The Passion

The two and a half mile-long road down to the only paved road in Bhutan is little more than a muddy trail, so pocked and rutted over the past two years by large construction vehicles that I am forced to watch nearly every step in order not to trip and fall. In the moments when I stop and allow my gaze to travel up the steep mountain slopes surrounding me on all sides, I am amazed by the beauty of this continuously changing landscape. Depending on the time of day, clouds, or angle of the light, different facets of these plunging ridges come into view. The silence is broken only by the distant sound of a falling waterfall across the valley, the rush of the water audible even over a distance that would likely take more than three hours to travel by car. Huge rhododendron bushes toss their branches in the cool gusts of wind that punctuate the intense heat of the late summer sun. A buzzing insect with wings of deep black and vibrant red dives by my ear, its body as big as the palm of my hand. It is beautiful and terrifying at the same time. “That’s a bug?!” I wonder incredulously, “it is as large as a small bird.”

Every day I try to take this walk out of the active areas of construction into the silence of these magnificent mountains in an attempt to remind myself that the mud, noise, fluctuating availability of water and electricity, hammering and sawing are only part of my ongoing experience of being in Bhutan. Happily, I am now able to extend my morning work hours. Construction on our unit of buildings is nearing some form of completion—or at the very least, there is no longer endless pounding on the walls all around me and I am getting better at ignoring the noise from outside. As a result, I am reading and translating large sections of the biography of Drukpa Kunley, the fifteenth-century Buddhist saint whose life-story is the subject of my dissertation.

Today, while on my walk, I found myself thinking back to a book of stories I read as a child. Anyone who knows my family will know that we are not particularly “religious” in the Christian sense. I did not grow up Catholic, although the few times I went to Catholic mass with friends who were, I loved the elaborate ritual, so different from the white walls and simple sermons at the Congregational Church we attended semi-regularly. I barely remember Sunday school, though I think my sister and I did go for a while. I do remember sitting in the main hall of the church and listening as Reverend Johnson (who was the nicest man) read sections of the Bible and talked about them to the congregation. But mostly I remember feeling that I should try to recall all of the “bad” things I had done during the week in order to ask forgiveness for them. Understandably, expending effort in that direction never lasted very long and I’d find myself staring out the tall windows along the side of the church at the huge old maple trees that stood there shimmering in the wind.

But one thing I remember well—an illustrated book of stories from the Old Testament kept in the thick wood cabinets in our family room. Some part of me always felt that this book was somehow secret or special and I never did with it what I did with all my other books—store it away my room for long private reading sessions. Instead, I’d find myself waiting until no one was around and then sitting on the floor, on the orange and black wool carpet in front of the cabinet, crouched over the pages of this large book, reading through the stories and especially, looking at the pictures.

I still remember Moses parting the Red Sea, the waves surging around him as his long hair flew up tangled in his billowing cloak; the gloating look on Delilah’s face as she held up the long dark tail of Samson’s sheared hair; the terror on the face of Isaac as his father stooped over him with the knife, ready to sacrifice him at God’s command. But in particular, I remember the story of Christ’s passion, the look on his face as he carried the instrument of his own death on his back up the hill, the tilt of his head as he cried out to God, wondering how he could have been forsaken, the trickle of blood across his chest and the palms of his hands, the bent forms of the grieving women who washed his body after his spirit had fled.

More recently, I recall sobbing in a dark movie theatre in Madison, Wisconsin, next to the man I would marry, as the film, The Passion, came to an end. Although many decried the extreme violence Mel Gibson elected to depict in that film, calling it gratuitous, I disagreed with their censors. The world that chose to crucify Jesus Christ was a world in which fear of what was not understood could easily lead to torture and violence—this was nothing new in the history of human beings, nor is it something we are strangers to today—but in choosing to highlight the suffering Jesus experienced at the hands of his torturers and in showing how, in the face of such humiliation, ignorance, fear, violence and pain, he continued to express only kindness and understanding, I felt Gibson captured the essence of what we all struggle with (in much less extreme ways) in trying to be good, kind human beings. What made Jesus a hero in that film was not his sacrifice on the cross, but his willingness to face the pain and suffering of his existence without losing his ability to forgive, to be kind, to have genuine compassion for those who caused him the most pain even when it was abundantly clear that those others cared nothing for that kindness, that compassion. This is what completely broke my heart--first in a way I could not make sense of as a child looking at the dark paintings depicting Jesus’ death, and later while watching The Passion.

Why do I mention this? Because in reflecting on the kind of person I am beginning to come to know through reading Drukpa Kunley’s autobiography (or as the term is know in Tibetan, his rang rnam thar—self-story of complete liberation), I try to make sense of how such stories work to collapse the very ancient past into the present; how they reach across time, space, culture, and ideologies to touch something present in the very fact of being human. Only if I can identify some of these elements can I begin to explore how Drukpa Kunley’s tales have something to say to me, to you, and to the world that cannot be said in any other way, and without which, we are lesser, poorer in our understanding of what it means to be human. Remembering my response to Christ’s passion, acknowledging fully that my knowledge and understanding of Christian faith and practice is very limited (in spite of being a scholar of religion), I can still say that something speaks powerfully to me in ways that extend far beyond my intellect when I allow myself to be addressed—and not only addressed, but transformed--by Jesus’ story. This, I feel, is important. If I am open to the possibility that such stories have something to show me about myself, that they hold up multi-colored mirrors in which my own reflection seems strange and unknown, in which someone or something else may know me better than I know myself, then this world will never be dull, never be old, never be bereft of the magic that gives us hope. Stories, in many ways, are the most tangible elements of what we have, of who we are. Even writing this blog is like telling a story. We are all telling stories—not only to others, but every day, every moment—stories to ourselves about who we are.

Perhaps Drukpa Kunley, revered as one of the greatest Buddhist saints of the fifteenth-century in the Himalayan Buddhist world, never imagined someone like me reading his stories. But in writing them the way he did, I feel certain that he envisioned there would be a need for straightforward expressions of what it meant to be “enlightened.” The more I read him, the more I see his humor and irreverence, his direct communication, and his continual willingness to step beyond “doctrinal” representations of his faith, the more I can’t help but wonder how much difference there is between the “enlightened” state and the condition of being at peace with exactly what it means to be a complete human being. How this state of being fully human is explored, expressed, and crafted in Drukpa Kunley’s narrative, and how my own condition, both the internal ups and downs, and the external environment, where currently there is no electricity and clouds stack themselves over the mountains into towers of shifting gray light, are all connected is what intrigues me most.