(Edited by Kathryn Hummel)
‘Are you standing in the street? What’s that background noise?’ Prof. Iris, a friend and mentor who let me keep her after undergrad, called me from rural Pennsylvania.
I had graduated then hopped a plane to travel with Radhika, an Indian friend from college. I was now twelve hours ahead of Iris and continents away on Radhika’s Bangalore rooftop, with horns honking, autos buzzing, and motorcycles revving on the street below.
‘I’m just brewing a cup of tea,’ said Iris. Dishes clinked into the sink as she put the phone down and called to her husband, a Norwegian-English translator, ‘Alec! Soup!’ She told me he had been secluded all morning editing short stories. I imagined standing in her kitchen, comforted by home sounds: wooden chair legs squeaking against the tile floor as she sat at the table, the rustle of a newspaper opening so she could read the small-town headlines to me, her shooing Moses, the calico cat, onto the floor.
‘How’s the home invasion?’ I asked.
Iris was preparing for what she called her ‘declining years’ by remodelling her old farmhouse. She groaned. ‘The whole thing is a trauma. Lots of bodily fluids are being expended. Me — tears, mostly over how much this is going to cost. My cat — piss, out of revenge for having his schedule interrupted. And you? Have you found God yet? In the land of a million gods?’
Over our decade-long friendship, one of our repeating conversations revolved around our conflicted relationships with religion. We both found it deeply painful but necessary to split from our conservative Christian roots. Iris’ crisis of faith started on Kent State’s campus in 1970; mine after I fell for a girl at church camp.
While my sense of Christian theology was still in limbo, I was excited to encounter divinity in a different country. I sat on the edge of Radhika’s apartment roof and watched pedestrians stroll towards the park for street-food like grilled corn on the cob smothered in spices and spritzed with a hint of lime. I told Iris my plans. ‘This weekend, Radhika’s family is taking me on a proper pilgrimage to the holy site on top of Tirumala Hill where an incarnation of the god Vishnu touched the earth. It’s like the Vatican of India.’
‘I’m almost finished with the book you lent by Sarah Macdonald, Holy Cow. Is her experience of sensory overload part of what you imagined when you first dreamed of going to India?’
‘Yes, the whole country blows the top of my head off. Radhika and her husband, Rakesh, have been taking me around their home state of Andhra Pradesh, on the south-eastern coast, to meet all six hundred of their relatives. They speak energetically in Telugu. When I met her extended family, they were a burst of noise. I liked them immediately.’
‘From your messages, Radhika and her family seem very protective of you.’
I had described how, in congested places like markets or train stations, Radhika looped her pinkie around my index finger and led the way. Sometimes I kept hold of the dupatta that she wore over one shoulder.
‘Have you taken any other solo trips?’ Iris asked.
‘No, not since my last message from Mumbai.’
‘How’s your quarter-life crisis?’
I, like a lot of twenty-somethings, wasn’t sure what to do with myself after graduation. I still didn’t know what I wanted to be or who I wanted to be with or how my upbringing as a conservative Christian fit with my growing awareness of my identity as a pan-sapiosexual. I was hoping India would enlighten me.
‘Sounds like some of your problems have been solved by sex.’
In my last email to Iris, I had described being seduced by a few fellow travellers. At the time, I felt the transitory nature of these sexual encounters made them less emotionally risky.
‘After your last email,’ said Iris, ‘I thought the computer screen was going to melt. Question: did we ever talk about the three women “kept” by male elites in 5th century BCE Greece — lover, housekeeper, intellectual partner? Your last three choices weren’t far off, but I’d add a carpenter if you can find one. Your message was also filled with good descriptions of food. I say you write a food journal with undertones of sexual discovery, rather than focusing on the sexual smorgasbord.’
Suddenly struck with self-awareness, I asked: ‘Did I overshare? Sometimes I forget that —’
‘I’m an old person?’ She sighed. ‘I know. That’s what I like about you. But I’m so glad I’m not your mother.’
The next morning, I received an email from Iris. She often sent follow-ups to our conversations, a habit for an academic:
So good hearing your voice. I forgot to ask about your sense of Indian LGBT rights. I was reading an article about ‘outing’ this afternoon, and what struck me is how right you’ve been to be careful.
In your process of self-discovery, you are, in a sense, reinventing yourself, which is part of the reason you went, I suspect. Am I right? I think of you often, and I’ve been wondering how you’ll deal with the question of compromise, your authentic self vs. the version you’ll show people you love once you return home.
Final thought — Alec speaks constantly of Ibsen. A major theme of Ibsen plays is finding the truest part of oneself and being faithful to that often means losing those closest to you or, worse, destroying them. Ibsen doesn’t offer pat answers.
Oh, leave this for another day. Go dancing —
Iris
*
Allo Iris,
Here’s what happened last weekend. We drove to the top of Tirumala Hill, but Radhika told me climbing was the best way to meet the divine. In the past, Radhika’s family climbed the four thousand steps from the base of the mountain to the temple. The edges of the steps are impressionistic: fiery, earth-toned smears. Some pilgrims thumb turmeric and vermillion paste on each stone as they climb. Some kneel or prostrate themselves as an act of self-sacrifice and humble devotion. Almost like the use of candles in Catholic prayer, pilgrims place a leaf on each step, dab it with flammable camphor, and light it with a match.
In the evening, we showered, put on clean clothes, and headed out into the cool air to wait barefoot in the queue that meandered through a succession of halls towards the main temple for the evening darshan, or divine viewing. I love being in a country that abandons shoes so often: in art museums, temples, homes, shops. Being shoeless makes us quiet, humble, momentarily similar. As we shuffled into the passageways, I stretched up on my toes to see over the people in front of me. The space was so tight we touched belly button to back, toe to heel.
Radhika, her father and her burly brother stood in front of me, and Rakesh stood behind.
‘If you get swept away by the crowd,’ said Radhika, ‘we will never see you again.’
‘We will protect you, like a phalanx,’ whispered Rakesh.
The line steadily soft-padded through the series of waiting rooms. In each room, we sat on a row of benches. My knee jiggled with anticipation.
‘The suspense is killing me,’ I whispered to Radhika. I asked what the priests were doing on the televised worship.
‘They’re bathing the god,’ said Radhika. ‘They treat the statue as if it were the real thing, so they feed him and put him away for sleep. The statue is said to be self-manifested.’
The hall door opened and we lined up again, single file. As we got closer to the holy chamber and the chanting of the priests, my heart started to pound. Radhika was holding my hand tightly enough to leave ring impressions, and the people behind us were pushing for their turn. I stepped over the engraved stone threshold and moved into the candle light towards the god’s presence. We pilgrims waved the holiness of fire over our heads, put our hands together, and bowed our heads.
‘Don’t turn your back to the god,’ whispered Radhika. She led me from one side of the room to the other.
The divine chill Radhika had described earlier, or maybe the chill of claustrophobia, ran up my arms and settled in my stomach. When we walked outside into the fresh air, the priests offered delicious laddus — small round balls of sugar, wheat and coconut fried in ghee.
Radhika’s father asked in English, ‘So? How was it?’
‘It was certainly something.’ I couldn’t verbalize what I felt, but it wasn’t transcendence.
‘We had more time than others,’ said Radhika. She explained that people with regular tickets see the god from a few chambers away, only for a second, but in the holy chamber we were close enough for the living statue to practically breathe on our faces.
While the other family members went to donate money to the temple, I tried to process what had just happened.
Rakesh is a sensitive atheist and a liberal academic, so I told him, ‘It’s a bit disturbing that I, a white Protestant, got to cut in front of genuine devotees because your father-in-law bought me a VIP pass.’
He nodded. ‘They have to manage the crowds. It didn’t used to be like that. One hundred thousand people move through here a day, so the poorest are denied an audience with god because there are too many in line. You felt it. They are pressing you forward always, and you get no moment to appreciate.’
‘Christianity is the same in some churches — classist and commercialised.’
‘I don’t believe, myself, but I come because tradition is a good thing. It holds families together. And sometimes I get that feeling,’ — he took a sharp breath to represent a supernatural chill — ‘of something else there. You know?’
I took a seat next to Rakesh on the steps of the money-counting house and watched the crowds move towards the temple. Some people had climbed the steps, waited in line for hours, for a glimpse of the god. I finally identified what emotion I felt: grief.
I’m still processing why this experience made me sad. I look forward to talking with you about it soon.
Love,
Karen
*
‘Hello, my dear.’ Iris answered the phone.
I was sitting cross-legged on Radhika’s roof again, watching the sun set and the Indian fox bats fly home to their roosts in Sankey Tank Park.
‘I received your letter,’ said Iris. ‘And as a repressed lapsed Calvinist I’m always interested in essays about religious doubts and crises of faith.’
‘It wasn’t an essay.’
She kept going. ‘However, I have a few critiques. Having trouble hearing God in a crowded place is a bit cliché, isn’t it?’
‘You asked for a story about something other than sex.’
‘I’m surprised at your age you were able to think of anything. While the travel narrative was interesting in itself…
‘Bugger, it was a letter, not an essay. A letter for your entertainment.’
‘You’re talking to an academic; everything is a potential essay. But what struck me is that you could probably write a series on ‘Finding God’ — in obvious places like less crowded temples, but also in still waters and in occasional serendipitous encounters.’
‘You mean like finding God in people?’
‘Yes: people, unexpected places. That’s your homework.’
‘Do you still find God in church? What are you really thinking about during services?’
She laughed. ‘Why is there an American flag on the dais? Where are my children? Does the pastor truly believe what he is saying? Oh, that reminds me, I wanted to share something with you.’ She put down the phone and returned a few seconds later. ‘I’ve just finished reading The Year of Living Biblically. I want to pepper you with quotes…where was the part that made me think of you?’ She flipped a few pages. ‘Here it is: “The religious rights’ obsession with homosexuality comes out of their culture not out of Scripture.” I’ll save the book for you. But then you might think you’re hearing from the devil.’
‘Seducing me to the dark side.’
‘But this book is really good — thoughtful, compassionate and funny — I highly recommend it. How’s your digestive system?’
‘I’ve gained about 12 stone. I can barely fit into my stretchy harem pants.’
‘I’m always struck by your feeling at home in host countries. That was precisely my feeling when I first visited my friend Karin in Sweden. What makes us feel that way? Freedom from responsibility and quotidian cares?’
‘Freedom to be out of place. Joy in embracing the confusion. Visual beauty.’
‘As in the love of beauty must have an object?’
‘Whatever, you and your dead white writers.’
‘That’s your homework. Write an essay about beauty.’
*
A few weeks later I received a rare letter from Iris in her tight cursive font, the card hand-designed with naked angels painted on the front:
Let me know if this makes it to you. I feel like I’m writing to Marco Polo. Your last letter has me wondering about the motivations for evangelism and your need to escape from it. The purest motive, of course, is delight in the Lord and that happiest lives are lived focused on Him/Her. So we want to share the joy. But there are, as is true of humanity, darker impulses that have to do with personal insult and rejection. I’ve experienced this before from people who seem to be more interested in whether I will validate their beliefs and their life commitments — and underneath that is insecurity or even superficial, shaky claims to the Truth.
In other news, I’m reading the best religious book I’ve come across in a while: The Naked Now by Richard Rorh. It’s a call from a Catholic priest to return to the wisdom tradition in Christianity. Like a breath of fresh air, it feels like heaven’s literal inspiration and exhalation. His religion is centred on an ego-less, non-dualistic ‘contemplative gaze’ that welcomes paradox and contradiction. The way to that mystical relationship with God is great love or great suffering, both exemplified by the crucifixion.
By way of a transition — I’m feeling strangely unsettled but I don’t know why: maybe midterm anxiety. Creeping generalized anxiety disorder or too many sleepless nights. Last night was horrid — wicked storm. I echo your little scream from last semester: ‘I need a break!’ Despite reading Rorh, I do not feel at one with the universe —
— Iris
P.S. Please find attached Sharon Old’s poem, ‘The Pope’s Penis’. Gives a whole new outlook on worship.
*
Dear Iris,
We’ve spent the last few weeks roaming around the lush southern state of Kerala without a map or a guide book. Today Radhika and I tried to visit the Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Trivandrum (also known as Thiruvananthapuram), a city near the bottom of India. The priest gestured towards me.
‘It’s not possible,’ he said in English. ‘Foreigners are not permitted in the temple.’
Radhika gave me a stricken look, embarrassed.
‘It’s okay. I’ll wait outside,’ I said.
‘She can wait, even in my office,’ the priest offered.
Radhika dreamed of visiting the temple for a long time, and when she came out into the sunlight, she gushed about the beautiful murals on the walls.
Next, our police escort and travel guide, a gentle lieutenant who moved with crisp military bearing in his white shirt and black trousers, took us to a shop to sample spicy banana chips. My two Indian companions spoke a mix of Hindi and English together.
As he drove us back to our hotel, he asked about the temple. He explained that security might be a little tighter as secret vaults under the temple had been discovered and opened recently. In India, gods can own property, and Vishnu was now the wealthiest god in the country.
‘How much did they find?’ I asked.
Radhika translated for me and took a moment to convert the answer: Malayalam to Hindi to Telugu to English, rupees to dollars. ‘He says they’ve found billions of dollars of treasure in the vaults, and they haven’t opened all of them.’
The police officer, still disgusted by my temple experience, said in a raised voice: ‘This is not Indian. This is not Keralan. How can we keep people from visiting God?’
Love,
Karen
*
During the next phone conversation with Iris, she told me about her knee injury, the stacks of bureaucratic paperwork waiting for her attention, and the students who cheated on exams because they couldn’t read. When she finished her gin and tonic, she changed the topic. ‘How did you feel when they told you foreigners couldn’t enter the temple?’
‘That’s the first time I felt excluded and mildly filthy.’
‘But from conversations with me,’ she said cautiously, ‘I know that’s not the first time you’ve had an experience like that.’
I thought for a moment. ‘You’re right.’
A few years ago, I had been asked to move out of an apartment, owned by a Pentecostal church, because the elders were informed I ‘struggled with same-sex attraction’.
In our circular conversations about religion, Iris and I often discussed ways we felt outside the church. How can we manage the split between fundamentalist dogma and intellectual curiosity? Was there space in the church for questioning? For women in leadership? For LGBT people? As we both found our way through faith, we found the answer was yes, absolutely. It took me about a decade to reach this answer.
When I was eighteen and studying at a rural western New York college, a young man tried to ‘court’ me. I assumed his age and height equalled wisdom. I admired his confidence. But we fiercely debated issues of human dignity, including the legitimacy of lesbian love. Iris responded:
As someone who doesn’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about one’s love choices as sinful or even harmful, I have trouble following the argument. I promise I’m not being facetious when I ask you to outline it in simple prose for me.
Fill in the blanks for me: some Christians would have us believe that……………..is sinful and that the Devil’s argument that……………is subtle, deceptive, and to be avoided if one’s soul (and body) are to remain pure and worthy of heavenly bliss.
I am being perfectly honest with you when I say that the focus on homosexuality as sin seems so foreign to what I understand Jesus’ teachings to be, that I simply become confused and impatient.
For some reason, the debate reminds me of the 70s question about whether one could be both a feminist and a Christian. I believe the answer is yes, but it’s a struggle. Of course, you should not listen to me. I don’t believe in either the heaven or hell I was raised to desire or fear. I do, however, think there is a divine mystery of some sort that I’ll never understand and that a cosmic unity in love is possible on earth and after death. Because my brain has not been attuned (and I am thinking of Mozart here), I might be denied an ultimate bliss — but not because I took the Lord’s name in vain or had impure thoughts. Could be wrong though!
Sigh (or perhaps I should be more honest, and shout with outrage, ‘Not my God!’). Ha — God is a woman anyway, so this claptrap makes no sense.
—Iris
Over the decade of our friendship, Iris told me in various ways that ‘it gets better’. She often encouraged me to keep a journal, probably knowing that eventually I would work her advice out for myself. During another conversation at her kitchen table over mugs of blueberry tea, after I returned home from a semester at a large university, I confided to her that I felt a growing split between my political/religious beliefs and some of my friends and family.
‘If you aren’t sure how to talk to them, have you tried writing?’ Iris asked.
‘How can I write honestly without threatening the theology of members of my family and close friends?’
‘I’m not sure you can write honestly about your life without threatening a certain kind of theology.’ She dunked her tea bag a few times. ‘Being married to a guy who hasn’t figured out what to do with theology he can no longer accept wholeheartedly, I know how corrosive and blocking the problem can be. He has become stuck in his own writing because, I think, he cannot face honestly the religion he was raised with. I’ll leave you with one more thought. Closures are rare; it’s all fluid.’
‘What?’ I asked.
*
It wasn’t until the end of my time in India that I felt an intense experience with the divine supernatural.
Dear Iris,
Radhika kicked me out of the nest one last time to travel solo, to rely on the kindness of strangers. I arranged a place to stay in a village nearby recommended ruins and waterfalls and temples. Couch-surfing. It’ll be fine, Radhika assured me. It’s for one week; the room is free.
The village in the mountains is all red clay roads, obstinate cows, grandmothers with cell phones. My host is married with two small children. He offers to show me the local attractions for a nominal fee. We spend the day together. In the evening his wife serves me dinner and I play with their children. I go out to hear music at a local rooftop restaurant. I get back late and the gate is locked. So I climb over the wall. There isn’t a lock on my door and I don’t think anything of it until my host slips into the bed and puts a hand on my stomach.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask, trying to turn.
‘The others are sleeping. No worries.’
I feel his cock under the cotton of his dhoti and smell his breath, thick with scotch. I scoot away from his hands, but he continues to caress me. He shushes me like a child. ‘Relax. Relax. The others will not wake.’
‘Stop. What are you doing?’
‘What is it?’ he asks. He pins down my arms with one hand. Even as he works his other hand under the elastic of my pyjama bottoms, I can’t believe he’ll actually go through with this. He mumbles, ‘You shouldn’t play with boys. I thought you wanted this. I waited up for you. It isn’t fair.’ The man’s right hand cups my breast, squeezing.
I stop telling myself stories of adventure. I pray, not expecting an answer. God. Protect.
And then, then, his whispering stops. He snores. I am still, dumbfounded; suppressing a giggle of shock, I listen to the deepening sounds. My heart pounds. I wait until my arms fall asleep under his weight. I untangle myself from his limbs and slip out of the room, grabbing my pack, passport and flip-flops. He sleeps on.
No nightmares yet.
*
‘My dear,’ Iris growled at me a month later when I sat in her kitchen in rural Pennsylvania. ‘Oh my God, I am so glad I’m not your mother.’
She vigorously shook her head in her characteristic gesture of deep frustration, mussing the perfectly straightened points of her white pixie-cut. ‘I don’t mean to suggest that if you had been raped it would have been your fault. But please, please don’t take such risks. I say this out of love.’
Fresh back from India, I was slender and tan. I slouched against a chair at her kitchen table while she put the kettle on. ‘I know. I was too naive to understand what was happening: how he spent the day taking me to secluded place, how he gave me a room close to the street so his wife wouldn’t hear us.’
‘But what a vignette. It catches that brief time when adventure calls louder than caution in a young girl’s life.’
I took a breath. ‘The moment he fell asleep felt like a divine intervention, a deus ex machina. That kind of prayer never worked for me before. I couldn’t believe it. These moments of, I don’t know what to call them, inexplicable grace, are why I can’t ditch Christianity entirely.’
Iris pressed her lips together and a look passed over her face that at the time I couldn’t interpret as deep cynicism.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Are you saying you believe in God because you were spared a horrible experience? If God is safety, what happens when that safety is taken away? Faith maintained by, dare I say, a charmed life?’
My early-twenties self stared at her.
*
Another time I asked Iris if she had experienced moments of spontaneous peace or intervention. We were sitting at her dining room table in the dim November light. With a mixture of Scottish thrift and passionate environmentalism, she often kept her lights off and heat low. In companionable silence, we wrapped our fingers around warm mugs of jasmine tea and slurped the hot liquid.
She said, ‘I’ve had a few beyond-the-veil experiences. One locution came after September 11. We had been to church. The pastor was out of his depth. His words were rote, clichéd, hardly the comfort I’d been seeking. Some Christian women wanted to bake pies and send them to New York.’ Iris shook her head and gave an exasperated laugh. ‘Completely surreal. After the service, we walked down the church steps. It was a burnished autumn day. The sky was deep blue, and I could smell the bakery from down the street. Then I heard a clear voice, “You schmucks. I created a beautiful world and I wanted you to be happy in it.” It was not my voice’.
We agreed that we could do without the legalism associated with Christianity, but the revolutionary message of unconditional love undid us.
I unwrapped a square of chocolate from the bowl on her table, snapped it in half and put the square on my tongue. After a moment of silence, I said, ‘I know religion is supposed to be controversial, but I want God without dogma or drama. Is that too much to ask?’
‘What you want, as an introvert, is religion without other people. Was it C.S. Lewis who said the worst part of religion is putting up with your neighbors?’
We agreed we would maintain ambivalence towards organised religion, but we would cling to Christianity because it provided a framework for healing and forgiveness. Faith allowed us to craft meaning out of violence and tragedy.
Iris twisted her wedding ring. ‘There have been other times of grace. Peace when I shouldn’t have felt it. Like that line by Wendell Berry: “I rest in the grace of the world and am free”. This morning I noticed the crystallised oak leaves clinging to one another, the blue-haloed morning sun, the fog lifting from the river but still obscuring the hills, the flash of gulls’ wings. The quiet.’
