This is Diwali, the Hindu festival of light. Lovely concept.
It hits ‘the God Place’ in us, as a student of mine says. I understand The God Place to be the ache, the deep, the yearning, the poignant and true. I think of it like a nerve or a vein. She was using the phrase to refer to what happens to her when she hears Ave Maria, or Amazing Grace, or Lord hear our prayer. Something deep is happening to her, even though what is happening to her is not something she would call Christian. It is about family, about childhood, about innocence and the loss of innocence. It hits the oldest realities and the burden of knowing. I think it’s probably about our secrets and shame and love - all of them together at once like a cocktail of drugs slung in an IV bag. Or maybe a yellowed and badly shot postcard from a mediocre country called your whole life. No one else could possibly care about it, but this little missive breaks your heart. I think of the God Place as our sorrowful, blessed humanity bared naked. How vulnerable that is.
How surprisingly beautiful.
This is a conversation I have been having with students, and with my teachers, and in my own experience, for about 35 years. I say that because I assume until I was 10 or so I didn’t think about it. But that isn’t true. I had all sorts of god thoughts as a kid. Probably more than most kids. I know I had more god thoughts than most kids and I even knew it at the time: I was weird, and a part of my strangeness was religious. For a little while, other kids called me Preach, as in Preacher. That was in the third grade. I wanted to be a monk. I fully expected to be a monk, as if that were just the most obvious truth there could be, something like tomorrow being Thursday. Duh.
But then around eight or nine or twelve years old, Religion became a great big farce and problem. I rejected it. That wasn’t hard to do because no one in my family or community was terribly invested in it. As a teenager, I read Marx. That hit me as more honest and real, the opium of the masses thing. Nietzsche didn’t help matters. Nor did all the history I read: proof positive that the greatest sins in history have been committed in the name of religion. There is nothing - absolutely nothing - so racist, misogynistic, repressive, shaming, violent or cruel as religion has been and continues to be. Nothing in the world has caused more violence, theft, invasion, genocide, browbeating, caste forming, slut shaming, victim blaming, witch hunting, ostracizing, bullying, flagellation, rape, enslavement and abuse. Nothing.
By the time I was a teenager, my rejection of religion wasn’t quiet. I was vocal. I was angry. I was an feminist.
These days, I can see that part of what I was was mean. I refused to come home for a family thanksgiving, and instead sent my mom a card that said ‘happy holocaust!’ One easter morning I made up a little ditty as I made my coffee, something about a baby Jesus and how we’re gonna hang him on a cross. tra la da dum! I thought I was funny. But I was singing it right in front of my father, who got red and silent. He finally said “do not mock me,” and left the room. His voice was so tight it trembled. The silence when he left was bad.
In a less cruel and pulsing moment, I once asked my dad why he still called himself a Christian: he had raised me thinking that Bible stories should be treated as myth, not miracle; he didn’t think Jesus any more divine than Jo Shmoe; and he certainly didn’t believe Christ had resurrected. “But if you don’t accept the basic tenets,” I said, “the very things that define Christianity, and given all the harm of history, how can you still call yourself a Christian?” I said. He said he couldn’t handle life - this awful world - without it.
The funny thing was - and I mean funny strange, funny weird, funny with an angle on it you can’t quite describe - I continued to be downright enamored of what human beings had done in god’s name. I mean cathedrals. And pilgrimages. And festivals. And art. My little anthropologist soul, or artist’s heart, or whatever it is, inhaled god stuff like crack. I didn’t believe in god, but I loved what human beings had done for him. It seemed that religion was both the most vile and the most gorgeous piece of what it means to be a human. What it means to have a heart.
By the time it came time for me to get sober, the God thing was mostly poetry. Like Tolstoy, it was a poetic vision. Like King, I figured it a capacity to dream of things like justice that had never been real but should be believed in. Like Malcom, it was a radical, defiant, insouciant choice. But it wasn’t anything that actually felt useful in my personal life. Then in sobriety, and in yoga, the two places I frequented with the religious fervor of a pilgrim, they kept saying god. Godgodgodgodgodgodgod. I knew from the get go that this was going to be the hardest part. I knew that my awkwardness with churches and people who openly talked about prayer were going to either be my redemption or my excuse to flip a middle finger and run away. Since I knew the latter meant I would die, I was in a pickle.
I asked folks about it. I asked friends, people who I thought I knew and I thought thought like me. “What do you do about the god stuff?” I asked my Native friend who was five or six years clean, who I knew damned well understood history and power. “It doesn’t bother me.” she said. She’d just gotten a haircut, a thick, flippy, coiffed look since the down her back hair I’d seen the day before. It moved, heavy and soft, as she drove with the windows down. It was beautiful. She was beautiful. I waited for her to say more but she didn’t. I boiled in myself and looked at my hands. I asked my other friend, a guy I’d known since we were sixteen. “I don’t have a problem with it,” he said. In fact, I seemed to be the only one of my radical, activist friends who was terribly bothered by faith.
It slowly occurred to me that my problem with religion was neither rational nor humanitarian. It wasn’t intelligent. My problem with religion was a spiritual wound. It was trauma, a mass of spiritual baggage, not some liberated rationality.
Generally speaking, I spent years just trying to not worry too much about the question. I tried to follow advice. I was aware and wary of my own tendency to resist. I tried to go along with what obviously worked for other people. Since they said godgodgodgodgod, in fits and starts I would try to find my soul. I went to church (it made me cry). I went to some other church (ditto). I meditated and I read the spiritual classics (Merton, James, Flan O’Connor, St. Benedict’s rule, Abraham Heschel, Karen Armstrong), I held hands with other people and I chanted the lord’s prayer. (A Jewish friend shared that she had resisted this early on, being a Jew; her sponsor said to do it anyway. She did. And then she didn’t have a problem with it anymore.). I went on meditation retreats and flipped sobriety medallions in my hand like prayer beads.
Yoga complicated this question even as it was giving me a practical way through it. I could heal, and sooth, and wrestle with my soul without worrying too much about God. But the whole time, there were allusions to altered states, enlightenment, spontaneous psychological weirdnesses. Some folks alluded to this in a promissory way: hinted that we’d get there if we practiced hard enough. Others dismissed it. Some seemed to be hawking it like snake oil. There were always questions of culture: it struck me as weird that a bunch of white folks would use the spiritual technologies of brown folks without there being any actual brown folks in the room. I knew enough about history and politics to know that Hinduism - related, but not quite the same thing as yoga - is not a ‘better’ religion than any other when it comes to human rights. White yogis seemed oblivious to this. They seemed to be choosing a mishmash of yoga-vedanta-hinduism with a holier than thouness, a spiritual superiority that celebrated ‘one truth, many paths’ while ignoring actual history and actual people.
I don’t in any way pretend to have figured these things out. I have tried to quit yoga, like I quit the church, and for the same reasons. I can’t.
This has raised questions about addiction and delusion and coping skills all over again - have I (do we) replaced one problem with a slightly less harmful one? (Yes. And no.) Is that, in the end, any less harmful? (no. And yes.)
About a year into sobriety, my grandfather was in the hospital after a stroke. My sister, who was hugely pregnant, my dad who was 30 some years sober, and myself still in the wild-eyed initial stages of it were all visiting him. The pastor came to give my grandpa communion. She had a neat little leather zippered bag with a couple of wafers, plastic tiny shot glasses, a mini bible and a vial of wine. Somehow, even though I had been spending the last hundreds of days drilling the thought of not even one, not one drop, into my head, there was no question that any of us would turn the wine down. We each held our teeny shot glass and tried to sit respectfully in the hard hospital chairs bunched around the hospital bed. The smell burned my nose in a way that did a funny thing to my heart. The pastor said some things and then we said Amen and it was bottom’s up. But this didn’t hit me as a relapse. It certainly didn’t cause me any problems. I’ve told this story to students, mainly as a way to talk about holy moments. It wasn’t dramatic. There were rubber soles and beeps in the hallway, a flaccid cold spring outside the window. There was a bad landscape print on the wall. It was one of the most sacred moments of my life.
And now it’s Diwali. The celebration of the victory of light over the darkness. One of the myths Diwali is connected with is the Ramayana: Ram, an incarnation of Viṣṇu, comes to rescue his kidnapped wife Sita from the evil yogi Ravana. In the way of myth, the Ramayana is fantastic. It’s chapter after chapter of brotherly vows, epic battles, dark nights of the soul.
It’s also probably the most misogynistic thing I’ve ever read.
Every woman in the story is evil, except for Sita. Sita is holy, mainly because she is so faithful to Ram. It made me think of Tammy Wynette and how stand by your man always swells in my head when I hear stories - not statistics, stories from folks I know - about domestic violence. Sita is faithful to him even though he ditches her. Sita is molested, kidnapped, assaulted, burned alive, abandoned because Ram’s role as king is more important than his role as husband and folks are gossiping about her (proven by the burned alive thing) purity. Eventually she is outcast. She commits a kind of suicide by asking the earth to swallow her. Take her home.
I studied the Ramayana with one of my teachers. I hated it. Most of the women in the group hated it. The teacher (male) kept saying that we should see this as metaphor, not an apologetics for misogyny. “Sita is a metaphor for the earth.” he said.
I huffed. “Is that any better? Sacrifice the earth for the sake of the kingdom?”
I blew my top more than once in that group. I finished the study, but I’m still wondering if that was important. Maybe I should have just left. I made a very good friend. I learned some things. I do think it’s important to understand the Ramayana’s place in Indian culture.
At the end, Sita dead and gone, Ram and everyone else in the story are quiet and reflective. Maybe they are sorry. I’ve heard some teachers point to that as proof of something or other. I can’t see it that way. Is feeling bad afterward good enough? Or is that just the canonization of male fragility? Is ‘alas, too late’ really the best we can do?
“At what point” - I said to the group in one of our closing sessions - “are we going to stop calling these awful books ‘holy’?” When are we finally going to stop using them as a model for any kind of anything? Forgive me, but they are trash.
I include the Bible in that, lest anybody think otherwise. The Bible is trashy trash. I find the Quran to be good poetry, but would be willing to sacrifice it too.
Another thing my dad said, once. I was telling him about studying the yogic texts: the Sūtras I just keep studying over and over again, but also the Bhagavad Gīta, the Puranas, the Upanisads, my Vedic chants. I talked about what I have learned about how to study these things - it’s important, absolutely essential, that you have a teacher help you through it. There has to be conversation, dialogue, a sincere learning process involved. He started, shifted excitedly in his seat. “That’s true of the Bible, too,” he said. “it’s not just ‘important’; it’s downright dangerous if you read it on its own.”
Here’s where I’m at right now: I’ve figured out that I often, in my woundy anger, confuse ‘religion’ and ‘god’. Not exactly my fault: the words are used without clarification all the time. There are a lot of loaded unspoken things happening whenever the words come up. But for myself personally, I can now see that God and Religion are not the same thing. I can wholly reject religion and stay pretty intimate with God. But I also hate the ‘spiritual, not religious’, option. It’s just too damned sloppy. It usually means people want to feel good but aren’t willing to do any of the work (religio: obligation, vow, rule, agreement). It often means people feel justified in taking from all sorts of traditions without developing a real relationship with any one of them. Spiritual generally strikes me as not far removed from spiritualism - weird self indulgent mysticism.
I understand the God Place in us. I am sympathetic to people’s need on the one hand and justified rejection of formal religion on the other. My sympathy has resurrected. I reject religion, I love God, and I practice religiously. Thing is, I don’t think I have a choice. It just is. I am. The only question is what I am going to do with it.
I can read and honor them all, at this point. The Bible. The Gita. The Ramayana. I quietly light a candle in the dark. I love the human cries and glory they preserve. I revere the complexity of the questions, the human angle, the woven thread. The victory of light over darkness is a lovely, lovely story. I know it isn’t true. Not now, and not in the myths, and not in the ravages of human history.
But I’m still gonna bet my soul on it.