It was the beginning of my education in teaching world religions, which would have been hard enough in a static world. Since I taught them in a world that was always changing—the media, the headlines, the skyline, the students—my syllabus changed every semester. The one I handed out on my first day of class would be a great embarrassment to me now, with its false confidence and clear parameters. The one I used last semester is fifteen pages long, with dozens of hyperlinks, field-trip opportunities, and elective assignments featuring religious holidays, rituals, art, music, dress, and dance.
The “world tour” speech is gone now, replaced by one that highlights the more practical benefits of religious literacy. Whether students intend to become teachers, nurses, police officers, or businesspeople, I tell them, religious illiteracy is a luxury they can no longer afford. This is a new idea for them—that illiteracy might be a problem in religion as well as English—or that a religion class might have life applications beyond going to church.
A nursing major was the first to break this seal in my class. Three weeks into the unit on Hinduism, she told me she wanted to do her elective on Hindu views of illness and death. “I want to know how to take care of a Hindu patient in the hospital,” she said, “and I just realized I don’t know.” When I was a hospital chaplain in the 1980s I never once thought about that. I did not have to, because I was a Christian chaplain at Georgia Baptist Hospital, where I never met a patient who was not Christian. Now, even in a hospital as small as the one in Habersham County, that would not be the case.
Business majors are more likely to relate to people across desks than bedpans, but they can benefit from knowing how people of different faiths view borrowing and lending money. Education majors need to know where the major holidays of their students fall on the academic calendar, especially the ones that are not on the Christmas–Passover axis of the public-school system. Sports management majors need to know the same thing, especially since the month-long fast of Ramadan can occur during any season of the year. Dietary laws may also affect the sorts of places athletes can and cannot eat while they are on the road. A criminal justice major once told me that he never expected to learn anything in Religion 101 that would help him be a better detective. Then he learned about the ways that people of different faiths treat their dead—including murder victims—and why some families might resist allowing an autopsy that would help law enforcement do its job.
This new emphasis on religious literacy across the professions works well, since even students who are not religious can see the benefit. At the same time, I have read enough student papers to know what most of them will really be working on this semester: their own relationship to the divine. Some may call it “ultimate reality” instead, but their questions will be the same. What is true and what is not? How did they come to believe what they believe? If the bottom drops out, how far will they fall? If there is only one God, why are there so many religions?
What I know and most of them do not yet is that even people who belong to the same religion do not agree about what they mean when they say “God.” Some mean a loving daddy, while others mean a cosmic judge. Some see Jesus on a cross and some see him on a white horse with a sharp sword in each hand. Some frankly admit that they do not know what they mean, though they know they ought to—and though they have prayed hard for some clear word from above on those nights when the sound of their own heart scares them half to death.
It is one of the reasons why I never tire of teaching the class and why it never rolls out the same way twice. Every semester brings a new mix of students who will affect each other in ways no one can predict. When the first-generation Bosnian American speaks of his grandfather who died in the war, the cheerleader beside him stops doodling to look at him. When the just-coming-out gay history major lands in the same small group as a just-gone-rogue messianic Jew on the debate team, they both find new best friends.
Maybe these relationships are all that really matter, since it is impossible to teach five great religions in fifteen weeks. I can tinker with the syllabus all I like, but students will still come out blinking at the end, some of them suddenly unable to remember whether Torah goes with Judaism or Islam. Was Jesus born before or after the Buddha? After years of being crushed by this outcome, I now see it as a proper response to the disorientation of Religion 101.
All their lives, most of these students have looked out at the world through Christian glasses. They have learned to describe what they see in Christian terms and not to ask questions about what they cannot see clearly. Now, having tried on some glasses from other traditions—one or two of which have brought troublesome areas of their lives into sharper focus for the first time—they are suddenly aware of how many ways there are to view reality. The lens is not the landscape. It is a way of translating the landscape so that people can walk upright on it, making some sense of what happens to them.
To complicate matters, some students realize for the first time that Catholic lenses are different from Protestant ones, just as Asian lenses are different from Native American ones. Remembering that Torah goes with Judaism is a very minor detail to most of them at this point. They are still trying to get their heads around the fact that God may speak more languages than they ever thought, to far more people than they thought, using different methods than they thought. Either that, or the whole thing is fiction.
I hope that is not the conclusion they reach. As much as I respect their reasons for becoming more spiritual than religious, I want the young people in my classes to know that religion is more than a source of conflict or a calculated way to stay out of hell. Religions are treasure chests of stories, songs, rituals, and ways of life that have been handed down for millennia—not covered in dust but evolving all the way—so that each new generation has something to choose from when it is time to ask the big questions about life. Where did we come from? Why do bad things happen to good people? Who is my neighbor? Where do we go from here? No one should have to start from scratch with questions like those. Overhearing the answers of the world’s great religions can help anyone improve his or her own answers. Without a religion, these questions often do not get asked.
I also want the students to know that while every religion has its villains, each also has its saints. In the quiet backwater of my second-floor cinder-block classroom, I want to give their imaginations something better to work with than what they are getting from the movies and the news—some of the treasures in the chests they have never had any reason to open before. I want them to know about Mohandas Gandhi, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jalāl al-Din Rumi, and Abraham Heschel. I want them to know about the desert fathers and mothers, Teresa of Ávila, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Desmond Tutu.
For reasons I have yet to explain to you, I believe this has become my Christian duty. I believe it is the neighborly thing to do, the Christlike thing to do. Part of my ongoing priesthood is to find the bridges between my faith and the faiths of other people, so that those of us who draw water from wells on different sides of the river can still get together from time to time, making the whole area safer for our children.
The students are not my children, but I do want to make the world safer for them. As tired as I get of grading their papers, I never tire of them—of trying to find better ways to expand their thinking without blowing their minds; of exposing the lies they have been told about people of other faiths without causing them to distrust their own families of faith; of preparing them for the criticism they will almost surely face if they are vocal about finding anything they admire in faiths other than their own. As often as I have been warned that no one can protect students from the alienating effects of higher education, I still hate to see it happen—as it will in this semester’s class, if all goes well.
At the end of the first day of class, I give the students a brief quiz with basic questions about the five religions they are going to study. “You’re not supposed to do well on it,” I tell them when their faces pucker with anxiety. “If y
ou cannot answer a single question correctly, then this class is exactly where you need to be. Plus, it can be really helpful to clarify what you don’t know as well as what you do.” I will return these ungraded quizzes to them on the last day of class, so they can see for themselves how far they have come. There will be a few unclaimed quizzes left over—there always are—reminders of the students who set out on this journey but lost heart before the end.
“Be sure to write your name at the top of your quiz,” I say when our time is up. Then the students are gone. I gather up the extra syllabi strewn on the long tables. Next I pack up the menorah, the Shiva, the Buddha, the cross, and the Qur’an that have been with me all these years. We have seen a lot, and still we begin again. Heaving my satchel over my shoulder, I wonder what the students will teach me this time. Was it really twenty years ago that I found my way to the Hindu temple in Atlanta for the first time?
2
Vishnu’s Almonds
The God of your understanding is just that: the God of your understanding. What you need is the God just beyond your understanding.
RAMI SHAPIRO
The Hindu Temple of Atlanta was not hard to find. There was no other building like it on Riverdale Road, a busy four-lane highway south of the airport lined with used-car lots, muffler shops, coin laundries, and self-storage units. All you had to do was raise your chin to look above the flat asphalt roofs to the tops of the trees, where the tiered tower of the temple rose like a giant sand castle. The first time I saw it I almost wrenched my neck trying to figure out what such a fantastic building was doing in a place like that.
I had been teaching world religions for about a year by then. The textbook and the VHS tapes were already old news. How could anyone teach a living religion without ever leaving the classroom? When it became clear that a brass statue of Shiva and a British guy in a pith helmet were not going to do it, I started scouting sites for field trips in Atlanta. The Hindu temple was the obvious choice, not only because it was so impressive, but also because it was the only one in Georgia. When the founding members broke ground in 1986, devotees came from Alabama, Tennessee, Florida, and the Carolinas to join the celebration.
Construction was still going on when I visited the first time to do reconnaissance, but the central worship area was finished and had been open for some time. Visitors, including student groups like mine, were welcome seven days a week from 9:00 a.m. until 9:00 p.m., with or without a guide. Since there was not a lot going on, I asked for a guide, which was how I discovered that the names of the deities I had memorized did not match the names on the figures inside. Vishnu had become Balaji. Kali had become Durga. Lakshmi had become Padmavathi.
“The gods have thousands of names,” the guide said when I asked him. “The names we use here are familiar in the south.” The south of India, he meant. It was the beginning of my education in how many Hinduisms there are, which would eventually wake me up to how many Christianities there are, but not yet. At the moment, my mistake with the names added to my general frustration with Hinduism, which had no founder, no single sacred text, no set pattern of worship, and no central statement of belief. Even the names of the gods changed depending on local custom, along with their images in the temples. In one place the deities had milk-white skin. In another their faces were black as night. How was I supposed to teach that kind of variety in four class sessions? Eventually a swami would offer me a metaphor that worked. “You are thinking of Hinduism as a single shop,” he said, “but it is much more like a mall, with shops of every kind under its roof. Some shops are large and popular. Others are small and specialized, yet everyone inside them identifies as Hindu.”
This matched what I learned from Huston Smith, the great-godfather of all teachers of world religions, in one of his books on my shelf. Hinduism is the great psychologist of the religions, he wrote. It knows that people are different and offers them different paths to union with the divine. Some choose a scholarly path and others a path of service. Some choose a path of meditation and others a path of devotion. Some devote themselves to Vishnu and some to the Divine Mother. Some shun the worship of deities altogether, striving to realize God in themselves with no decoys. Others mix and match. As baffled as I was by this divine array at first, the apparent limitlessness of the Hindu way was fascinating to me, along with the freedom followers had to find their own path.
Yet this was precisely the problem for some Christians I knew—not just the part about realizing God in the self, but also the part about endorsing more than one way to God. At a seminary where I once taught, I met a professor of Christian evangelism who surprised me by saying that the problem with American Christians was that they were all becoming Hindus. This was apparently the worst thing he could think of to say. “Americans want to pick and choose,” he said. “They think they can design their own way instead of following the one that Jesus has already laid out for them.” I did not know enough to argue with him then, but the sound of his disdain has never left my ears.
Back at the Hindu Temple, I decided that it was a safe enough place to begin exploring religion beyond the classroom and got back in my car to go home. Two weeks later I returned with a college van full of students and a faculty colleague whom I will call Dr. Acharya. She was a professor of mathematics at the college who stood out in the faculty lineup at graduation every year with her flowing gown from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. I did not know her well, but when I invited her to go on the field trip, she said yes without even checking her calendar. The temple was ninety minutes away from the college and she did not drive, so she jumped at the opportunity to go.
The students were still standing around in the college parking lot when she arrived in an emerald sari with gold threads, her black hair parted straight down the middle and pulled back into a bun. Those who had mastered understanding her accent in order to pass her classes stepped aside to let her through as she headed straight for the front passenger seat of the van. Accepting helping hands from students on both sides, she climbed the two steps and landed in her seat with a great puff of held breath. Someone hauled her carryall in after her. We were ready to go.
Dr. Acharya knew I was Christian, so she staked out her territory early in the ride.
“I have nothing against the Lord Jesus,” she said before we had gone a mile. “As a Hindu I love him too, but loving him does not mean I cannot love Lord Vishnu. Do you see?”
“I see,” I said. Then we talked about how our classes were going. Once the students had plugged in their earphones or were snoozing with their foreheads pressed against the windows, she told me how much she worried about her grandchildren. As third-generation Indian Americans, she said, they were at risk of losing their religion. She did what she could to remind them of the holidays and the importance of worship, but since she did not live with them, there was only so much she could do. Huh, I thought. Christians are not the only ones worried about their grandchildren’s faith in a changing world.
When we arrived at the temple an hour and a half later the students woke up and pulled the plugs from their ears.
“Are we there yet?”
“Look at that!”
“What is that?”
I was headed to a parking place near the grand staircase to the main entrance when Dr. Acharya pointed to a small door on the ground level instead. “That’s the way we go in,” she said.
It looked like a stage entrance to me, but she had been there a lot more times than I had. I parked the van, the students piled out, and we all stood looking up at the ornate building that rose high above our heads. When I looked around for Dr. Acharya, I saw her sitting in the van, waiting for someone to notice that she required assistance. The same two students who had helped her into her seat helped her out of it. Then she smoothed her sari, reached back inside the van for her carryall, and started walking toward the door.
“Come,” she said. Like ducklings, we all followed her inside. The smell of garam masala was so str
ong that it made my stomach growl. While Dr. Acharya excused herself to go to the restroom, I turned to a glass booth on my right where the temple manager sat behind a set of sliding windows.
“I called ahead about a class visit,” I said.
He nodded and wrote something down on a pad of paper in front of him. Then he pointed to a small room and said something I had to ask him to repeat. “Please leave shoes there,” he said again with a lilting accent. “Then walk up.” He made a walking motion with the fingers on his right hand to make sure I understood.
While the students were pulling off their shoes and shoving them into cubbyholes, I told them most of what I knew. “This is the only Hindu temple for a couple of hundred miles around. This part was built in 1990. People drive here from Alabama and South Carolina for the biggest festivals. We’re here to observe a weekly worship service for one of the major deities. Dr. Acharya said to go on up, and she would meet us inside.”
Something had clearly changed since my visit two weeks before. When we reached the doorway of the main hall, the place was full of activity. A priest in an orange robe that left much of his upper body bare was sitting on a carpet with a young couple and a baby. Another priest was deep in one of the several alcoves, waving a lit wick in front of a deity taller than he was. Elsewhere in the room people were doing all kinds of things. Some were saying prayers in front of a statue of Ganesha, while others circled a table with tall stones on it. Some were pressing folded bills through the slot of an offering box in front of the goddess Durga, while others were dipping their fingers into bowls of colorful powder and pressing it into the spot between their eyebrows.
Holy Envy Page 3
