I plan to think and write about my understanding of America, through my experiences here over the last three years. I hope to explore areas that are of the soul and also of the land. I hope to get a working essay by the end of 2003. So here is the tentative beginning.

The Irony of America (At the end of third year of my American sojourn)

Man always seeks to escape unbearable reality by seeking an alternative reality. However rarely is the whole scope of the alternative reality clearly glimpsed much less understood. In my case the reality was once India and the escape was an idea called America. The America of my imagination and the America of my daily reality are now two whole circles whose circumferences intersect in parts, in arcs and on occasions, which in reality are less than frequent. I wouldn’t term this a disappointment because my evaluation would be a function of my perception rather than what reality is. What then is America? This is a hard question with a multiplicity of answers.

However one fact, by virtue of its repeated experience surfaces; America for me is mute silence. Silence of much agony, silence of displacement, silence that comes after one has had a hearty cry, silence that one constantly wears like tie if not like a coat. And what I have come to see is that this affliction is not mine alone, because if it was mine, I could have faulted it as something personal, some fatal flaw in my character. It then must also be shared by this place that I live my days in. I have come to that conclusion by not so much as logic as much as by feeling and direct experience. Someone might here say, “Why silence is good isn’t it?”

To that I would answer, what one is referring to is not silence but solitude. Solitude is of the deep woods, the sea, the breath of a lover passing over our face, of dark night and multiplicity of universes. Silence however is different. Silence is the recoil of a gun, the devastation after a bombing, the groping of sweaty bodies in dark rooms and the anti depressant induced daze. How to tell the difference? Easy answer for that, plumb the unrest of the heart.

On this cloudy Saturday morning, I was doing a speed reading of a book I had picked up earlier to give as a gift. It’s called “A Spiritual Life – Selected Writings of Albert Schweitzer”. The section which set me off musing was titled, the search for beauty. I have been on that in various ways for a while I guess. The medium for me has been the written word. And at the same time as Schweitzer says every composer is also a poet as is a poet a composer, so has been music a critical input to this process of exploration.

People whom I describe as personal heroes have often been many things at the same time, driven relentless by a curiosity for life. I remember the sign painted by someone who has passed that way before me, on a dorm room wall which said “Life is wasted on the living”. And I think these heroes have avoided that by falling into a regiment, a specialist frame of mind. Actually I think that most specialists couldn’t have reached the acme of their field without having a rich life which is again propelled by this curiosity to deeply taste the marrow of life.

Richard Feynman comes to my mind right away, especially because I was talking about him last night. While he was a great physicist, he got a Nobel for that, he was first a fanatic about living. This is evidenced by his bongo playing at the Brazilian carnivals, his quite sketches and paintings, his wacky quest to go to Tuva in the middle of Central Asia etc. While his physics may not have required him to do all this, my thinking is that his physics is the best manifestation of this life force (sounding a little like Yoda) within him, while these other quests were the interesting side shows of the carnival. So is the case with say Einstein or other polymaths like Octavio Paz or Tagore.

While I don’t think I have joined/belong this pantheon yet, I have consciously resisted efforts to be limited to just one kind of a groove. So as much as I enjoy Bach this morning, whose fugues Glenn Gould is pounding on the piano, I have enjoyed, yesterday, the poly rhythmic jazz of McLaughlin’s electric guitar jamming with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, in that excellent album, “The Inner Mounting Flame”. The key I think is to soar or fall into that level/state of transcendence where things become luminous. And perhaps then, living with all its attendant suffering and despair, becomes a festival.

…

What often bothers me is how opaquely most of us live from the natural world. In his book “A Walk in the Woods”, ------, writes that an average American walks less than 200 yards everyday. I think most of this would be around one’s place of work, usually hermitically sealed buildings, or in and around the local commercial shopping belts. And then the health (or should it be weight?) conscious members of the society attend to their bodies by going to the gym or similar activity. However the soul is rarely attended to, resulting in strong bodies, stronger specialist intellect but a soul of questionable thickness. In my own experience, one big fuel pump for the soul is the natural world, because it’s an open invitation to learn how to closely observe. And it’s in this learning to see that is one useful way to temper the soul. How often do we screw up just because we weren’t observant of ourselves and for others! Consequently, this still to me is a one such easily accessible idea to turn this “Prozac Nation” into a place of saner and less howling souls.

…

Yesterday I was very restless and perhaps a little weary with myself. I don’t like myself in that situation and the problem is instead of mitigating the situation I usually tend to worsen it for myself. One of the reasons behind such restlessness is this yearning for a human contact (feeling almost ETish “I want to go home”) at a level that is still not very clear to me. My best guess is that what I yearn to do is to reconcile myself with me. To use that old line, “you are sitting in your driveway and hoping to get to a home”. Anyways writing and having an interesting conversation helped.

A church or for that matter any place of worship is supposed to engender a sense of sacredness and silence. But my observation (and very subjective one at that) of the church I have been frequenting is that it brings to me that sense of communion very infrequently. This usually falls in the periods of music and then sometimes in periods of group prayer. The rest of the time it is characterized by a busyness that I find to be antithetical to any kind of contemplative journey much less one towards the sacred.

As I have said these are very subjective personal experiences, colored by my personal beliefs and views. Perhaps the others who attend various services feel differently about them. I suspect this kind of disconnect I observe internally, perhaps has to do with the different aims with which I approach worship and how others approach worship especially in large group settings. I believe in the value of prayer in a group, in Sanskrit “Satsang”; association with the Divine that pervades all life, with and through one another. There is majesty in many voices joining together in prayer and since I believe in the value of prayer, which also has been found to be psychologically and physically effective, I would and have gladly joined in prayer in various settings. But then by natural association, for some reason only rarely is this sense of sacredness carried over in the aftermath.

What I have observed is that it’s very hard, if not impossible to extend and carry on this prayerful attitude into what devolves into a club with aims that in many cases are not congruent with the core purpose of being in a place of worship. While I don’t mean to devalue the value of any institution and community, because without those have their own key place in our lives, I do question the necessity of mixing both.

Usually the period aftermath the service is called fellowship. I perhaps understand and view fellowship very differently. So the questions I pose are what is fellowship, what is the aim of fellowship and what should be the subject of it? My observation of fellowship as I have seen it, it is largely social association and social talk. While sometime this talk does veer towards the issues of the religious institution i.e. church, most of it is outside that ken. Again while emphasizing the necessity of community or societies and the conversation that happens between people, I find this to be in opposition to my idea of sharing time together in a sacred way i.e. fellowship.

Perhaps it is this disconnectivity is what Reynolds Price experienced as well when he in his book, “Feasting the Heart” writes “my religious emotions have been seldom been fed by the churches or temples, the places where I’ve encountered a sense of power in the ground have mostly been secluded spots in fields or woods or secular rooms”. And personally my experience doesn’t differ very widely from Price’s observation. I have experienced more closely this power yesterday sitting next to a brook in a shady glade than today in a church. Wendell Berry similarly has said that to be in the greatest cathedral is to stand under a tall oak. And the best place to read the Bible is outside, because it’s a book of narrative centered about the outdoors.

If religious experience is meant to be an expansion of the self, I believe that kind of expansion can happen only in silence and solitude. How can an attitude of prayer be sustained when the talk turns to the latest vacation in some resort or that of some business matter? And can both of these be dual and complementary aims, if they are in such obvious opposition?

Then it means that I must withdraw from this “Church as the Sunday City Club” phenomenon and devise mechanisms, both ritual and place, for having a quite and sustained engagement with the driving and singular mystery of all life and all religion. Perhaps that overgrown grove of woods with the singing brook up the street and a book of contemplative poems every Sunday morning would do as I continue the search for a place where communal worship without the socializing is possible.