Fleeing Fundamentalism Read online

  Then a young, fresh-skinned Thomas Didymus appeared, sitting at a wooden table in a dirt-floored home in Caesarea, locks of dark curls falling into his eyes. He held his quill to weathered parchment. “Tell me of your secret teachings,” he coaxed Jesus.

  “Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death,” the gnostic Christ began. “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you … He who has known himself has simultaneously achieved knowledge about the depth of all things.”

  As his eyes rose from the manuscript he was writing, Thomas finally understood the esoteric message Jesus had been delivering in parables and symbols—that the same divinity that Christ possesses dwells inside us all. Jesus looked at Thomas and said, “I am no longer your master.”

  Suddenly Christ’s words harmonized with those from all of the great mystical traditions: “Look within yourself and find God,” said the Buddha. “The Lord is enshrined in the hearts of all,” states the Isha Upanishad. The Islamic Sufi mystic Rumi declared, “Deep in our hearts the light of heaven is shining.” Confucius said, “What the undeveloped man seeks is outside; what the advanced man seeks is within himself.”

  I imagined the rocky shores of the Jordan, where a small group of gnostic followers shivered, the cold whipping their garments. Their leader, Valentinus, standing in the current, called for them to enter and be awakened. “As you lower into the water and are resurrected out, you will be reborn to the knowledge of your own divinity,” he said.

  The clock chimed outside in the plaza, and I sat up. I thought about the similarities between Christian gnosticism and other mystical faiths I had read about, those that shunned religious dogma and taught inner enlightenment. For years I had assiduously avoided Christianity, but now I wondered if the gnostic Christ might have been onto something: inner knowing rather than outward doctrine. The thought reminded me of a small Buddhist temple in the woods, where people meditated on Sunday mornings for ninety minutes at a time. When I first heard about the place, I’d thought, That sounds crazy, sitting for an hour and a half—I’d go mad. But that afternoon in the Suzzallo Library, I decided that I was ready to give the experience a try.

  On a bright spring morning in May, I pulled up the driveway and parked next to an immaculate Japanese-style home. Behind it a finely raked gravel path disappeared into a lush garden. Following the trail, I let it direct me into another world as it wandered past silent ponds reflecting the garden hush, lotus-white lilies, and carved stone pots pouring tranquility from bamboo waterfalls. The perfume of cedar and juniper permeated the morning sunshine beaming through the Japanese maples. Violet moss flowers lined the path as a thicket of thin bamboo reeds brushed their emerald smoothness against my legs. The garden was redolent of rain moistened earth warming to life. Then, at a turn in the clearing, a lovely cedar structure emerged, a small but exquisite wooden temple.

  Symbolism inspires the Buddhist temple’s design. The foundation stands on a square base representing the earth, crowned by a winged roof, emblematic of water. The flight of stairs ascending the temple represents the steps of illumination, and its stylized peak recalls the wind. Earth, water, fire, and air: simply contemplating the structure is said to draw the observer closer to enlightenment—the realization that all is one.

  As I walked up the creaking cedar steps, they emanated a warm, lingering sweetness. A huge keisu gong protected the doorway, while oriental lanterns danced in the soft summer breeze. I took off my shoes and set them next to others placed neatly in a row. Incense greeted me as I stepped into a room where purple cushions lined either side of a long aisle. Up front, a shrine encasing the Buddha was surrounded with offerings of fruit and flowers, white candles, and clear water in ritual bowls. Since I had never attended such a service, I kept my eyes on the people seated on the purple cushions, cross-legged, holding their hands in a circle, thumbs to thumbs, left palm cradled in the right. A beautiful woman entered and lit the candles, signaling the ceremony to begin. She retreated, and the gong sounded as a large man in a black and white robe entered. He did not look at us, but walked down the aisle toward the shrine, where he lit the center candle, offering its incense to the Buddha, and then made three full prostrations on the floor.

  The meditation began. The books I’d read on the subject suggested that I let my thoughts pass without judgment, observing each idea as a transitory event, not identifying with it but letting it rise and pass like a cloud in the sky. I didn’t find the exercise an easy task. I kept thinking, This is lunacy, such a waste of time, just sitting for an hour and a half … I’d better cook those vegetables in the fridge before they turn into fungus … Speaking of fungus, there’s enough of it around my bathroom sink right now to harvest penicillin … Oh, my God, my legs are falling asleep … Maybe I’ll move my toes just a hair to wake them up, but shit, not a soul around me is so much as twitching, and it would be a dead giveaway that I’m a total amateur … By the end of this, my legs will have gangrene, and they’ll have to carry me out of this place on a stretcher like Gandhi.

  Finally I remembered to concentrate on my breath—in and out, in and out—and an odd thing happened. The rising and falling events in my flighty brain began to fade as faces in a dream. I felt waves washing over my mind, like a tide raking the beach, caressing my naked feet. I was a solitary gull between heaven and earth, embarking on a thousand-mile journey, beyond the sound and reach of the everyday world. For what seemed a mere moment, the leg aching and mind chattering stopped. The sunlight was like the water, the water like the sky, and the sky like the soul. The gong outside sounded, and the meditation was over. Amazing, I thought. That was ninety minutes, and my legs are still with me.

  The woman passed out song booklets and then hit a huge bowl shaped gong with a padded stick. The note rang out, and everyone began to sing in the same monotone, Tendaai Shomyooo kyooo-ku. In the open vowel tones I heard a universal resonance reminding me of the elongated chants of the mystical sects of all major religions. The Muslim Sufis chant Allaahh, Buddhists and Hindus call out Ommmm, Jews who follow the kabbalah recite Daai Daai yadle-Daai, and Christians sing Ah-men and Alleluia. Gregorian and other Christian chants are based on these vowel tones, drawn out across notes in extended musical phrases. As we chanted, it seemed to me that at their heart, religions had more to unify them than to fight over. After we finished, the Zen master, still motionless in the lotus position, made a few observations about the interdependence of things, and that the awareness of this truth leads to ahimsa, a desire for nonviolence and respect for all life.

  We had tea, and the ceremony was over.

  A few weeks later, Susan called and left a message on my answering machine: “Please say you’ll meet me for dinner. I have something very important to tell you.”

  Susan had booked a table at Maximilien in the Pike Place Market. The night was dry and mild, and I jumped out of my car and walked the four blocks down to the waterfront. Between the old brick and stucco buildings that bordered Virginia Street, a departing ferry moved toward Vashon Island like a drifting jack-o’-lantern. On the corner of Post Alley, four Hispanic boys in oversized parkas and matching Lakers caps stood leaning against the wall blowing cigarette smoke into the air. I thought of Jason.

  I entered the dark restaurant and saw Susan sitting in a corner booth. She looked as beautiful as ever with her coal black hair cut into a hip new do, messy and spiked on top, her lips still red and shining. As I reached the table she jumped up and threw her arms around me. I could smell the same expensive Halston perfume that she had worn for years, and I felt my body relax into her. Good friends never change, I thought.

  “God, why did we let ourselves get out of touch?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, but I did know of course. I had let it happen, willed it to happen, so busy trying to create a new life for me and my kids, unable to deal with so many parts of my past, unwilling to look back, even at old friends.

  The wa
iter arrived at the table just then—a handsome black-tied man with white teeth and a compact smile. “Would you ladies care for a drink?”

  “I’ll have a martini,” Susan said, “Bombay Sapphire, up with two olives, please.”

  “The same for me.”

  “So, I’m separated from Robert,” she blurted out. “After all this time I know it’s hard to believe, but things were simply getting unbearable.”

  “My God, what happened?”

  “Well you know that evangelical church we’ve been attending for years?”

  “Overlake Temple?”

  “Yes. Robert decided it was just too liberal for him, so he found this totally right-wing Fundamentalist group out in Monroe and told me that we were going to start attending it. So I went, Sunday after Sunday, even though I was uncomfortable with the pastor’s condemnation of everything. After a while I really began to miss our friends at Overlake, so I asked Robert if I couldn’t attend the Saturday evening service if I continued to go to Monroe on Sunday mornings. He said no. No discussion—that was it.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  “Yeah, and it gets worse. I started attending the Saturday evening service anyway, so Robert talked to his new pastor who said I was in a state of rebellion, and if I continued attending the service at Overlake, the church would have to discipline me.”

  “What the hell did that entail?”

  “Get this, one Sunday morning the pastor informed me that I wouldn’t be allowed to take communion that day, and that he was going to call me up in front of the parish to address my rebellion toward Robert’s authority. I walked out of the church. During the service he informed the congregation that the members were bound by Second Thessalonians to discipline me for disobedience to my husband—I wouldn’t be able to take communion, and I was in danger of being excommunicated. I wasn’t even there to defend myself, and my kids were sitting right in the service.”

  “What a crock of bull.”

  The finely dressed waiters glanced our way.

  “When Robert got home that day, I took the kids and moved out of the house.”

  “Thank God you are free from that hypocrisy,” I whispered.

  “Yes, but you have to remember, Carlene, that not all Christians are like Robert and not all churches are like the one in Monroe.”

  “You’re right,” I said.

  I was elated that Susan had broken away from the tyrant Robert, and that she was back in my life again. For months I considered what she’d said about religion; I knew that there was plenty of wisdom in her remarks. Each spiritual gathering had a different personality and couldn’t be prejudged as unhealthy. So when a friend on my block asked me to join her for services one Sunday, I found myself, for the first time in years, packed into a Baptist church foyer. As we jostled toward the sanctuary, a sea of bodies enclosed me, and suddenly eight months of Zen calm, stored up from countless hours of meditating, evaporated in one rapid heartbeat, and I had the overwhelming urge to emulate the demon possessed man in Mark, screeching and tearing his hair from his head, bolting from the tombs of the Gadarenes. We pressed through into an enormous sanctuary. Up front an elaborate orchestra played updated hymns: “Fairest Lord Jesus” remixed in pop fashion, “The Old Rugged Cross” driven by a rock-and-roll pulse, and “How Great Thou Art” in symphonic medley. I sat down in a burgundy upholstered pew, feeling like a Yankees fan in the middle of the Seattle Mariners’ home section. The worship area looked like a combination of lush mortuary and sports stadium. A huge balcony overlooked the main floor, from which clean-cut parishioners waved to their friends and made plans to meet at their favorite restaurant afterward for Sunday brunch.

  An immaculate fellow with a megawatt smile stepped to the pulpit. He was tall, sinewy, and narrow shouldered, with a bald forehead that wrinkled deeply when he smiled. Pastor Ted opened his sermon with a joke. As the sermon progressed, however, he turned grave and began to shout that the Bible demanded that God’s people be set apart from sin, and then he praised the current president of the United States for taking a stand against evil in the world. “It’s good to know we finally have a friend in the White House,” he said, “a man who lets the God of the Bible tell him what decisions to make. A man who consults his heavenly Father, rather than his earthly father, when he wants to make a big decision like going to war.” I shifted uneasily in my seat as “Amens!” exploded around me.

  “We can also be comforted by the fact that our current House majority leader believes that God has anointed him to bring a biblical worldview to American politics. Senator DeLay has publicly testified to the fact that ‘only Christianity offers the real truth and gives the proper answers to a lost and sinful world.’”

  “Amen!” erupted around me again like hoots at an NBA tournament match, while the words of theologian Hans Küng ran through my head: “When we believe that ours is the only faith that contains the truth, violence and suffering will surely be the result.”

  As I listened to Pastor Ted, I wondered where such a “biblical worldview in government” would lead America. If we were going to consult the Bible on government decisions, the logical conclusion would be to create a theocracy. If the document is God-breathed, we must embrace the entire text and stop picking out only the verses we like—every sentence is fair game for our biblical America. But be afraid for your daughters if Jehovah takes over. The government could find itself in the business of stoning girls who turn out not to be virgins on their wedding night.

  But didn’t entangling holy law with national law set up a state religion and violate the free rights of all? Didn’t such religion, whether taken from the Bible or the Koran, isolate and entrench us, destroying any hope of achieving harmony with one another? Instead of viewing the world as a collaborative, interconnected whole, such a “faith” divides us along doctrinal and religious preferences, tempting us to believe that God has taken our side. It seemed to me that Jesus—the gnostic and the canonical Christ—said that when we show kindness to others, we show kindness to ourselves, and that when we judge others, we judge ourselves. If we were at war with our “unsaved” family, neighbors, or a “godless” society, a war was surely raging inside us. It made me suspect that our capacity to make peace with the world and those around us depended primarily on our capacity to make peace with ourselves.

  I HADN’T SEEN David in ages when Micael asked if we could give him a ride to the airport on the day she was leaving for the Middle East. My heart sank. “Sure, that would be fine,” I said, feigning nonchalance. I already had enough to be worried about. Micael would be among the first group of Peace Corps volunteers ever sent into Azerbaijan, a country bordering Iran, where she would be stationed alone in a remote village somewhere near the Caspian Sea. I wouldn’t see her for two years. She had graduated from Willamette University in Oregon in the spring of 2003 and decided to serve in the Peace Corps before going on to graduate school. I was thankful that Carise, at least, was staying on “safe” soil. She had graduated from Western Washington University that same year and was now working at a public relations firm in Seattle. But Jason was about to depart for a destination even more disturbing than Micael’s. He had flourished in the Job Corps; the tattooed young men there had turned out to be good-hearted and generous, offering Jason friendship and camaraderie. After graduating, he had joined the Washington State National Guard. He had grown into a fine young man, strong and thoughtful. Several days before Micael’s departure, I received his phone call: “Mom, they’ve just called us up for active duty. I’m training in urban warfare, and I’ll be in Baghdad on street patrol within a few months.”

  So I was in no mood to exchange small talk with David.

  Immediately my mind began picking through scraps of the past, digging in the upturned dirt of blame. As I felt a wave of resentment toward him, I chastised myself. I shouldn’t be holding a grudge against David. My life was good. I had been fortunate in meeting a wonderful man, someone who had become an important part of
my new life, a kind and gentle person whom my kids also adored. I had been blessed in my career as well. An entry-level job at the local public television station had led to a position as coordinating producer on an exciting new PBS series. Best of all, Carise, Micael, and Jason had grown into happy, adventurous adults.

  David’s life seemed on solid ground as well. Since finishing his detox program, he had stayed sober and was now an apartment manager in south Seattle, and a part-time minister and teacher at a local Unity church. In classes and sermons, David frequently discussed his former life as a conservative pastor, describing his descent into pornography and alcoholism, warning the congregation against self-righteousness and religious arrogance and using the Bible as a weapon of judgment. He was turning his life around, and even though I knew I should let go of my anger, part of me still shook a silent fist at him.

  When he got into the car that evening, I was stunned by his appearance. His gray hair was thinning, and his eyes looked red and weary—sunburned by the glare of life. “Hello, David,” I said with counterfeit cheeriness. But after that words abandoned me. For several seconds the air was stone still. Then Carise, ever the diplomat, jumped in with a question about her father’s new girlfriend, and Micael followed up by asking about his latest sermon. I kept my gaze fixed on the road and avoided eye contact.