The question is: “Can religion be apolitical?” What they have in mind, being British and all, is the recent revelation of Catholic priest Fr. James Chesney’s involvement in IRA car bombings in the 1970s. Being the chauvinistic American that I am (and a pretty sporadic news-reader lately), I didn’t mention Chesney. But the question presented simply too good an opportunity to summon the rarely-summoned memory of my favorite theologian. Here goes my answer:

Religion is politics. It just is. The great French sociologist Émile Durkheim was right almost a century ago when he wrote of religion as “an eminently social thing”. We learn it (or don’t) at our mothers’ breasts and cling to it (or not) as we set out into the world. We speak the word of God with human lips and hear it with human ears. The ways we do so are our first inkling of what a good society should look like. And that inkling forms habits of how we bother to treat one another. How we treat one another is politics.

Few have known this quite as well as the Episcopalian lawyer-theologian William Stringfellow, a man who followed Karl Barth’s advice to read the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. “There is no option in this world of abstention from politics”, he wrote. “Everyone everywhere is involved, whether intentionally and intelligently or by default or some moral equivalent of it.” So, no: religion cannot be apolitical. But people can think it is, and that’s when it becomes truly dangerous, or at best vapid and naive.

Keep reading to watch me rather recklessly equate spirituality with terrorism.

It is undeniable that the news is hot on stories of what Oppenheimer calls “clerical impropriety.” As distressed as I am over the sentence I am about to write: it seems as though it is only a matter of time until every religion has its fifteen minutes of sexual scandal. But while stories like this one are trendy, it could be dangerous to analogize one religion’s scandals with those of others.

While this particular instance obviously and unforgivably includes abuse, it is an abuse unique to this particular religious society, and to this particular religious leader. The article makes it seem as though this abbot’s misconduct occurred only among adult women, and we know at least one affair was consensual. The story here is less about adding Buddhism to the list of religions that have had public scandals, and more about how this one community is handling the situation.

Oppenheimer suggests that while characteristically Western faiths have a built-in protocol for abuse (with, if I may editorialize, the nauseatingly true sentence: “Priests and rabbis know the boundaries, even if some do not always respect them”), this does not exist in Buddhism. He says, “The teacher/student relationship in Buddhism has no obvious Western analogy,” and in this context of blurred lines, there is a gray area in terms of sexual relationships. The article also explains that questions regarding the appropriateness of such relationships are becoming an issue now as many Asian Buddhist leaders are encountering Buddhist communities that include female members for the first time, and that they don’t always know how to react to the situation.

While Oppenheimer might be onto something here, I tend to err on the side of skepticism in this particular instance of abuse. Let’s be honest here: you would think that a married abbot, one who has been the head of this society since 1956, at a monastery on 67th between 2nd and 3rd should, in some way, be in touch with Western societal constructs.

Even if I am wrong, and Shimano did not feel that his behavior was inappropriate, it was pressure from Western voices that led to his resignation. Once the record of Shimano’s affairs got into the hands of bloggers and other U.S. media outlets, there was a frenzy of criticism that the Zen Studies Society leadership, and ultimately Shimano himself, could not ignore. Stepping down might not be an admission of guilt, but it is definitely a nod to the attitudes of troubled critics. And by the way, the article doesn’t mention that Shimano’s wife was also a board member, and she has also resigned.

The fascinating part is, even though this issue is somewhat resolved, it seems as though the society still doesn’t quite know how to handle the aftermath. If you go to its website, you will notice a point of information right on the home page about ethical guidelines. The write-up on Shimano’s leadership it links to is both critical and reverential. It understands and is troubled by his misconduct but also retains respect for him as its spiritual leader. In addition, after some thought, it has decided to outsource the management of the remaining fallout to the FaithTrust Institute, “a multifaith organization that addresses ethical violations by spiritual leaders.” In the meantime, Shimano will “remain committed to ordained and long-time students for as long as his health allows.”

If Oppenheimer is right, and Buddhist societies are encountering these kinds of problems more and more, will we begin to see standardized protocols like the one the Zen Studies Society is working to build? And what affect might these protocols have on Eastern Buddhism? I guess we will just have to wait to find out.

(H/t Josh Baran.)

“Is he dead?”

It seemed a stupid question at first.

It was Sunday and I was lying in bed with a cold. I was half-watching the television, where Rosie O’Donnell, Richard Dreyfuss, and Emilio Estevez were pretending to be a family in the movie Another Stakeout.

The phone rang. It was my mother, crying. I sat up.

“Something bad has happened,” she said. “Leon jumped,” she said. “Out the window.”

He lived on the 24th floor of a Manhattan high rise.

That’s when I asked if he was dead, and the answer was quick: of course.

*

Leon was my stepfather for 19 years. He was mentally ill, although only diagnosed after I’d left home for college. There were hospitalizations, and prescriptions for Risperidone and Paxil and a whole soup of anti-psychotic and anti-depressant medications.

My mother took care of him until the night he imprisoned her in the kitchen and started squeezing her thin arms, and then her neck, leaving a trail of bruises. His son, then a teenager, heard our mother’s screams and ran to a neighbor’s house for help. The police arrived the moment after she’d broken free. She was running down the street, Leon in pursuit. He was arrested, brought to a mental hospital. My mother secured a temporary restraining order, and then a divorce.

After that, he lived alone. He improved when he was on his medication, and when he felt better he was sure he didn’t need it. So he’d stop taking it—and then go into decline. First he’d speak slowly, then not at all. He’d stop eating, then drinking, then leaving the couch, even to go to the bathroom. His court-appointed guardian would discover him on the sodden upholstery and call the ambulance. Rehydration, medication, revival. Wash, rinse, repeat. He was 75, and I couldn’t imagine how he could continue in this fashion.

But I also thought he would never die.

*

Leon started confusing me when I was five years old. That’s when he married my mother, and not long after, he dropped down on one knee and said he’d be honored if I’d call him Daddy.

My own father had died when I was infant; I readily accepted Leon’s proposal—he was nice to me and brought me toys. As I got older, I came to admire him. He celebrated the life of the mind. He was always reading, several newspapers a day, books, magazines. He was forever handing people articles to read, and always encouraging me to read and, when it became apparent I was so inclined, to write.

But then there were the times when his eyes got swirly and hard and glassy. He’d hurl words I’d never heard before, at volumes I’d never encountered—along with furniture, and anything else he happened to get his hands on. At first, his furies were vented only at my mother, but then, around the time I became a teenager, I became a favorite target.

He could not bear the smell of me. He swore he could smell makeup on my face and bade me to wash over and over again. He did not like the sight of my bare feet; I was required to wear slippers. When I forgot—as I often did—he would find them and throw them in my face. But as much as he seemed to want me to disappear, he also couldn’t stand to be unacknowledged. His rage at encountering unwanted sensory evidence of my existence was matched only by his rampages when I tried to ignore him.

There were always apologies afterward. They became less convincing over time. “I never meant to do you any harm,” he once said to me, sadly, after a social worker had paid an investigating call. I’d stopped listening by then. It was only after he was officially diagnosed with psychosis that I realized that he was probably telling the truth. But he made his final attack on my mother not long after that, and although he lived for seven more years, I never spoke to him again.

There was no funeral. He was buried in Calverton National Cemetery. I went a few weeks after he was buried. His headstone was white, and along with the relevant dates, it said: “Beloved Dad. Rest in Peace.”

But did he?

*

“It’s about the jumper on 24th Street,” said the police officer who answered the phone, when he thought he’d put me on hold. A few moments later, I received permission to tear the fluorescent green police seal from Leon’s apartment door. Cause of death had been determined. It was not murder. The apartment was no longer a potential crime scene.

The case was officially closed. But my work had just started. Since I was the only one of the immediate family living in the city, I had to clean his apartment, to ready it for its next occupants.

I walked into the dining room, past a wall lined with packages of Depends and stacked with newspapers, the one on top from the day he died. His shoes were kicked under the table, and the table itself was overflowing with clocks, both digital and analog, and many watches. There were several compasses, needles spinning northward. Also on the table, a stack of papers: copies of patents he’d applied for as a younger man, plays he’d written when he was younger still, and his military service records.

In the living room, I found approximately 300 flashlights that he’d collected to ward off the dark, and dozens and dozens of radios that he’d bought to fill the silence.

I opened his closet, which smelled as he always did, of newsprint and Scotch tape. There, among his suits, was a garbage bag filled with burnt out light bulbs. These I threw away without counting.

I went into the bedroom, where I found pictures of my brother, and his daughter from his first marriage, and of me. The frames were tipped face down. There were knives of various shapes and sizes arrayed on the night table.

He’d used a knife to cut the screen out of the dining room window. Or so I surmised; the screen was gone and there was the knife near the ledge. Also: a blue velvet yarmulke, and his glasses.

I had been told it would take about ten seconds for him to fall from that height. I had been told that he hit the honey locust trees in front of the building. When I looked, I saw no obviously broken branches, but the coroner’s report confirmed that he did not reach the ground intact.

He was identified with his fingerprints.

*

After a few weeks, I finished donating his belongings to charity. Conversations about Leon were just as likely to be about redoing his kitchen cabinets as they were to be about trying to make sense of his death. Life’s details had to be addressed, we had to move on, insert-platitude-here.

The blunt truth is, it was much easier that way. In cleaning and emptying Leon’s apartment, I had encountered the evidence of a once-full life of many identities, an inventor, a playwright, a husband and a father—narrowed to fingerprints. I felt compassion for his many losses, immediately followed by guilt: after all, in the last years of his life, I’d shunned a very sick man I’d once called Daddy.

To ease the guilt, I’d re-tell myself the story of Leon’s crimes. Then I’d feel sad, and mad—the complexity was exhausting.

By day, I mostly succeeded in pushing him out of my mind. But at night, in my dreams, I’d often revisit his apartment. It was as cluttered as the day I first tore off the police seal. Leon would slowly pace the living room. He was frightfully pale, bruised and abraded. He had a pained look on his face. “How did you survive the fall?” I’d ask him. “And who is in your grave?” He’d stare at me, and say nothing at all.

One year passed, then another and another, and night after night, I’d encounter him, still pacing in the living room.

*

Then, one night, the dream changed. Leon had died, and it was my job to identify his body. He was brought into the living room, in pieces. There were mason jars filled with fluid and fat. His tibia had been turned into a trumpet, painted and ringed with red silk thread. The top of his skull had become a vessel, a kapala, rimmed with silver. It was separate from his face, which was pale and arranged in its familiar pained expression. “Everyone dies, but no one is dead,” I said as I examined the pieces.

I was repeating a Tibetan saying I’d read a few days earlier. It was meant to be comforting to those who had lost a loved one, but I’d found it menacing when I first encountered it. I did not want my dead to be anything but gone.

That morning, though, I woke with the understanding that while Leon’s shattered body was long gone, the unfinished business that we had—his pained expression, and mine—were still very much alive. And I realized that if I examined what remained closely, slowly, it might still be possible to transform what was left into something useful. Perhaps even into something sacred.

“Is he dead?” Not such a stupid question, in the end.

Beck announced that “America today begins to turn back to God.” He’s the sponsor of the “9.12″ movement, which refers to his liking for the the “sense of unity and purpose” the country had after 9/11. I don’t know about y’all, but I mostly just remember Bush telling everyone to go shopping, and being secretly pleased that property values were going to fall because I was in the market for a house. I was also really squicked out by people grief-glomming when they had suffered no personal loss; the most egregious example of this was a book put out by The New York Times containing little biographies of the murder victims. I had to tell my husband that if I ever died in a massacre, I specifically did not want a capsule bio for strangers to fawn over. “My love of Duran Duran and propensity to write and sing little jingles about daily events dies with me,” I said.

Herewith, 9.12′s 9 Principles, some of which I agree with, and my comments. If you look at the original page, there’s a rather scary-looking graphic of a snake choking the Capitol dome. Maybe some nice, quiet prayer would be good for your soul, Glenn? I have just the saint for you! His name is Patrick. Also, Mary, the Mother of God has been known to trample a few snakes in her time. Just something to consider.

Here they are:

1. America is Good.

Mary: It’s pretty good. Yeah, it could be better.

2. I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life.

Mary: Which God? Whose God? Mr. Beck: BE MORE SPECIFIC! My God says a lot of stuff that I don’t think your God would really like. “People don’t like birth control?” He chortled one day. “That’s like not liking rainbows and kittens!”

3. I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.

Mary: This just makes me think you’re a habitual liar, and, in that case, being more honest than yesterday is negligible.

4. The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government.

Mary: Agreed. Especially on my property! I would hasten to add that my husband is the ultimate authority on my property. Since he has a penis.

5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it.

Mary: (garbled) What? No, I’m good. Yeah. Totally.

6. I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results.

Mary: Yeah! Shove it, poor people! Your results will vary!

7. I work hard for what I have and will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.

Mary: Oh man! I thought I had to make a $50 annual donation to Hampshire College or I was going to get audited or something! (Airpunch!)

8. It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion.

Mary: Glenn Beck, we’re agreeing on this one too! It is, in fact, totally 100 percent American!

9. The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me.

Mary: Fabulous! Could I get twice-weekly recycling pickups and a city-wide composting program?

Mary dismisses Rice saying: “she’s out of Catholicism and I’m in and out every day. And aren’t all Catholics in and out?”

No. Some of us got out and stayed out. I was a Catholic until I decided I didn’t think Jesus could be born of a virgin, die and rise again, as part of a suicide mission, as a scapegoat, to have my sins forgiven. Then there’s the Transubstantiation. It’s all a Mystery. The greater mystery to me is why any Catholic “stays in.” Maybe the reason is, as Mill suggested: “not because they think it’s true but because they wouldn’t know what to do without it.”

We spoke the same language. No,
we did not speak the same language.
We believed in the same gods. No,
we didn’t believe in the same gods.
The lavender fields where we first arrived
were forever symbolic to us; the scent
not somnolent but a promise
of our new future. No, none of that.
The boat we stepped ashore from,
it was burned behind us. Perhaps
they thought our people had only one
and if we couldn’t leave, no more
would come. No, it was not our only boat,
but though we hoped others would follow,
none did. The reeds we used to make our first bed
bent easily, and we laid together
in it on a cliff side with paths traced
across the rock face. We snared birds
in nets and roasted them on a spit;
we ate greens picked from sparse rock
outcroppings. We kept a torch aflame
all night for protection. We slept safely.
No, our fishing line disappeared
from its reels, our earrings
from our ears. Finally the blankets
that covered us vanished and we woke
shivering in the inky night. The stars
turned slowly around us, night birds
swept their ugly shadows across
the stony path, and we waited.
No, we did not have to wait.

“When you speak to [Bahati's] allies, they’re pretty clear: This is a project to eradicate homosexuality in Uganda, and they hope it will become a model for all of Africa. They’re not saying, ‘This is a reform.’ They’re saying, ‘We can do this. We are at the crux.’ When I was there, an American pastor [named] Lou Engle, who leads a big Christian right group called The Call, said, ‘This is ground zero of the great war with homosexuality.’”

That’s what I did last summer, after a series of political sex scandals propelled my 2008 book The Family onto the bestseller lists. The scandals took place in a posh Capitol Hill townhouse maintained by the Family — the oldest and arguably most influential Christian conservative organization in Washington — for congressmen looking for a break on rent or spiritual counsel, or both. Since the townhouse is on C Street, it’s cleverly called C Street. And since there was really only a page or two in The Family dedicated to C Street, I cleverly grabbed the name — now synonymous with corruption — for my next book, written in deep seclusion during the past year. C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy arrives in bookstores on September 27.

And I’ll be on NPR’s “Fresh Air” to discuss it with Terry Gross today, August 25th. You can find local air times here. Also scheduled for the program is Eliza Griswold, whose fascinating new book, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam, I’ve just started reading. It’s a nice pairing, since that fault line runs through Africa, and for my part I’ll be talking about a chapter in C Street on Uganda and its so-called “kill-the-gays bill,” which is excerpted as “Straight Man’s Burden” in the September issue of Harper’s magazine, on newsstands now. It’s sub only at the Harper’s site, but NPR will have all or part of the story up tomorrow. If you’re really interested, you can read an additional piece on the subject I wrote for the September issue of The Advocate, “Dangerous Liaisons.” Come September, I’ll have some original material for my first love, KtB.

My publisher, Little, Brown, has set up a Facebook page for the book on which I and the Little, Brown folks will be publishing news, including updates on the stories dealt with in the book. Please befriend this lonely page here.

Better yet, befriend me. I’m easy. Just have a beer with me. But to do that, you’ll have to come to a C Street event — or, better yet, book one. Contact Carolyn O’Keefe at carolyn dot okeefe at hbgusa dot com, and cc me at jeff dot sharlet at gmail dot com.

Here’s the itinerary up to late October:

September 21 — Austin, TX. Blandy Lecture at the Seminary of the Southwest.

September 23 — Gettysburg, PA. Gettysburg College.

September 27 — Washington, DC. National Press Club

September 28 — Washington, DC. Georgetown University Bookstore.

September 28 — Washington, DC. Politics & Prose Bookstore.

September 29 — New York City. The Strand.

September 29 — Brooklyn. The Powerhouse Arena.

September 30 — Madison, CT. RJ Julia Booksellers.

October 7 — Hanover, NH. Dartmouth College, with poet Cleopatra Mathis.

October 12 — San Francisco, CA. The Green Arcade Bookstore.

October 13 — Lafayette, CA. The Commonwealth Club.

October 15 — Salt Lake City, Utah. The Ex-Mormon Foundation.

October 22 — Charlottesville, VA. University of Virginia Miller Center for Public Affairs.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67N23820100824