Out of India: Karma & Christ
Moynihan, Maura
GROWING UP CATHOLIC & THE ADULT SEARCH FOR FAITH OUT OF INDIA: KARMA & CHRIST A PILGRIM MAKES THE EFFORT TO COME BACK 66G rowing up Catholic" has become an established genre, an...
...I remember going to Church with him as a child and feeling very proud and excited...
...y parents' generation was different...
...But I decided that I was not going to reject Hinduism, I was just going to incorporate what I'd learned...
...You know, "What on earth had gotten into them...
...As I said, I moved to India when I was fifteen, and I fell in love with India the moment 1 stepped off the plane...
...It doesn't matter in India, no one cares...
...You can never explain faith...
...I'd ask in Sunday school, "But why was he crucified...
...I was kind of confused and didn't know what I ' d done wrong, because to me it seemed perfectly sensible...
...Catholics also tend to be more superstitious, and they're always trying to blame something on someone else or on some external force...
...I sang at sidewalk cafrs, making forty-five dollars a night passing the hat, doing street theater, and living hand to mouth...
...When I was a child i loved Christmas so much...
...Hinduism is also much more physical: the priest will fling holy water at the faithful, and they'll scream...
...That's why I was very strongly attracted to Hinduism when I first got to India...
...I majored in Hindu studies at college because I love reading the texts and the another...
...I think the church could be even more active on issues of disarmament and of military intervention and war -- then again, look at the Crusades...
...The iconography of the devil has not been very well developed...
...I wonder what he thinks...
...I'm sorry...
...You worship her and pay homage to that principle of destruction and violence...
...It's more like a Baptist church - - more hysterical, in a way, more ecstatic...
...But in India my faith and my involvement in religion were reawakened, and I guess that says something for what's lacking in our Christian education or upbringing here in the West...
...I stayed in 450: Commonweal Vrindavan for two weeks, just walking around in a daze...
...it hasn't come after me...
...There's less fear in the Hindu psyche...
...took a year off from college and went back to India, and i lived the life of a true pilgrim...
...I studied Hinduism in school and I loved it because it's so colorful and exciting...
...l This is a funny story - - I don't know what she'll think but I'll tell it anyway because it's very revealing about Catholic childhood...
...But I have a lot of trouble with Catholics who told me that he's the one God, the only God, the only Way...
...I regret that...
...I'm not just going through the rote motions because I learned them as a child...
...All the distinctions are blurred and our individuality and our sense of belonging to a tradition are gone...
...In the Judeo-Christian tradition in the West, what are erroneously called the pagan myths or fairy tales have been disavowed as being part of a religious tradition by the church, and a schism has grown up between the two...
...I know it sounds corny and prosaic to say things like that, but good God, that's what the human race needs, isn't it...
...We can be a street sweeper or the president, it doesn't matter...
...Italy is like India with its spiritual topography, because you have the place where a miracle occurred and then the home of a saint...
...I went through a period a few years ago when my faith was very badly shaken, right after Ronald Reagan was reelected and we embarked on a massive rearmament program while funds for everything else were being cut...
...The whole notion of time and space is so vast and so grand in India...
...I don't know why that is, but all the Catholics I know have that sense of wonder and awe in them...
...But we were the only two members of the family who ended up going: My mother had a terrible reaction against religion and Catholicism...
...So I began to think of Jesus as an avatar...
...The first thing one learns about Indian philosophy, which one hears from speaking to the mythology...
...In India and in Jerusalem and in Italy you feel a deep connection to the source...
...I've worked with the nuclear freeze, but I plan to get more deeply involved with the disarmament movements that are tied to the church because they have the most persuasive arguments...
...To me, Hinduism still had a lot of answers that I wasn't getting from Christianity, from a priest, from Catholic friends, or from going to Mass on Sunday...
...That's one reason I became a passionate Hindu for many years...
...But I was first attracted to the sight, the sound, the smell of it, which is a very important part of religion...
...It was dealt with in a healthier way...
...But to compensate for that socially, the largest Christian festival in the United States is Christmas - - not Easter, not Good Friday, not Pentecost...
...They're integral parts of the same cultural religious tradition, and they can coexist and cross-pollinate...
...I was about five, and we were driving in a car...
...All my father's closest friends were Jewish - - Norman Podhoretz, Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol - - so I was surrounded by all those rabbis, those brilliant Jewish intellectuals...
...But I was curious about some of the vocabulary...
...But I remember as a child being frightened of the crucifix and not understanding the Crucifixion at all...
...Look at/he face of Christ on the cross: the horror...
...They're afraid of it, and yet they're passionate...
...I became strongly attracted to Shiva...
...And he explained in a very gentle, fabulistic, Aesopian way that it had to be...
...They're like all the Greco-Roman gods...
...I loved it instantly...
...I don't recall his answer...
...The church, through the bishops' conference, has been very responsible about that, and I'm glad...
...Like the incense and the lilies in the church, all that's very important - - the outward forms of ritual and symbol and practice...
...It terrified me as a child, and it still frightens me when I go into a church and I see Christ's agony...
...I remember, for instance, poring through one of those old missals with the...
...I was always going to Hillel House with my friends - - they'd have Hanukkah parties and Passover dinners and I ' d always tag along...
...What is it we're missing in America...
...And I fainted...
...So I said, "John, don't you know that gasoline is a car's host...
...I had come to accept, from meeting those holy men and reading the vast literature of Hindu and Buddhist canons, a belief in reincarnation and the idea of karma...
...I looked up and saw tacked to the edge of a shelf a rendition of the Crucifixion which had been put there by our Cuban gardener...
...It's not just like a citizens' action group - - politicians can't turn away from it...
...There wasn't enough emphasis on really examining your conscience and really taking responsibility for confessing and then persevering and resolving not to sin again...
...And if I ever have children I don't know how I'll bring them up, because I really am a pantheist/universalist...
...I think that what's lacking in Christian education today is an emphasis on myth and mysticism and understanding Christianity through the arts, because that's how religion comes alive...
...What we have in America is a lot of karma, but not dharma...
...But that was a great loss...
...For them, the answers were much clearer...
...I was very poor at this time, I had no money and was all on my own...
...If I didn't have faith, I don't think I would be able to get up in the morning, I don't think I ' d be able to live...
...It was the most important part of the year, a unifying experience for my family, for the community, for society, for the world...
...Mom heard that and, perhaps reflexively after years of getting her knuckles whacked in parochial school, she came in like a torrent, pulled me out of the tub, and shoved a bar of soap in my mouth...
...I think it probably was a terrible tragedy and that he was terrified...
...My next memory is of my father telling me about Jesus being put to death - - and I was very concerned about that, as they say in Washington...
...I moved to India when I was fifteen, when my dad was appointed ambassador there...
...They didn't take to it immediately and instinctively, like I did...
...In India, religion is an integral part of your life -- to the extent that there's no secular art to speak of...
...I find the image of Jesus on the cross absolutely terrifying, and I think it's quite wrong that there's been such an emphasis on that in the two thousand years of Christianity - - or since whenever it was that the emphasis shifted from the Resurrection to the Crucifixion...
...I wasn't born a Hindu in this life, although I do believe in reincarnation...
...In fact, I wish we'd had more stories and less practice of genuflection...
...There's so much superstition in Catholicism...
...We Catholics on the block never had anything like Hillel House...
...No one in the church has ever explained that to me...
...I used to be afraid of church a little because it was so large and almost forbidding...
...He is the son of Patricia and William F. Buckley, Jr., the author and conservative commentator...
...But this day I decided that it was my dharma to be a Catholic - - after all, why was I born a Catholic...
...It was, I think, a pen and ink drawing, and it was one of those wonderfully gory Latino renditions...
...Then I came down very fast, which can happen with kundalini...
...No one really explains the rituals to you very well...
...It acknowledges the legitimacy of every religious experience and every religious leader...
...The Buddha died in his sleep and then the Nirvana came...
...I hope this doesn't sound silly - - I think when you describe your own spiritual journey it sounds silly to people...
...It's back to the Crucifixion, and the sacrifice of God's only Son, and the drinking of His blood - - that just seems strange and supernatural...
...And, like Christ, his message is very much for the poor: Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth...
...The only real festival we still practice is Christmas, and it has all the elements of a festival: the spiritual message, the merchandising aspect of it, everything...
...And it was arresting because I was still at the Mother Goose stage and not yet even into Grimm's fairy tales in which you have the odd scary old woman and, perhaps, the slavering wolf, but nothing like this...
...It shaped my values a great deal...
...And suddenly I just began to tremble all over, and I felt t h i s . . . I can't describe what it was but it's sometimes known as the kundalini awakening...
...I always wore a sari over my head, and beads...
...otherwise we wouldn't have the same kind of fear and anxiety about sin that we do...
...Whereas here, as I said before, if you say that you believe in God, people think you're a little off, and they're suspicious of you...
...I do believe that you get divine guidance...
...I feel very strongly, for example, that there should be more unity between Christians and Jews...
...That was a / I strange and beautiful time, now that I think of it...
...It's like Zoroastrianism and the duality in those early years, in the sense that they're trying to instill in you a reverence for God and a terror of,the devil...
...I still find Christianity stranger and more elusive than I find Hinduism...
...He sought to assure me that Jesus had not been surprised by this, that this wasn't a bad card they had suddenly dealt off the bottom of the deck, and that He had come to earth specifically to die...
...Judaism is fascinating - - the language and music - - and to think that Christianity is part of that makes Christianity seem a richer and more varied tradition than it sometimes appears...
...Oechiogrosso s Once a Catholic, to be published in September by Houghton Mifflin . THE EDITORS singer, and actress who has appeared in five movies, several plays, and television series . She is the daughter of Elizabeth and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, senior senator from New York . 446: Commonweal MAURA MOYNIHAN Faith is without any question the most important thing in my life - having a personal relationship with God . In this society, people laugh at you for saying that . You're considered a nut if you say you believe in God, a little off...
...People say that without the Crucifixion you couldn't have had the Resurrection, but I don't know about that...
...I would like to reinvolve people in faith because it means so much to me, especially in the nuclear era...
...Still, I think that the church isn't doing enough to bring back yot~ng people who have lapsed...
...I assume that derives from confession, from trying to exonerate yourself with the words and the incantation...
...I thought cars ate gasoline, just like we ate the host at Communion...
...My father goes to church all the time...
...I find the Catholic ritual and liturgy more peculiar and almost more supernatural than the Hindu, which seems much more down to earth...
...He was a carpenter, a cowherd, and led a simple life among simple people, like Christ...
...But many of my odysseys in India were solitary, not with them...
...Ritual should be pleasurable, it should be aesthetic...
...There is something very mystical and strange in the Catholic ritual, in the liturgy, that's missing in the Protestant and that, I think, always fills you with awe of the unknown...
...I believe very much in Jesus' message, and I don't think Jesus would like their attitude...
...I ' l l go to a synagogue and a mosque, and I'll have the same intensity of spiritual communion in any holy place...
...I don't believe that still, though I do consider myself a good Christian...
...She went to parochial schools her whole life, and she has terrible stories about it...
...Also, I never learned much about the saints and always wanted to...
...World War II had a tremendous impact on their values and beliefs and their faith in the age-old struggle of good and evil...
...Then I began to meditate and visualize Krishna and use the Krishna mantra...
...They don't call it evil -- it doesn't have that moral connotation to it...
...That's how I've come to reach Christianity again, through music and visual arts...
...I think religion is important not just for spiritual or ethical structure, but also for a sense of your cultural identity...
...Hinduism is very tolerant...
...I felt frightened and confused, though, to think that these three great monotheistic traditions had warred with each other so much over the centuries...
...I feel the same way about the language in a lot of the hymns: He who suffered for us, the Lamb who left his blood...
...It seems to me that during the Inquisition, for instance, the" church must have been invaded by some demonic force...
...When I went to temples, I felt a tremendous sense of security in that I belonged to something and a feeling that God was very close and accessible - - something that I had not felt in the church in a very long time...
...It was an experience of kundalini rising, and I felt an extraordinary communion with all the animating and divine power of the universe...
...Something seemed false about that, and it made me doubt the efficacy of prayer and ritual when I was very young...
...It was the gardener's shed and it was full of must, dust, and broken-down things...
...That always made me very uncomfortable, and that's something which Catholics always struggle with...
...I always envy my Indian friends so much because they know exactly who they are and where they come from and how they fit into the larger historical tradition...
...she wears a skirt of human arms...
...I believe in the duality of good and evil -- that's what I liked about my early Catholic instruction, the idea of two combating principles...
...I go to synagogues, too, and I think you can't really understand Christianity unless you know something about Judaism...
...And then I had an extraordinary mystical experience in Vrindavan, where Krishna was born...
...They both satisfy different needs for me...
...For the first time in my life, I saw someone with a halo, which is the aura - - I saw it around him...
...Catholics are also perennially childlike in some ways...
...Then in the temple in Vrindavan, where Krishna was born, I had the experience similar to the one I had had in Washington, only more intense...
...Mary wasn't crucified...
...In every temple in India the priest will come up and tell you that it's the holiest place in all of India...
...And I think that sense of community and cultural identity that comes with belonging to the church started slipping away as my parents no longer enforced any kind of religious discipline on the family...
...I believe in the old axiom that if you take one step toward God, he takes ten steps toward you...
...I was in first grade, but I remember this moment quite vividly...
...A lot of my friends went to parochial school, though, and there were always nuns coming to visit the family because we were actively involved with the church...
...the crown of thorns had been jammed tight into his skull...
...I was in kindergarten or first grade, and we had just been preparing for First Holy Communion...
...Most people desperately need some.kind of spiritual guidance -- not just spiritual, but also a sense of cultural identity, which a lot of American Catholics are losing...
...That started to slip away, and with it went my whole sense of who I was...
...she ascended body and soul to heaven...
...If you ask the holy men about Jesus they'll say, "Yes, he is also an avatar...
...It's terribly frightening for a child when she's eight years old...
...Dharma is the corollary principle: it is the law that you must obey...
...I think he'd be very upset that his message has been distorted and that crimes have been committed in his name...
...They were very confused by it...
...But you don't have tllat in Christianity anymore...
...But all the plays and songs and art and music of India are extolling the great achievements and powers of the many, many, many, many gods...
...It was a moment of absolute communion with God...
...Yet in my early Sunday school education and my education in general, there wasn't enough emphasis on trying to conform as closely as possible to Christ's teachings and his message of love and forgiveness...
...My first spiritual experience took place at St...
...I was very sorry that I wasn't confirmed - - we were moving a lot at that time and my dom indifferent to India - - either they love it or they can't stand it...
...Patrick's...
...No, "Paths are many, truth is one...
...And then I had another mystical experience in Delphi, in which I s a w . . , well, you can't describe these experiences, so...
...I haven't talked to them about it too much...
...And I have, through Indian religion, come to a new acceptance and understanding of Christianity...
...I lived in an ashram for a very long time...
...The real miracle of Christ is the Resurrection...
...It wasn't that way for us, as you know...
...The Buddha wasn't crucified...
...Thomas's in Washington with my dad...
...Nuclear war is just a symptom, isn't it...
...Krishna was born in a palace, smuggled out at night on a bed of reeds, and floated down the river, like Moses...
...Going to Italy also had a hand in making me rediscover Christianity and enjoy it more and find more pleasure in it...
...I also felt that way when I was in Greece and I went to Delphi...
...I think that's misplacing much of our faith 14 August 1987:447 and our focus...
...They found a nice, unblemished, suburban Catholic girl who also had the advantage of being very pretty...
...The devil has more power over you if you are afraid of him - - you attract him through fear...
...I go to church, but I also go to the Hindu that at temple - - to me there's no conflict at all...
...omething about Catholicism and its emphasis on ritual, which inspired the Reformation and God knows what else, does sort of lead one to think it's a system and you can buck it - - that if you just go in and say so many Hail Marys you'll be cleansed...
...You can choose the path that's suitable for you...
...Christ is a very good exemplar and model for that...
...It seemed to me that the Crucifixion was like a human sacrifice - - and of the most hideous kind if he was the Son of God and a man of peace...
...But I don't know what Christ would feel about the divisions in his church...
...There are hundreds and hundreds of years, after the Greeks left andbefore the Moguls and the British came, when no one kept any records...
...One day I went to Notre Dame and had another overwhelming feeling of faith...
...That's not a very comforting notion, nor is it what he meant when he was teaching and spreading his message of love...
...I was born a Christian and that's very important...
...But in the history of the human race as we know it, we've never faced anything like it before now...
...Nothing was spared: Christ's knees were bloody...
...That was a lot of fun...
...They never considered sending us to parochial school, I think because of my mother's bad experience with the nuns...
...1 made an effort to come back to it...
...I went in really just as a student with my notebook and my sunglasses and left my sandals outside...
...It was like a Dickens novel or something...
...I was listening to the music, the censer was swinging, and suddenly the whole altar seemed to glow, to acquire an aura that had not been there previously...
...I went back to the United States and started going to church again - - but combining it with my visits to the Hindu temple, which I still do...
...But I don't know if Krishna was a god or a man...
...Shut up...
...It just felt to me like home...
...I'm also interested in the sanctuary movement and the church's role in Central America...
...I think he was probably a myth...
...At that time in my life I was very unhappy and I sought refuge and solace in temples and churches, really out of desperation -- in much the same way that you'll see a bag man passed out in front of St...
...That's a problem particularly in India, with its caste system...
...I know, for instance, that the doctrine of reincarnation was described in the early Christian Scriptures and that it was removed at the Council of Nicaea...
...I felt almost like that...
...So there's always been a great 14 August 1987:451 involvement with Jewish culture in my family, and I feel very privileged to have had that when I was growing up...
...she spouts blood...
...So you can see why the Victorian ladies were a little confused when they first arrived on the subcontinent...
...You can talk about your guru and your meditation and your mysticism at any cocktail party and it's not considered to be offbeat or nutty...
...I was also unhappy at that time, longing for some answer to all my deepest prayers...
...I had very few possessions, and I walked many places visiting holy sites...
...In Hinduism, the notion of evil and the devil is much more sophisticated and more visible, in the form of the goddess Kali...
...But certainly my parents have seen the change in me since I made a greater commitment to faith - - how much happier I am and how much more responsible I am...
...Zoroastrianism describes them very well: Asha and Druj represent two angels inside the soul who compete for the individual throughout his life...
...I can't explain why...
...I don't know if Krishna lived, but I think there's evidence that Christ really took human incarnation...
...My father taught at Harvard, so I was hanging around the Harvard campus all through the sixties rebellions...
...We don't in America - - we've lost so much of that...
...It's Christmas, the birth of Christ...
...It was in France and Jerusalem that I had my reawakening, and when I went to Assisi it just all came to life...
...I had a healthy resentment about this intrusion on my Sunday mornings and took no interest in it...
...I felt way Stonehenge...
...David Stockman was my live-in babysitter, so it's all my fault in a way: I tortured him so much that he turned into that weirdo who destroyed the economy...
...GROWING UP CATHOLIC & THE ADULT SEARCH FOR FAITH OUT OF INDIA: KARMA & CHRIST A PILGRIM MAKES THE EFFORT TO COME BACK 66G rowing up Catholic" has become an established genre, an exercise sometimes in anger, often in bittersweet nostalgia . Even when it is not trivializing or overtaken by the jocularity that sophisticated Americans appear compelled to adopt as the price of describing religious feelings in polite company, such reflections frequently resemble insects trapped in amber - exotic, lovely, or bizarre, but above all the lifeless relics of a bygone time . The spiritual dramas and questions that were once so intense seem never to have outlasted puberty ; they have little connection with a continuing quest for religious understanding and personal direction . The following accounts, by Maura Moynihan and Christopher Buckley, are happy exceptions . Moynihan and Buckley, however, would certainly not claim their stories as models - they have sought and found faith in strikingly different ways and different places - nor would the editors foist that role on them either . Their stories are typical only in their individuality . They are reminders, in effect, that "growing up Catholic" isn't what it used to be . No doubt the search for an adult faith always took more circuitous paths and achieved more varied forms than books of Catholic theology and spirituality let on . Unusual spiritual journeys, it often seemed . were reserved for "converts ." Yet since Vatican 11 . awareness has been growing that we are all converts . These accounts are based on interviews, conducted and edited by Peter Occhiogrosso . They will appear with the stories of two dozen other current or former Catholics in Mr...
...I don't accept that about the Crucifixion...
...I've been a vegetarian since I was a child, they know that...
...it's lost...
...452: Commonweal of the physical, which you see in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions and which often seems to be lacking in contemporary Catholicism and Christianity...
...Then it's not something threatening, then it's not just a moral dictum...
...That shouldn't be at all, and in Hinduism they're not at variance with one 4 4 8 : Commonweal parents never got around to it...
...It was terrible to read the paper in the morning, and I couldn't even get out of bed sometimes, I was so scared...
...There was more justifying and explaining the Crucifixion...
...But you recognize it and ask it to protect you...
...I'll just leave it at that...
...I have always thought that Krishna and Christ shared many attributes and qualities...
...I think there's much duality in Christianity...
...I asked my father about CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY, thirty-five, has been an editor for Esquire, a speechwriter for George Bush, and has written several books, including The White House Mess (Viking) and a new play based onthe life of Edmund Campion...
...Again, as in a Hindu temple, it's the spiritualization GROWING UP CATHOLIC & THE ADULT SEARCH FOR FAITH FROM ACID ON GOOD FRIDAY TO 'ORTHODOXY' NOT A SYLLOGISM BUT A POEM y first memory, my first consciousness of God occurred in the semi-abandoned garage attached to my parents' house...
...In Jerusalem I met, at the age of nineteen, a man from the Greek Orthodox church who took me around the Old City...
...I was very attracted to all the stories about Mary, the Virgin Mother.'I' m named for Mary : my name Maura is the Gaelic for Mary . You're named for saints - or, in India, for gods - because that particular saint - or god - will protect you . So I feel that I have the protection of the Virgin Mother, and I feel grateful for that . There is a certain distinct personality type that is definitely Catholic and that is defined by a certain energy . They like to flaunt their neuroses . That doesn't mean we hang out together . In fact, my closest friends when I was growing up were all Jewish . I was always a little bit envious of them because they had better festivals and holidays . Then I went to India and became exceedingly jealous of my Hindu friends . Their rituals seemed more participatory than the Christian ones, but I've MAURA MOYNIHAN, twenty-eight, is a free-lance writer, since come round and changed my mind...
...Then, before I knew what was happening, I began to be instructed in catechism...
...And yet he's a good Catholic...
...The reason it doesn't matter in India is that the divine and the actual get mixed up...
...Go to a Hasidic synagogue in Brooklyn and, my God...
...It's not a big deal in India...
...I think that my going away from the church for those years and immersing myself in an entirely different tradition has made me come back to it with entirely fresh eyes...
...Isn't that horribly irresponsible...
...You do really feel that you're in an integral universe there, that everything has its purpose and its place and is working as part of a larger scheme...
...Instead she would tell us, "Now go into the confessional and say, 'I lied ten times, I stole five times, and I was mean to my brother six times.' " So every single one of us went in and repeated exactly what she said...
...Still, if you go to the church out of desperation, it does not desert you then...
...I do think that the church didn't reach out and grab us enough...
...Through my Hindu studies, I started understanding Jesus again...
...There were about five or six of us and she sort of walked us through the Baltimore Catechism which, on the whole, seemed very much less interesting than that card which I had seen in the gardener's shed...
...Kali is depicted as being black, like the devil...
...I had another in Jerusalem at the Dome of the Rock and the Wailing Wall and then at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher...
...One thing the church should do is to revive the folklore and mythology...
...He performed miracles, but much more than Jesus did - - Jesus was very modest about it, Krishna wasn't...
...I think there should be more of an effort on the part of Catholic and Jewish leaders to emphasize what is common to both traditions and to create a greater' unity...
...Well, now there is with films, which are a Western technology imported to the third world...
...I used to go to church to feel close to God but didn't feel that personal ecstasy that I felt at Hindu temples...
...But it wasn't the devil who was a prominent player in my early childhood fantasies and myths so much as myself and the evil in me - - being tainted and being sinful and going to hell...
...I think they were a bit bemused by my attraction to Hinduism, frankly, in the early years...
...I spent many hours a day meditating and praying...
...My mother's parents were divorced, and the nuns used to tell her stories about children of divorced parents and how their feet and hands would turn into animals' hooves...
...This was done privately in a kind of car pool approach...
...But I think you can forgive mistakes that have been made along the way...
...his fingers were clawed around the hub of the nail...
...ow do my parents feel about my Hinduism...
...So I was searching for my dharma...
...I find that very frightening . When I had a rock 'n' roll band, I used to try to talk about mysticism and religion . I wrote songs about it and people laughed, so I stopped and went back to teenage angst . My earliest years were spent in upstate New York, but I don't remember them at all . Then my family moved to Washington, D.C., when I was in kindergarten and my father was working for John F . Kennedy as assistant secretary of labor . I had an extremely happy childhood, and I feel very blessed . During those years in Washington, my family and I were more involved in the church as a family than we were ever to be again - which makes me very sad . We made our First Communions, my brother was confirmed . My father used to take me to St...
...Thomas's Church in Washington, and I was awed by the size and scale of it . I suppose religious buildings are supposed to inspire awe and reverence, and they do - it works...
...Maybe it's because we're a nation of immigrants and .we don't have roots that go down too far - - we're.transplanted...
...Truth is many, God is one," is one Hindu axiom I love...
...That doesn't exist in Christianity, and it's another thing that attracted me to Hinduism...
...People are .selpundits, is that all things are divine, all things havejiva, which means soul...
...I don't think anyone can challenge the moral authority of the church on that issue...
...God knows, it can often seem stodgy and boring...
...I was playing with my little brother in the bathtub one day...
...It's what I would call the spiritualization of the physical...
...If you are a Hindu, you are born with your dharma - - we can be anything...
...My Sunday school teacher was a very sweet and lovely lady who told us some lovely biblical stories, although not enough...
...I don't have any problem reconciling that and believing in both...
...Because of your sins...
...My mother is Episcopalian, so she did not participate - - it was just my dad, me, and the maids, all of whom were Cuban...
...she wears a necklace of human skulls...
...It is only through almost militantly reasserting my faith that I feel I can keep on living and that nuclear war can be stopped - - it ~enough people turn to God and discipline themselves ethically and spiritually...
...I don't think they know the extent to which I'm involved in my meditation and my personal practice, because 1 keep it fairly private...
...We don't know what we are...
...In fact, at Del.~ phi I had one of the most powerful mystical experiences of my life...
...I was sort of working my way around Paris at odd jobs...
...That's all wrong...
...So Krishna came along, and he was a radical and a revolutionary very much like Jesus...
...CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY it, but I didn't even have the vocabulary to describe what I ' d seen...
...IF the sixties the social revolutionaries were defying everything that was established, and that meant the church, too...
...went to public school from the first to the fourth grade, then I went to private school from the fourth grade to the beginning of tenth, following which I attended the American International School in New Delhi for high school...
...Contrast that with the irony and, some 14 August 1987:449 would say, even the hypocrisy of the Catholic upbringing which on the one hand is so sensual and on the other teaches you to deny and fear and reject the flesh and the physical world...
...That's my problem with Catholicism and Christianity, so I've tried to come back to it in my own way...
...So it was as a child in Sunday school that I first began to question Catholicism...
...By this time I was going to Mass with my dad and, always, the servants...
...He's the God of destruction and he's very strange, the God of the Saddhus - - he's blue and has a snake around his neck...
...blood was streaming down his face...
...What's wonderful about Hinduism is that there are so many different belief systems that contradict one another - - there are many different sects you can follow - - yet all are part of the Hindu religion, and they're all perfectly acceptable...
...In Catholic education, you are instilled from the very beginning with all kinds of phantasms of fear...
...The Krishna myth has elements of Moses and of the Christ myth and of certain Greek and Roman myths, too...
...I think they're glad that I'm involved with the church again, but I don't think they care one way or the other...
...I go to synagogues, which my parents always encouraged a lot: My father goes to synagogues] too, and he's been a great champion of Israel...
...But I became a fervent devotee of Krishna -- though I'm not a Hare Krishna at all, which is a different sect...
...I t ' s a very clear, visual memory, as clear as yesterday, burned like a daguerreotype into my brain, and I have no way of accounting for it...
...In India there are large festivals on the scale of Christmas five or six times a year...
...I was attracted by the sensual, physical qualities of the worship - - the brilliantly colored temples, the vast mythology with many, many gods, and the sound and smells and richness of it...
...And what about taking Communion, the Body of Christ and the Blood of Christ...
...I burst into tears and felt a reawakening of faith that had not happened to me for a very long time...
...Besides, there's more truth in what the artist portrays than in what the theologian will tell you...
...That was a war in which it was very clear that there was Good and there was Evil...
...I'm not sure if I was yet fully verbal, so I may have been younger than four years old...
...There aren't the terrible conflicts between different sects and schools of thought that exist elsewhere...
...But now I try to think more of the Resurrection because I don't like that emphasis on our sin, I don't like that emphasis on evil, I don't like that emphasis on torture and murder...
...The Catholic church in Italy, God knows, is spectacular -- the color and the light...
...There's no real Indian history...
...There should be more joy in the Catholic service...
...You find that over and over again in the doctrine of bhakti, which is the notion of reaching God through love only, not through exact performance of ritual or understanding of doctrine - - because that keeps religion in the hands of the educated classes and away from the poor man...
...You're a child, you don't know...
...I came to it entirely of my own volition and my own longing, without any kind of judgment - - considering myself a Hindu, not thinking of myself as a Catholic -- and have rediscovered how wonderful the Catholic service is and how much it is trying to instill love, forgiveness, and brotherhood...
...Catholics have a very difficult time with sex, although it's something of a paradox...
Vol. 114 • August 1987 • No. 14
