

I Confess

And, yes, along with Ran, Nora Inu, Nights of Cabiria, Zorba the Greek, Ju Dou, Red Sorghum, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Blue Angel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Wings of Desire, and A Night at the Opera, Slapshot is one of my favourite films. Maybe my very most favourite. I just wish I could find a picture of Newman in that terrifying leather suit to put here.

In a Handbag

Every day I vacillate between disgust and perverse fascination with this ridiculous campaign, not to mention politics in general. I realize politics is at its heart seedy and unseemly. At any level beyond that of local activists committed to working single-mindedly on one local issue, politics and political speech are, by their very nature, filled with half-truths, exaggeration, 'spin,' disingenuousness, diversion, outright lies and, all too frequently, the overturning of conventionally accepted dictionary denotations. It is the realm of inappropriate alliances, indefensible trade-offs, slanderous smear campaigns, absurd rationales, contrived difference, cultivated insularity and groupthink, and outrageous posturing. It is, frankly, sickening.


Here is my 'political' stance on a few of the 'political' issues of today:
-I don't care that McCain is in his seventies.
-I don't care that Palin is a woman.
-I don't care that Obama is African-American.
-I don't care that Biden is a 'Washington Insider.'

As to the 'experience' issue that both sides make much of, here is the list of individuals with the necessary experience for the vacancy in question:
-Jimmy Carter
-George H.W. Bush
-Bill Clinton
-George W. Bush
Other than them, whoever gets the job is going to be getting a big promotion. That is, of course, the trajectory of the American Dream: onward, upward. Not stuck in the dishpit forever, not condemned eternally to Triple A when you have the chops to make it in the majors.

And nobody has the qualifications to run the country perfectly, not even to the universal acclaim of his own supporters.

So none of the Presidential or Vice-Presidential candidates are qualified, or ready, any more than anyone else receiving a promotion is. To me, it is obvious that that is the nature of a promotion, even of a lateral move: the person is going to do something different. It may be similar to the old position in numerous ways, but because he hasn't done it yet, he is not experienced at it. What we do when we promote someone is consider his intellect, his skills, his aptitudes, his personality, his potential, his overall suitability, and his likelihood of rising to the new demands. In the case of a politician running for office, we must also consider whether his values align with ours, his allegiance thus far to those values, his level of dishonesty, his policies, whether we have reason to believe he will continue to represent the best interests and stated desires of the polity he might come to represent, and we must attempt to distinguish the genuine from the political, the sincere from the machinating, and the honest from the demogogic in his campaign rhetoric. --On the other hand, we could dismiss out of hand any candidate who has ever written a book, learned a second language, taken vacations outside the U.S., gone to a selective university, or studied Constitutional Law as 'uppity' and elitist and stick with candidates whose hobbies we share.

Lipstick and Pitbulls

I am so speechless about The Whole Sarah Palin Thing that I can't even finish a post about it I started a few days ago, let alone write about more recent developments, such as her speech tonight. But I reiterate, that a candidate for a national office (or in more populous areas, state or even municipal office) seems like someone one would like to have a beer or Barolo (or hunt moose or go to the symphony) with is truly insufficient grounds for a vote in his or her favor. Nonetheless, it does appear to me that this vote of the 'common man,' with his presumed demonstrable less-than-vigorously-cultivated critical-thinking skills is precisely what McCain was informed that Sarah Palin could deliver, and which his preferred vice-presidential choices, meanwhile, would preclude. Sarah Palin's positions on some issues may yet remain a mystery, some other positions may be objectionable or ideal to one side or the other but, if it is indeed true that what motivates the Common Man most in an election is the candidate's life's resemblance to that of the voter, Mrs. Palin, despite her 'extreme' attributes like moose-hunting, midnight suns, and marathons, takes 'common' to dazzling, giddy new heights:

--mother
--new mother
--working new mother
--small town
--blue-collar, steelworker husband
--child with disability
--married high-school boyfriend
--PTA member
--husband in labor union
--son in military
--hunting, fishing, snowmobile racing
--no passport for most of life
--pregnant teenage daughter
--mispronouncing foreign words as proof of patriotism
--beauty queen
--big hair
--wacky and whimsical children's names
--believes religion and science are at odds; chooses religion
--anti-intellectual; Obama's education/Constitutional expertise disqualify him

Surely her life story has many aspects with which an 'average' American person can relate. It's a compelling narrative of a strong, opinionated, charismatic, attractive woman. And, like the majority of American citizens, she was not born into inherited wealth: in her sudden rise to the national stage, she embodies the long-cherished image of the United States (or 'America,' as she would say) as the Land of Opportunity: that anyone can make it here and that hard work and tenacity matter more than pedigree. It is a great story; I just wish it had built slowly to a climax rather than suddenly to a punch line.

Difference and Disability

So then, this brings up the question of 'what is a disability?'. I can't answer the question without drawing on my own life, my own experiences and knowledge of other people. There is, however, a standard answer which certainly forms a part of my larger, personal one: a disability can be inferred in an individual testing below a certain level on an IQ test, and by difficulty in an agreed-upon number of 'adaptive skills' such as feeding, cleaning, or clothing oneself, mobility, communication, social fluency, and the ability to get and retain a job.

In my more expansive definition, the consequences of a disability are another way to diagnose its presence. If we are alienated from others, that is proof we have a disability. One obvious thing that produces this estrangement from others is difference: a different body or a different brain, obviously, but just as much a different home culture or religion, different traditions, a different language, illiteracy, poverty, mental illness, scars from childhood, selfishness, insecurity, jealousy, fear. These are disabilities because they keep us from interacting with others as richly as we otherwise could and, by barring us from truly connecting with others, from reaching our own potential to be fully human.

Because some of them have only transactional or contingent value, the difference is that with some of these afflictions we have the choice of whether or not to show our brokenness, a privilege not granted to every person with every disability. We may still be as insecure about our scrawny arms as we were in seventh grade, but if we bulk them up, or even simply walk with a swagger or a sidearm, no one need ever know. We have the luxury of hiding a fear of rejection, for example, behind a supercilious or dismissive attitude, but that fear, however well hidden to others, still exists and thus precludes true intimacy with others.

So I just think the overwhelming majority of us are disabled in significant ways. The manner in which our frailty manifests itself may not preclude abundant, pleasant, superficial contact with others but, inasmuch as it means we cannot fully offer ourselves to others, and thus receive the entire richesse, the whole, the true self, of others in return, it is every bit as limiting as all those things conventionally labeled 'disabilities.'

And, rats, I still didn't say what it was I was trying to say for months on this. God bless blogs: there's always tomorrow. Someday it will, despite all my best efforts, say precisely what I mean it to say...

The Genius of Compassion

Part of what excites me about the company I'll be working for is their belief, consonant with mine, that we are all utterly, radically, equal in worth. I think most Americans can sign on to the notion that a guy with two hands is not of substantively greater ontological standing, or possessed of significantly richer human dignity, than the guy next door who lost one of his in a boating accident. Where I think they stop acceding in large part is the point at which the argument includes individuals with little perceived 'productive' value. We have on the one hand an instinctive fear of anything different, which can certainly be overcome by rationality, personal experience, and openness. Unrelated to that, however, is a troubling enculturated rating scale of humanity particularly present in the United States with its historical emphasis on productivity and industriousness and the lionization of the self-made man. In this schema, someone who doesn't or can't earn as much as another is quite literally worth less than him. The problem arises when this purely financial equation is applied to other realms.

I know with deep certainty from my own experience that we all have our gifts and disabilities. The array is unique to the individual. We are thus all people-with-disabilities. Put in outdated terms, we are all in our own ways 'disabled persons,' 'retarded' relative to others in certain areas. Every genius has things he will never be competent at, just as every person with more limited intellectual abilities has areas in which he can excel. I think most people can calmly accept that a million-dollar football player could be great at running and tackling but less adept at theoretical cosmology, and that a person with ALS in a wheelchair might be stellar at the latter but wretched at the former. The point at which I think it becomes difficult is when the argument for equal inherent worth and dignity includes people who are limited in both physical and intellectual pursuits. We can see that Stephen Hawking is clearly earning his keep; so, too, is the running back whose physically punishing job will have health consequences for the rest of his life.

But I think that when we look at the gifts which we ourselves are most grateful to have, those that bring the most richness to our lives, they are seldom either grandiose or superficial ones, like having a knack for making millions, being able to run marathons, being a genius in one area, or having impeccable taste. The gifts we feel most grateful for, and which we tend to believe are in fact constitutive of our deeper selves, are the small, everyday ones, like tolerance, patience, sincerity, fairness, trustingness, and empathy. And those sorts of little yet profound gifts are present in every sort of person.

They are, moreover, productive - if, admittedly, not necessarily in a financial, or secular-Calvinist sort of way. People who are able to empathize readily with others produce a different atmosphere - in the home, at work, in friendships, and in the larger society. Those who are able to trust produce reciprocal trust in others, leading to honest communication and genuine communion. Anyone who can accept others as they are, without condescension, judgmentalism, or fear, stands a great chance at creating meaningful ties with others, which in turn can produce a better, fairer, kinder, more decent world. I don't think it takes a genius to see that.

Institutions vs. Institutionalized Strengthiness

I got a new job, which I am very excited about. It is as Job Coach for people with disabilities, for a great, passionate, very cool organization, whose values mesh up with mine very well. I had applied for a similar position with a different organization previously - and, I don't know, something, or, truly, a few somethings just weren't right as I went through parts of the interview process. And neither my passion nor my political or intellectual position on issues related to the job mattered at that place: it was to be a Job and nothing more. After having worked in many, many restaurants and seen the kind of ardor, dedication, and self-sacrifice routinely demanded of even those on the lowest rungs of the kitchen ladder, it was quite disturbing to find that, in a position where human psyches and human hearts would be affected as much by my approach as by my execution of the position, neither actually mattered. I still knew that I would rock at the job and be a great asset for the individuals I would support if hired, so I waited to see if I was called to the final level of interviews. But I wasn't, and I felt it was all to the best.

So now, I am excited. I met one woman I'm going to work with, T. She lived, for thirty years, in one of those horrific institutions we imagine don't exist anymore, only recently having been placed into community living. She was so great at her job in the institution's sheltered workshop that she earned about four times what she was 'supposed to' every month. Now, she has her own home that she decorated in her own style, a social life, hobbies and interests she can pursue, assistants who help her out with things she can't do for herself, and she is soon to get a job at a department store, where I will liaise between her and the company, and work to help her understand her responsibilities and succeed at her position.

The day I met her, my new boss and one of T.'s supported-living assistants were with us as we walked around the mall, but a major point of the trip was to see if T. and I would be a good match, so I hung back by her and tried to let her and her curiosity about the new person lead the interaction. After soliciting compliments on her new shoes, T.'s first real question to me was what I thought a person should do when someone is harassing or being mean to him or her. I asked her what she thought someone should do, and she said she would just ignore them, that some people just do mean things and you have to accept that and try not to let it bother you.

Alright, it's a simple truth. Fine. Ignore mean people and your day goes smoother. But being harassed or made fun of in the way T. meant it, in the way she has experienced much of her life, simply because she looks and acts as she does, is not something most of us have to contend with. Nor are our experiences with it so much a part of how we view the world, and our place within it, that we would want to bring it up with someone we had just met. It's not pressing for us. Being rejected in some fashion multiple times a day is simply not a risk most of us face.

But then, neither is that sort of open, heartfelt communication something most of us are willing to risk. Many of our disabilities are such that they keep us bound up inside our own perspectives, our own minds, in a functional isolation paralleling T.'s decades-long real isolation, but in our case masked by an abundance of superficial relations. We can't bear the risk of being truly ourselves and truly vulnerable with others, so we frequently fail to achieve true communion with them. We refuse, even after much time with a person, to lay our fears and weaknesses bare to even a fraction of the extent to which T. was willing to do unreservedly from the very start. We close those parts of ourselves off - the weak and the small and the yearning and the sad parts - that people with obvious disabilities are more often unable to hide. We are just as weak, and just as dependent on other people and community, as 'they' are, but out of our own fears of rejection we steadfastly refuse to present that side of ourselves to others.

Plates? I Don't Need No Stinking Plates!

Apparently I picked up some bad habits at the soup kitchen and left a cupboard door open at my own place. I heard odd noises in the kitchen and went in to discover the neighbor's cat sitting in a cupboard on my plates. It is a good thing I recently broke a few; if I hadn't I'm pretty sure the pile would have come crashing down with his dismount. I think he's in there hiding from today's variable weather. I don't know anything about cats. But 'La Bohème' is on TV, although it doesn't appear to be helping the cat's mood any.

And yes, I do use some kitchen cupboards for kitchen things, not just clothes.

Almost-on-the-Highway Robbery

My recent problems with car thefts got me thinking of the stupidest time I was robbed. --Aren't they all pretty stupid? you ask. Yes, of course, but some leave you feeling more like a hapless sap than others. Now, I admit that this latest round of car robberies does incline me to believe I was rather excessive in Standing on Principle by still refusing to lock my doors after the second round of thefts, but the Convenience Store Pocket-Pickers of '92 win by a landslide for the extent to which they added insult to ego to injury to my pocketbook.

It all began, as most of these stories do, with idiocy. When yet another one of my $300 cars died (was it the Rambler? the Nova? the Mustang II? the Dart, the Valiant, the Olds? I have no idea, but I loved them all), my stepfather (the nice one) took the situation in hand and said we were going to go to a real car dealership, and get me a real car. Fair enough by itself, but when we got there, after cursory handshakes with the avuncular sales agent, both parents sat down and read magazines, leaving me to deal with the car shark on my own, on the basis that I was (chronologically, at any rate) an adult.

I told the middle-aged salesman what I wanted in a car: large and lumbering; safe and slow. As far as features, I wanted power windows. With regard to design, I was hoping for lots of metal around me, and pedals I could reach. In other words, I wanted some granny's trade-in. What I drove out in was a ridiculous speedy Mustang with a bordello-red interior, a spoiler, and some 'sporty' thing over the back window. The salesman was a 50-year-old man, an authority figure, and I gave up standing by my criteria soon after he began prating on about how 'young ladies like you' needed 'fun, sporty' cars. It was a ridiculous accusation, but I was helpless to protest.

Well, the payments on this thing were a bit obscene, and I was not entirely successful in making them all the time. In the days before online bill-paying, when bills got too late the only recourse we had was to drive somewhere and pay the thing in person, which was what I had to do one sunny summer day in Orange County.

First, go back in time one day.

I stopped at my customary Diet Coke outlet, a convenience store just before the freeway onramp. To get in, I walked past two men standing just beside the door who would have looked more at home in a Dorothea Lange photo than in our sparkling suburbs. When I came out, they asked for money. They told of how they had driven from Oklahoma for work in 'that ole pickup over there' (pointing to distant hideous truck parked in front of the office-supply store), earned some money, but got robbed and now just needed to fix up their ole truck to go back home. I felt flush, having just cashed my paycheck, and it hurt me that decent, hardworking rustics would have such a cruel welcome to California. Again. So I gave them a twenty.

Now, go forward a day.

I had to go pay my current and overdue car payment in person somewhere way up north. For that I needed Diet Coke. Now, I had the whole of my paycheck on me still, most of it in a billfold I had stuck in the side pocket of a jacket, and a lot of it was going to the car. The same two guys were outside the store as I went in. I paid for the Coke with money in my purse, and the same one as before accosted me again with a story. They had come out from Nevada to help their ailing relative in that ole van over there (pointing to a sickly, rusted van parked in front of the auto-parts store), but got robbed coming out of the nursing home or graveyard or something, and just needed to get some money to get back home. I was only brave because I was angry, but I actually managed to give some version of a 'Say, look here, Mister' and express a tiny bit of my indignation at having given them twenty dollars the previous day for a different story.

Needless to say, I did not again contribute to their cause. --Not intentionally, that is. While the talky one was remonstrating with me about his need for gas money, the silent partner picked my jacket pocket clean of the billfold, and with it nearly all the money I had in the world. I'm pretty sure that's the time I feel most stupid about. At least until the next one...

Hopeless Causes, Claretians, and Charisms

'La caridad me urge, me impele, me obliga a gritar.' -St. Antonio Maria Claret

'You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.' - St. Bernard of Clairvaux

'To reach something good it is very useful to have gone astray, and thus acquire experience.' - St. Teresa of Avila

'Arm yourself with prayer rather than a sword; wear humility rather than fine clothes.' - St. Dominic



With all that being said, in regards to my statement in the last post about there being no one-fits-all spirituality, I do not mean to say that some truths cannot be universal, nor either that admiring and utilizing elements of other traditions is inherently wrong or fatuous. But trading one inadequately-investigated tradition for superficial adherence to another, one set of misapprehended truths for another yet more confusing system, is every bit as goofy as Chesterton makes it sound. Familiarity is a no more sufficient basis for renouncing a spiritual tradition than it is for divorcing a spouse or vowing never again to read Dostoevsky or eat ice cream.

Augustine defended his use of Plotinus by likening it to the Jews taking the gold out of Egypt, and varied things from different sources may have especial resonance to individual seekers. What is necessary when confronted with all these sparkling jewels is a determined refusal either to make lead out of them or to appropriate what seems convenient or commonsensical while gravely mistaking its essence.

In that vein, there are as many different spiritualities available within Catholicism as there are Catholics. John Dunne, John Dear, John Main, and the fourteenth-century Dominican John Tauler have not only the same name but a shared focus on contemplation and meditation that would not be entirely unfamiliar to a real Buddhist. Martin de Porres, Vincent de Paul, Francis of Assisi, Oscar Romero, Dorothy Day, Antonio Claret, Cesar Chavez, Jean Vanier, and Simone Weil can give anyone a good start who wishes he could combine his love of the poor and the suffering with his love of God.

And this is where the saints come in. There are two primary ways to look at the saints. One is as Friends of God. They did so well in this lifetime that they have God's ear in the next, so while you are praying to God directly that the Red Sox please, please, please take the pennant this time, you can also suggest to St. Jude that this may be the sort of hopeless case worthy of his attention as an advocate. If you are struggling in school, you can ask a brilliant scholar like Aquinas to help you along, or you can petition someone who battled the same challenges to at least give you the courage to keep plugging away diligently.

The other way to see them is as Heroes for Grownups. Saints can indeed be intimidating: they were saints, after all, and we are probably not. But each is as memorable for what he or she overcame as for what s/he accomplished, and meditating on those struggles is often where we can gain the most. They were also individuals, with distinct tendencies and temperaments, walking very different paths toward union, and just as we feel greater sympathy toward particular people we meet in daily life, so, too, will different saints' stories seem more or less apropos of our own journeys, strivings, and weaknesses.

I don't know why people are scared of saints. I think particularly if we refuse to idolize them, to make them into something they were not (i.e., perfect), we can see in their examples how far a small, flawed, and eminently human being - possibly a human being who shared some of our own fears and failures - can get in this life by not letting those fears and weaknesses surmount him.

Matteo Ricci, Mandarins, and Moksha...

So, R. gave me a copy of What Makes You Not a Buddhist, which is a brilliant little book that brilliantly feeds into my particular prejudices, except that it lays out a solid argument for what I get too cranky to articulate beyond the level of whininess. Moreover, it is written by a Tibetan Buddhist, and 'Tibetan Buddhism' is at the moment the preferred flavor for those who are too young to have been 'Zen' before its huarache-wearing disciples were supplanted by 'Tibetan' flocks in Tevas and Birkenstocks. What binds the two groups beyond their shared fondness for open-toed shoes is a distaste for 'organized religion,' 'dogma,' and a purportedly mediated experience of the Divine, as well as the sense that what they perceive as lacking in Christianity can be found in a bastardized version of a tradition that, being exotic, they have no bad memories of.


I have been wanting to write a semi-sensible rant on this for a while, because it ties together Chesterton and the Dalai Lama, which not so many things do, really, if you think about it, and also because it fleshes out to an extent what I have said about the secularized (and thus inaccurate/irrelevant) and largely pernicious vestiges of Calvinism that haunt even a stolid, fourth-generation atheist in this country. What Chesterton had to say on the one hand was this little nugget: 'The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.' In The Everlasting Man he also said this:

'They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they cannot leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith. Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best thing is to be far away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian.'

And the reverse of the vantage point of that Confucian to a distant and exotic Christianity is what we take with us as we look at Buddhism, or Tibetan Buddhism specifically. Our parents never threatened us with bardo if we misbehaved; we were never disappointed with Tara if our entreaties to the Eternal appeared to go unanswered. We can approach Buddhism with open arms and hearts because we have no (substantive or distorted) history with it, whereas we cannot even view a (likewise quite distant) thirteenth-century Christian contemplative from a perspective untainted by our views on the Reformation, the Inquisition, colonialism, or even every terrible or just mediocre pastor or believer we've ever known.



Chesterton again:

'The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not judge Christianity as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda' (super-double-bold-italics mine).

But metaphors can only go so far, and I would quibble with Chesterton's only to the extent that even as our Londoner looks more charitably on a Confucian or a pagoda than he does on a Christian or a cathedral, he still does so ineluctably from the balcony of his apartment or the front porch of his Georgian, or Queen Anne, or 'Tuscan' home. He comes into life with a Judeo-Christian weltanschauung from within which he can never fully remove himself, however many embroidered Hill Tribe jackets his closet holds. Whatever sympathy he may find himself to hold for the precepts of karma and moksha, and whether he decides he ascribes more to the concept of atman or of anatman, he is, like Matteo Ricci under his Confucian silks, ever and always a Westerner, regardless of the extent to which he claims, or purports to reject, his own spiritual heritage.


As the Dalai Lama asserted many times in the 1994 John Main Seminar (The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus), though there are many similarities between teachings in the Gospels and Buddhist works, just as there is no one type of man, nor no one type of spirituality or spiritual practice suited to every individual equally, there can be no one tradition that incorporates all the teachings of all the world. The Trinity is not equal to the three kayas - but there are 'parallels and similarities,' just as there are between mahabrahman and the Christian God when viewed in His aspect as ultimate ground of being. The Dalai Lama acknowledges that reaching too far abroad for spiritual insight frequently creates more confusion in the seeker than wisdom or equanimity. To gloss over these significant differences and the culturally-specific origins of Tibetan Buddhism is to demean both the Tibetan tradition and the Western would-be bhikku. What he likely adopts under these conditions is neither Christianity nor Buddhism. He cannot extricate himself from his patrimony - however ill understood it may be in his case - nor can he successfully through sheer force of will insert himself into the story of millennia of Himalayan spiritual inheritance. He begins with misunderstanding his own religion and ends with exoticising, romanticising, cheapening - and misunderstanding - a different one.

I didn't get to the eminently sensible Buddhism book (written by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, originally from Bhutan). But now I fully intend to, since I was at least able to start. This has been simmering a long time. Like, years and years. It's good to let it go.

Mustangs, Ministers, and the Misery of Politics

Like you, I'm often scared of religious people. They can be arrogant, preachy, narrow, provincial, and very, very poor listeners. Perhaps also like you, I often find academics to share many of the same attributes. Both groups also tend to associate solely with their own kind, which does little to broaden either their experience or their perspective.

In between are people who can combine rationality with spirituality, and who are possessed of a faith profound and vast enough to encompass new facts and new experiences: life, in other words. I was unexpectedly impressed with the Orange County pastor, Rick Warren, who is apparently very famous and hosted the question-and-answer session with the two presidential candidates. I admit that I didn't watch the whole thing; I'm going to have to do it in parts, since politicians scare me more than anyone else. But here is a guy whose whole life is built around his faith, who brought his little church up from meetings at local public high schools (Go Mustangs!) and other such buildings to the fourth largest church in the United States, who is an evangelical, for Heaven's sake - and who asked about the sanest question I have heard anyone ask a candidate.

He put the question the following way: 'A lot of good legislation dies because of partisan politics and party loyalty keeps people from really putting America’s best first. Could you give me an example of where you led against your party's interest ... and really maybe against your own best interest, for the good of America?' While every overpaid political 'journalist' unceasingly strives to provide the gossip-hungry public 'news' of candidates' 'flip-flopping' with as salacious a tone as if they were announcing yet another politician's sex scandal, any sane citizen realizes that as facts change - be they borders, heads of state, environmental conditions, social problems, diplomatic relations, demographics, economic conditions, or anything else within the purview of a aspirant to high political office or a lowly voter - our position on those facts might be a more sensible one were it to take into account that they no longer mean quite what they once did.

Let us take an avowedly religious person. He or she believes that some values and acts are always absolutely good, and likewise that some things are always wrong. His or her choices are thus always far more restricted than someone for whom all categories are, at least in theory, potentially fluid. But in even in this case, which I hold up to be the most rigid stance politically - even from this most rigid perspective one thing could have been right under previous circumstances and now completely indefensible ethically. Ergo, it's not 'flip-flopping,' but serious consideration, reflection, and analysis of facts. If Geo. W. Bush were to say in light of current circumstances that when he met with Putin in 2001 he should perhaps have been wearing his bifocals when he 'looked the man in the eye... and was able to get a sense of his soul,' I would be grateful for his new more reflective and less hasty analysis. I might think he was rash, gullible, or arrogant as regards his earlier pronouncement, but I would not impugn his current stance on the basis of its divergence from his previous statement.

So, that an evangelical Christian, the sort of person many people perceive as being the most inflexible, the worst at listening, and the least amenable to cooperation, should suggest that in the execution of the office of President the good of the country might conceivably at times trump strict adherence to Party loyalty - well, it fills me with the sort of faith, hope, and goodwill that I usually only experience while crying during films about brave dogs or talking beavers made for third-graders.

Cat Fights in Cowboy Towns

There is nothing like waking up with a nightmare in the middle of the night and not being able to go back to sleep. There are even fewer things like waking up with a nightmare, not being able to return to sleep, and having a job interview the next day for which one had previously held out the hope of seeming collected, focused, and semi-smart. Oh, well, even if the black circles under the eyes are egregious, I can still hope for 'interesting,' clean, fully dressed, and amusingly small.

The dream, though! I was driving in a car with the neighbor's cat in the passenger seat. I know I was driving the Mazda car, because when we pulled over there was no dome light. We had to pull over because I couldn't find my house keys, keys that belong to a house I have never lived in except in dreams, a small Victorian in an old mining town in NE Washington, Nevada, or Central California. I had to find the keys because I had to give them to someone, and where we pulled over was next to a swamp alongside a highway that was also the road that the megachurch pastor who interviewed the Presidential candidates last week has his church on now, and which used to be across the street from an orange grove. But his church wasn't in the dream; it didn't exist yet, or maybe the dream only existed in a world devoid of megachurches. I don't know, but I was on the side opposite the orange grove, and down the street from a row of saloons, blacksmiths, and rooming houses that I've also only been near in my dreams.

It was hard to find the key without a dome light or streetlights, but then I remembered I thought it was in this pretty green carved box with turtles on it from Indonesia. Naturally, I knew exactly where the box was, but as I started to open the secret compartment on the box that had always worked before, it turned out just to be a a decoration and came off in my hand. At that point, I noticed that there was a cat sitting on the windowledge of the car and trying to get in. The neighbor's cat hadn't noticed the stranger yet, and I was starting to get scared of what else might be lurking on the roadside in the middle of nowhere so, although my fingers were shaking, I figured out how to open the regular compartment of the box to get out the key. I managed to open it, but inside were only hallucinogenic and shiitake mushrooms, the latter of which is of as little interest to me as the former, and as soon as I was realizing that, the outside cat figured out how to get inside, leapt at the other cat, they started fighting, and I woke up.

Now, I used dried shiitakes today, so they were in my head and I don't need to believe my subconscious is telling me to eat more mushrooms. We were also talking at the soup kitchen about people getting addicted to opiates after surgery, and how someone's tolerance for pain might decrease while on them and cause dependence, so maybe that's how the other kind of mushroom got in there. My brain should also not be telling me to replace the dome light, as I already succeeded masterfully in performing that bit of highly technical auto repair. It may have been saying, 'Be sure to take the GPS to the interview, idiot,' and 'If you got another cat of your own, maybe the wandering one would want to stay inside and you wouldn't have to worry if he is okay, since his owners will never care one way or the other.' Or maybe just 'Get copies of your keys made, don't drive around with cats, and don't move to a ghost town.' Either way, I woke up in the middle of a fight between two cats on my lap in a tiny car, with my heart pounding, and sitting straight up in bed.

'Your Power Is Turning Our Darkness to Dawn,

So roll on, Columbia, roll on.'

Some things we would never know without Wikipedia. Washington is a fine state in many ways. We have a lot of parks, and a lot of universities, a lot of nonprofits, and everyone gardens and nobody smokes. We lead the country in raspberries and hops, and while we may all suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder nine months out of the year, we are generally courteous.

That being said, we have the lamest, and most inscrutable, state motto. While others speak of valor, liberty, and progress:

-'Live free or die.' (New Hampshire)
-'Liberty and prosperity.' (New Jersey)
-'Union, justice, et confiance.' (Louisiana)
-'By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty.' (in Latin) (Massachusetts)
-'United we stand, divided we fall.' (Kentucky)

Washington takes as its slogan a Chinook expression meaning, 'Sure, when we get around to it, you bet.'

-'Alki,' or 'Eventually, by and by.' It should come as no shock, then, that the world's largest hemp festival is held here; while Mississippi is working out what it is today they are going to accomplish 'By valor and arms' and Nebraska is defending 'Equality before the law,' we're sitting around debating whether we should get extra chèvre or just double chorizo on our Mad Pizza.

And, while I think that orcas, rhododenrons, and apples make perfect sense in their respective categories, I can't imagine how the Square Dance Lobby succeeded in dominating the race for state dance. Moreover, while I love Woody Guthrie beyond all discretion, our state song, 'Roll On, Columbia, Roll On,' a panegyric to electricity and damming, is perhaps more on the level of his 'Ladies' Auxiliary' than of 'This Land Is Your Land' (the full version) or 'The Dying Doctor,' including such lines as:

'Other great rivers add power to you
Yakima, Snake, and the Klickitat, too
Sandy Willamette and Hood River, too,
So roll on, Columbia, roll on.'

-And you can't even square dance to it.

It's the Emerald City, not the 'Paris of the Gobi'

Well, thank God: we are back to rainy and 60 degrees, so everyone can stop complaining about the sweltering heat and go back to 'Sixty-three? In August? Where did our summer go?'

And while looking for information on replacing the antique dome-light bulb in the beleaguered hatchback, I came across this poignant story of another vintage Mazda owner's travails. Dave Fox, also of Seattle, and a travel writer for our own Rick Steves, battled his crappy car's possessed horn rather than undiscriminating robbers. It is a sad and touching story, and a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.

--Or at least the refusal of crappy cars to go gently into that good night.

"'Et tu, Brute,' rief Er auf Lateinisch

--wie est dort die Landesprache war."

I've apologized once, and I've apologized twice, and I've apologized more than that, too, for when my rhetoric verges over into the preachy ~

~ See, the thing is, much as I might love Dominicans, I grew up when and where I grew up, none of which admittedly were the best of all possible places or times and any of which maybe should have been the thirteenth or fourteenth or seventeenth century but were not and, accordingly, while I have absolutely no bad feelings whatsoever about 'prædicare' since I can't speak any Latin other than 'Non calor sed umor est qui nobis incommodat,'* I cannot help but wince, shake a little, and discreetly and in an eminently ladylike fashion vomit inside my mouth from smelling the imagined leeching vapors of petroleum by-products from obstreperous and designed-to-impress synthetic altar-flower arrangements basted with 'Inspired-by-Nature' 'fresheners' at 7 AM sharp every Sunday anytime I find myself within 26 miles of 'preachy'~

So it is that every time I go off on caritas, agape, empathy, compassion, love, the Beatitudes, the Song of Songs, Bernard of Clairvaux, Nagarjuna, Dostoevsky, Avalokitesvara, or even Common Decent Neighborliness, I always feel as though I have too much product and too many extensions in my hair, too overwhelming a desire to restate endlessly the obvious with an ever-increasing lack of delicacy, decency, and eloquence, too great a tendency to tripthongize my dipthongs, and a garish and enormous Daughters of the Confederacy pin tacked to my (it would be, under the circumstances) abundant bosom.

So, as a sop to myself and those of you who find my exhortations as tiring as I do, here is a panel from my favorite comic strip writer, Peter Blegvad, whose Leviathan ran in the Independent and to which I was as addicted when I lived in Greece and Suffolk as I was to Gauloises Bleues and those pull-out, frame-able sections about minerals, indigenous beetles, and traffic patterns in the Sunday El País.


*'It's not the heat; it's the humidity.'