Killing the Buddha

"My kitty is content that I will meet her needs and does not worry about tomorrow..."

It was not quite 15 years ago, and I was a reporter at a small town daily newspaper. It was a tough little town, with a crime rate that was too high for its size. The emphasis in the newsroom was crime reporting, which helped sell papers. I covered the courthouse.

Because we dealt with so much “crime and grime” on a regular basis, the newsroom staff used black humor as a way to handle the impact of constantly writing about the many ways in which people can be beaten. I learned quickly that such humor did not transfer well outside of the newsroom, so we kept our dark, snide remarks just between the news staff.

And it worked pretty well, except when a crime or accident had a child victim. Then nothing would help. I remember when a fellow reporter, Bob, went out to an accident scene. A van had struck and killed a young child who was walking with his family through a grocery store parking lot. The child had lagged behind and, because of the van’s high profile, the driver simply hadn’t see him.

Bob was angry when he came back to the newsroom. The driver had been defensive, asking why the child’s mother hadn’t kept a closer eye on him. I wondered whether the driver was trying to mask the shock of having just killed someone. Bob speculated that he was drunk (he wasn’t).

Bob dealt with it however he was able to. I had my own problems. I was covering a story about a man accused of child rape. I had already written the story detailing his initial court appearance and the charges against him.

He had taken a 7-year-old girl from her home. It’s hard to remember now, but I think he was somehow acquainted with the family. He took her to his house, where he assaulted her, then returned her home.

Normally I could get some psychological distance when writing this kind of story, but a child victim made it tough. Certain specifics of the case made it even harder. The assault consisted of more than one sex act, and I knew exactly what he was accused of.

You wouldn’t know it from my participation in the newsroom banter, but I was attending an evangelical Protestant church at that time. My journey through evangelical Protestantism started when I was 17. My brother had gone off to college and come home born-again. We’d been raised Catholic, and our parents were not pleased.

Undeterred, he witnessed to me and I asked Jesus into my heart. I soon was off to college as well, where I immediately began attending various Christian student groups. It seemed that these people offered meaning and identity, and I was willing to accept this neatly wrapped package from them.

Even so, I had doubts. I recognized immediately that I had entered a subculture, with its own jargon, music and celebrities. And I questioned some of the things I was hearing. Sometimes there was talk of establishing a theocratic government. I remember thinking, “But this is a pluralistic nation.” Then there was the woman who, when discussing a difficult situation in her life, blurted out, “Never ask God why!” I wondered, “Why not?” That was not the kind of relationship I was looking for with the creator.

Nevertheless, I maintained this form of faith until I arrived in that town, my second reporting job and last stint as a journalist.

I found a church to attend that was friendly enough, but they didn’t really know what to do with me, a single woman, no kids. As tough as it was, this was still a small town and I had come in from the outside. Many of the people at this church were related to each other, had grown up in the town and in that church.

But they seemed impressed that I was a reporter. So they asked me to put together a newsletter.

It was hard to get people to submit items, but I did occasionally get articles or poems from church members. In the submissions for the May newsletter that year was an essay by one of the women called, “My Kitty.”

A few weeks after the accused rapist was charged, the preliminary hearing was held. The child took the stand. She was a beautiful child, dark hair, so little. She did an excellent job giving her testimony. She told the police about the man’s house, that it had a fish tank, and a red and gold Chinese lantern—the kinds of things a kid would remember. The kinds of things the police observed when they entered the house.

There was someone else who testified—a teenager, either the defendant’s son or stepson, I can’t remember. He was developmentally disabled. He said he saw the man bring the girl into the home, then leave with her. He also said that he loved his dad very much.

Afterward, I went through the new paperwork in the file to get the complete statement the teen made to the police. There was one additional detail that stuck in my head—this kid had heard the girl screaming during the assault.

I filed the story and went home around 1 PM. I had a governmental meeting to attend that night, so I took the afternoon off. I decided to work on the church newsletter.

I started reading through the “My Kitty” essay. I still have a copy of it, and even now, it’s not quite clear what the writer is trying to say.

She talks about her cat sitting on her lap, purring, and tries to draw an analogy between her cat’s relationship with her, and her relationship with God. Her kitty is “almost totally dependent on me. If I didn’t feed her, she would starve, shut up in my house, not allowed out to hunt… She is in submission to my authority. She is at peace, never worried or anxious.”

The writer goes on to talk about how hard the cat’s life would be if it had to live on its own outside. She also chronicles giving the cat a flea bath, how even after that indignation, the cat returns to her lap, “grateful for the peace and freedom she has in our relationship.”

Now, there are many logical arguments that can be made here (God thinks of us as house pets?), but in that moment, that’s not how my mind was working.

Having just come from the courthouse, from the hearing, from trying to turn off the image of the girl’s rape in my head, made all the worse by her screaming (somehow I had assumed she would be silent, in shock), then reading this essay about the cat, thinking about how inane and absurd it was, it was just more than I could take.

It was the collision of two realities: the horror of sickening violence against a child, of sudden death, of driving through a parking lot and somehow killing a child, and a nearsighted, self-contained and self-satisfied religion that subverted all genuine human experience, good or bad, for its own purposes. It offered glib answers to the world’s problems—bad things happen because people choose to sin, or simply because “It’s a fallen world.” But if people pray a prayer and are born again, they will be changed. Jesus will judge the sinners who don’t repent.

But how did any of that help the little girl? Should someone have witnessed to her assailant sometime before the rape? What if someone had, but he just chose not to repent? Why should she have to be the victim of his free will?

No, the explanations it offered were futile. And then I realized that, despite my very best efforts to practice the faith, I had not been helped either.

The church woman’s kitty is “content that I will meet her needs and does not worry about tomorrow,” being stroked as her owner “read my Bible and enjoyed my devotions.”

I broke down and sobbed.

I realize now that the girl found help from the best possible source—herself. Her testimony eventually led to a conviction of the man, who avoided a trial by entering a plea. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison. She did what a lot of adults couldn’t have done, or couldn’t have done nearly as well.

I prayed for her for a long time after that day. As for me, less than a year later, I stopped attending that church. I got one call from the choir director about a month later, wondering where I was. I told him I’d been traveling on the weekends. That was the last call.

And that was the end of my time as an evangelical. For many years I felt as if God had abandoned me, that I was on my own. Now I realize that to reject a form of faith that was not serving me did not mean that God had left me alone.

I still sometimes wish it had worked, that kind of faith where God scratches us behind the ears and we purr, “symbolic of … trusting peace,” the essayist wrote. But my pain failed to respond and I was driven away, seeking refuge in the wild woods, the realm of uncertainty. It’s where I still am. It is not warm and cozy here, and there are moments of profound fear. But it’s also the only place I’ve been able to find hope and some small understanding of how a person might be healed.

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