Spirituality in America

Newsweek has what looks to be a very interesting issue out this week, featuring a series of articles on "Spirituality in America," a topic that has been of increasing interest to me in recent months. It seems almost serendipitous to see these articles in the same week that I've been adding Merton and Aquinas to my book project.

Though raised in a secular Jewish household, I did not have much interest in the Jewish faith until my teen years. What interest I did have was essentially crushed when I arrived at Harvard and found Hillel to be a singularly unwelcoming place for a curious novice who was raised in Utah instead of Long Island.

It was not until I finally took a look at Buddhism, after years of avoiding Eastern religions as the stomping ground of drug-addled hippies and angst-ridden teenagers, that I started to connect with a spiritual practice. And in the last months of law school, I connected with a classmate who had come to Christianity around the same age I came to Buddhism, and he helped me begin understanding that faith. Though my practice (or what is left of it after years of neglect in law school) still centers on Buddhism, it is wonderful to be exploring so many influences.

One of the Newsweek articles in particular caught my eye because the subject took such an unusual route to Buddhism, which I think goes to show the versatility and diversity of faith in this country:

Willis had always cherished the ideal of peace and in 1963 marched in Birmingham with Martin Luther King Jr. In college, inspired by the images of monks in Vietnam setting themselves on fire to protest the war, she became interested in Buddhism. But by the time she graduated from Cornell in 1969, Willis was faced with a stark postcollege choice: go to Nepal and study Buddhism or join the Black Panthers and fight for black rights-"peace or a piece," as she puts it. She opted for peace. And everything in her life changed. Buddhism taught her compassion and self-acceptance. It led her to her current job, teaching Buddhism at Wesleyan University. And it even taught her how to make peace with the Baptist church.

Her journey wasn't easy. Arriving at a monastery outside Katmandu in 1969, she was the lone woman among 60 monks; everything around her was strange. She learned to adjust to the sounds of gongs and conch shells, of chanted prayers. She hiked miles up a mountainside to study with Lama Thubten Yeshe, who taught her that she already had the nature of the Buddha within, if only she could be still enough to find it. It was a powerful message. The bias she faced in childhood "had convinced me that I was unworthy," she says. "I felt humiliated and undeserving." But through Buddhism, she learned to empty her mind of negative thoughts and self-doubt. Whites in Alabama might reject her, but Lama Yeshe came to call her "daughter."

Talking about spirituality is almost by definition an intensely personal thing, and it is made more difficult by the hesitation to appear as if one is claiming to speak on behalf of one's religion, rather than about it. I think this is especially troublesome for those who explore less understood faiths. Numerous friends, with the best of intentions, have asked me "What do Buddhists think about this?" as if that were a question that I (or anyone!) was qualified to answer.

Nonetheless, as I seek to further explore the spiritual side of myself and of humanity, it seems fitting that some of that exploration take place in this space.