by Jaimal Yogis
As Steven spoke, I found a renewed gratitude for the simple wisdom of Ch’an—teachings that were all about being here and connecting to nature, not blasting off. I also had a new appreciation for Steven. He wasn’t exotic. He didn’t wear robes. He didn’t look like a guru and actively asked not to be turned into one. He was just an American guy with an ordinary name and ordinary clothes. He also spoke. But he suddenly seemed to be the most enlightened teacher I’d ever met. And since all I wanted after the experience was to feel sort of normal again, to be home from this spaced-out feeling, Steven’s advice to take it slow and steady—along with tips like keeping the eyes open during meditation and still having conversations during retreats to stay integrated with the world—was exactly what I wanted.
Soon after, I packed up my bags, paid my respects to Babaji, and left the ashram, never to return. And again it was surfing—the pure physicality of it—combined with help from Steven, that eventually made me feel normal again. I still held Babaji in profoundly high regard. But I vowed that my path from that moment forward would be right here on planet earth, toes in the sand. All the metaphysical stuff might be real. But I wasn’t going to worry about it yet. I needed to put one foot in front of the other, finish school, get a job, work on being a whole human, and above all, stay sane.
As I looked at the skyscrapers rising up over the oak trees of Central Park, I realized two things. The heart-opening experience had scared me so badly—I really, really didn’t want to go crazy—that I’d swept the experience under the rug as I usually swept death under the rug. That denial had helped me get here to New York and into grad school rather than drifting off to who-knows-what ethereal yogic life. (Before that retreat, I’d been contemplating trying to be a monk again.) But it had also kept me from considering the full depth of what Babaji (who also taught about reincarnation) was pointing to, and what Thurman was talking about now.
There are times to dive deep, times to drift on the surface. And maybe I’d had to go shallow for a while to catch my breath.
I felt more free, more integrated, thinking like this. Maybe not as free as the disco roller skaters in the park. Gliding under the leaves in their spandex and aviator sunglasses, they always seemed ahead of the curve in terms of freedom from the oppression of giving a fuck what anyone thinks. But I felt a bit more stable.
There is a limit to memory and conjecture, though. I was still intellectualizing about the unknown, which is like trying to understand a style of music through reading about it.
Regarding the soul, there were always those nagging doubts. Was I just placating my fears?
To believe, I needed to hear the music.
14
I don’t want to be the only one here
Telling all the secrets—
Filling up all the bowls at this party,
Taking all the laughs.
I would like you
To start putting things on the table
That can also feed the soul
The way I do.
That way
We can invite
A hell of a lot more
Friends.
—Hafiz
During the spring that I was sneaking into Thurman’s class, one of my assignments was to make a months-long photo documentary of a person or cultural group—meaning, basically, go stalk some strangers with a camera for a few months, prying into every detail of their lives. This sounded daunting. But hoping to bring the lightness I’d found with Thurman to journalism life, it hit me. Why not profile some Buddhist monks?
Unfortunately the one monastery I found with real monks, on the Upper East Side, charged money just to meditate with them—a fact that made me resent them from the start. Time was growing short. My photography professor was pressuring me to choose a topic already, and I found myself checking out a group of Franciscan brothers who lived in Washington Heights, one of the last rough, low-income sections of Manhattan.
The abbot of the friary—a short man with John Lennon reading glasses—seemed a bit uptight. But I chose the brothers anyway because they were the practical choice. They’d agreed to let me stalk them just about any time. And juxtaposed against housing projects and boarded-up crack houses, guys sporting seventeenth-century robes and beards down to their chests made for pretty good photos.
I’d grown up on the Zeffirelli biopic, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, in which Saint Francis gets sick from war. Then, seeing God in nature, he spends his life singing barefoot through the streets of Assisi, healing lepers and rescuing animals. I loved the film. But I’d never spent a minute in a real friary and behind on my deadlines I was now viewing this as a grab-the-good-shots-and-go mission. My expectations were low. Which turned out to be good. As I took the subway to that brick monastery each day to follow the brothers serving food to the homeless or shooting hoops with foster kids, something soon began to happen. I started to like them. A lot.
None of the brothers preached to me, ever. They also turned out to drink excellent beer, tell good jokes, and laugh like they were in a brothel, though they hadn’t had sex in years. In my quest for that quintessential robed-monk baking shot, I’d even run Sonam’s momo-dough theory by one of the young brothers, Michael, while he kneaded dough. The big momo sounded “a lot like the way we talk about the body of Christ,” Brother Michael said.
Each of the friars had a unique but similar joy about them that reminded me of Sonam. But what I liked most about the friary was swimming.
I took the first plunge one March afternoon. It was snowing lightly on the nearby projects, and I rushed into the chapel, hoping not to miss the brothers’ hour of chanting and prayer. As I tiptoed in, I saw the perfect shot—friars, all fifteen or so, lined up like bearded chess pieces beneath the wooden cross. When the abbot peeked up at me, I pointed to my camera.
“This OK?” I whispered. He waved me in.
I quietly snapped shots from different angles. But just as I was standing on one of the pews, getting what I considered a genius aerial view, a tall German friar with a long red beard gave me the universal look for “Seriously, dude?”
“Too loud?” I mouthed. He went back to chanting.
OK. Hint taken. I decided to kneel and wait, which wasn’t a big deal. In fact, it was this waiting, this brief pause, that made the difference. The slow Latin chants harmonized in that Gregorian swirl, and within minutes the sounds seemed not just to enter my ears but to penetrate skin and tissue and bone. Like pouring vinegar on baking soda, the sounds both dissolved hard corners of elbow and skull and created a bubbling in the chest. Soon it seemed the friars and I were adrift on an ocean of light and sound.
This may sound melodramatic. But as literature professor Daniel Taylor writes in his romp through the Celtic islands, “If you have . . . ever brushed against the holy—you retain it more in your bones than in your head; and if you haven’t, no description of the experience will ever be satisfactory.”
I agree with Taylor. But we have all experienced something holy, even if we don’t call it that. We are all alive, which is itself holy. Since that’s nonspecific, however, I think many of us experience the holy as falling in love or blending into a redwood grove or singing our favorite song at a rock concert.
This brush against the holy at the friary was subtle. Most surprising was how unique and familiar it was. I’d felt this same sensation wandering European cathedrals in high school, chanting in Hindu temples in Indonesia, visiting the hermits with Sonam, or attending silent retreats. When you entered these sanctuaries where human beings gathered to pray and meditate and sing, it didn’t matter what the tradition was, what language was being spoken, or even if you understood the rituals and agreed with the philosophy. When you entered one of these sanctuaries, it was as if you had walked into a different inlet of the same ocean. Each cove and entrance had its own distinct qualities, but as you waded into the water, it all had the same thickness, clarity, pressure, salt.
Or at least that was what I felt. The question
was whether I had always been inventing this feeling because I wanted to believe.
I wasn’t sure. Perhaps belief and reality are not as far apart as we think. The more I came to the friary, the more I came to sing and pray with the brothers, the more difficult to doubt this aquarium of grace became. I was so inspired, in fact, that I decided to bring the brothers for show-and-tell.
At the time, I was also taking a religion and journalism class, which included a scholarship to report in the Middle East. Ari Goldman, former religion correspondent for the New York Times, was our deft professor. “If you want to report on religion,” he often told us, “every single piece you write will be ripped apart in more ways than you could ever imagine. That’s part of the fun.”
Much of what we focused on was how to write a religious scene—the feeling and ritual of faith being one of the most difficult aspects to convey to a reader. So I’d suggested the friars come in to help teach our Christianity unit, giving us a living scene right here in class.
“Sure,” Ari had said. “Makes my job easy.”
So, duct tape on their sandals, in walked two hooded young friars, Brother John and Brother Julian, to the sixth floor of the journalism school. Brother John looked a little like a younger Paul Giamatti with a thick black beard, while Brother Julian had soft, quiet features: long eyelashes, round green eyes, and a thin blond beard.
I remember feeling slightly nervous for the brothers. Surrounded by chain-link fences, graffiti, drug deals, they’d always looked at home. Here, among all the things they’d given up, they looked a little stiff. Their eyes darted about with expressions that reminded me of the barefoot Saint Francis when, in the Brother Sun movie, he first sees the opulence of Rome.
The brothers proceeded to give a fairly ordinary introduction to their mission of serving the poor. They spoke of sacrifice and returning to the simple life. I don’t recall much. But I remember that when Margaret, a liberal Italian Catholic, asked if gays could join the brotherhood, John said, “Yes, absolutely,” but he used the phrase “homosexual tendencies,” reflecting the Vatican view that being gay is something you could choose, even be counseled out of.
Most of us in the class, including me, believed homosexuality was like skin color—not something you could be, or should want to be, counseled out of. Most of us thought it was ridiculous that gays couldn’t marry in the Church and, furthermore, that the Catholic Church wasn’t in a good place to lecture on sexuality. But as we talked about our differences, the discussion never became angry. The brothers remained serene, humble, and reminded us that they had diverse views. They said Franciscans, like all Catholics, honor the “primacy of conscience.” This primacy means that God speaks through our hearts. The Church makes rules that sometimes change, and these are structural guides. But in the end, we have to follow what we know in our hearts.
“Saint Francis and Jesus,” John reminded us, “were revolutionaries.”
As the brothers spoke of this primacy, I couldn’t help feeling the sea of grace start seeping through the walls of the J-school. I wondered if I was the only odd duck who felt it. But once the brothers said good-bye, Ari nearly leapt out of his seat. “Wow!” he said. “That was like having the monastery come to us! Just their energy alone . . .” He trailed off, perhaps recognizing that New York Times journalists don’t say things like “their energy.”
Ari was a practicing Conservative Jew who once confided he’d been afraid to go near churches as a boy. So the comment seemed to give permission to other students, many secular, to say they’d felt some friar fairy dust.
Jonathan, the gay student, said he disagreed with the brothers on the “homosexual tendencies stuff,” but was touched just by their presence. “They’re like love toasters,” he said. “You just, I don’t know, you feel it.”
Ahmed, an Iraqi Muslim who’d been reporting on the war there, said the brothers made him “see what Christianity is supposed to be.”
And later, in the hallway, one of the Jewish single moms pulled me aside.
“I can’t stop thinking about those monks,” she whispered.
“Yeah, they’re pretty great,” I said.
“No, I mean, I really can’t stop thinking about them. Are they all, you know, celibate?”
Granted, this was no scientific poll. But seeing the class’s reaction to John and Julian was important for me. I’d assumed my classmates were skeptical journalists who didn’t believe in mysticism. Their reaction, however, made me see that both secularists and the faithful can feel mystical presence. We may differ on the fine print, or in how we explain the experience. But maybe, I thought, this basic acknowledgment of grace is part of what makes us human. Maybe I wasn’t making this up.
I had this on my mind when our class flew to Israel a few weeks later to report. Ari had scheduled an elaborate tour for us through old Jerusalem, Nazareth, Bethsaida, and Tel Aviv. At each stop, we had interviews with either imams, priests, rabbis, students, soldiers, or gypsies. Like a United Nations panel, these folks had been nicely plucked. They spoke about inclusion and tolerance, two-state solutions and interfaith dialogue, and we the students were starting to feel rather optimistic that faith could still be beautiful, could even prevent war instead of cause it.
At one point, we toured the Jordan River. There was a large African American man baptizing people, and Ari said, “Well, anyone want to get baptized?” A Persian student named Asha said, “Well, when in Rome,” and then about six of us followed her, letting the man dunk us in the same river where John the Baptist first dipped Christ.
Again, I felt the grace of the friary in the river—not surprising, I suppose, given my bias toward water. But honestly, it was everywhere in the Holy Land: in mosques and synagogues, on the hillside where Christ multiplied the loaves and fishes, in hummus and hookah shops. The Holy Land felt like a big interfaith rave that never stopped.
Or that’s how it seemed for a few days. Soon the headlines caught up.
For example, on our fourth day or so, the class was strolling the stations of the cross, the path Christ is said to have walked as he was flogged in his crown of thorns. It was a sunny day. And we were walking through a narrow limestone alleyway.
I don’t remember how we got to talking to the American man with a long white beard, a brown rucksack, and thick bifocals. But he took it as an opportunity to begin preaching that the apocalypse was nigh. Christ would be here to damn the wicked, etc. The speech was pretty boring in its lack of creativity, but the kicker came when he said he would personally destroy the Dome of the Rock—the shimmering Muslim shrine that sat atop the rubble of the old Jewish Temple—with a backpack full of explosives.
“That’s the place I’m going to blow sky-high,” he said matter-of-factly. Then he marched off, whistling.
The second standout moment came at Birzeit University, the largest university in Palestine. I had spent the day on campus, interviewing students for an unofficial poll on extremism. And though I looked high and low, after more than forty interviews, I could not find a single radical. A few female students sheepishly admitted they supported Hamas, but their support, they said, was because Hamas had given them money to go to school. When asked if Israel had the right to exist (Hamas had officially said it does not), they all three said they wanted a two-state solution that included the right of return and the 1967 borders.
The young man I met leaning against the English building, wearing a black leather jacket and jeans, was different. His eyes were bloodshot. He had lost family in the conflict, he said, and that was why he supported Hamas.
“We will not stop,” he said, “until every Jew is dead.”
The third moment came when I was coming back from Ramallah with a fellow reporter. We were headed through a final Israeli checkpoint to make it back to Jerusalem before dark. There was a long line of Palestinians trying to pass through the checkpoint, and when the soldiers saw that we had American passports, they sent us to the front of the line.
I admit that I was glad for the biased service. The line at the checkpoint had barely been moving, and we didn’t have three hours to wait. We had to be back to meet our class. But when a young Russian soldier holding an M16 searched our bags, pulled out my camera, and began scrolling through my photos, I didn’t feel so elite.
“What are you doing?” I asked as this woman, who didn’t look much over eighteen, eyed the photos I’d spent the last few days meticulously framing. They were photos of the usual stuff you found in Palestine: falafel restaurants, children playing, the inside of a barber shop, military barracks. There were a few shots of bullet-ridden homes or soldiers guarding the new border security wall. But nothing that didn’t show up on a daily basis in newspapers around the world. The soldier didn’t seem particularly interested in the content of the photos, however, as she navigated to the Delete All button and pushed.
“Hey!” I said, trying to grab my camera back. But it was too late.
“You can’t have those,” she said stoically as she handed me the camera.
“But you can’t just do that!” I said, seething.
“God thinks I can,” she said.
These examples were cartoonish compared to the horrors that occurred every day somewhere along the borders of the Holy Land. I knew that. But they saddened and angered me more than anything I’d read because for the first time I realized what people in war zones are truly up against. If you had to run into people and situations like this—and much worse—every week, even the most sane, balanced people could turn violent. I was nearly ready to blow something up after my photos were deleted.
