NTKOG #230: The kind of dewy-eyed monk wannabe who takes a moment to celebrate religious zealotry in all of its occasionally annoying streetside guises.
I am: basically a heathen. Sorry, twelve-years-ago Sunday School teacher!
I am not: at all an enemy of religious dudes. I just have a hard time relating to anyone with unshakable convictions that don’t involve literature or pizza toppings.
The Scene: Across the street from the Boston Public Library, heading home after an evening of writing. On the corner, a man swaddled in a dusty orange robe stood, grinning calmly at pedestrians, holding out a thick book.
When I was eight years old, I mistook my first Hare Krishna for a man dressed as the Little Caesar Pizza mascot. In the intervening years, our relations haven’t much improved.
The pedestrians passing the man stepped around him with that practiced urban disinterest. Yet in the four or five minutes I watched him, his smile only grew warmer with each snub. He was late thirties, perhaps, but younger in face and older in body.
As he gently pushed the book toward each cluster of pedestrians, the skin of his back rippled slightly through the backless robe. From the way the skin hung, you could see his body was once significantly fuller, but now it lay barely stitched onto the bone.
Finally, I walked up to him and caught his eye, smiling hard. If I were him, I’d have been surprised to be approached after all that rejection, but he nodded calmly back like it was inevitable.
“What book are you giving out?” I asked, and he lit up, flipping through a vanity-printed copy of the Bhagavad Vita, peppered with full-gloss illustrations.
He told me about the book, growing more excited with every sentence, clauses getting tangled with one another. Again and again, he flipped back to the pages of full-color illustration, proud like a little boy, as though he’d etched each color plate himself.
“I’ve been meaning to get a copy of the Bhagavad Vida,” I told him, “but I don’t have any cash on me. Let me go get some and I’ll come back.” I headed to the nearby 7-eleven and withdrew some money, getting a twenty broken into fives to cover the ten-dollar book fee.
When I walked back to the man, cash in hand, he actually did look surprised. He handed me the book and I handed him $15 — a little extra, to cover someone who maybe wanted one but couldn’t afford the whole price, I’d like to hope.
As I descended into the subway, I looked back at him in the almost fully faded light. And there he stood as before, getting ignored by the general public but still trying, trying, trying.
The Verdict: So, street-corner religious dudes: not all crazy? Maybe just devoted and trying to reach out to people who want to be reached? This much I can definitely say for the man: he in no way tried to convert me. A fact which — as is so often the case — did more to support his cause in my mind than anything he could have said.
Anyway, I was being honest with the man: I really have been meaning to buy a copy of the Bhagavad Vida, ’cause I figure any book recommended by both Thoreau and the Dalai Lama is good enough for me. I like that now I have a copy with a little memory to it, and with a reminder not to judge people even when they’re putting themselves out there to be judged.
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