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 Gita, 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 Gita,” 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 Gita, ’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.
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
I love this bit
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.
I felt like I was there too.
Funny isn’t it, how not being pushy is so much more effective?
My parents are both atheist, and while they always encouraged me and my sister to learn about different religions and ensured us that it’s perfectly ok to be religious (just don’t use it as an excuse to do despicable things), I grew up into this mindset that religion was for other people, who didn’t understand the perfect beauty and sufficiency of literature and science.
And then… the super über mega geek had a major breakdown at uni, decided you can’t invest your identity and self-worth in always being best at stuff and took a year off to live in Italy. Mostly I just drank lots and lots of red wine and goofed around eating gelato and committing heinous crimes against Italian grammar and syntax (which is, incidentally, the best antidote to being stuck up and self-important and ever so slightly depressed).
But then one weekend I went to Assisi (As in St. Francis of Assisi), and the monastery there has this really neat exchange program of sorts for franciscan monks from all over the world. And the foreign monks give tours of the basilica in their native language, and there was one in English starting just minutes after we arrived. So I went. My friends didn’t want to go on the tour, so it was me, the monk (from upstate NY), an extremely judgmental, mildly racist, homophobic (it was revealed during the first five minutes of our tour) older couple from Alabama and a weirdly happy we’re about to break out into kum ba yah’ing type family from Wisconsin.
The tour was lovely, though the older couple was getting on my nerves (Lady, will you for the love of all that is holy just STFU?!); the monk had studied art history (and, after joining the monastery, religious art) and gave a spirited explanation of the different works, the architecture, the franciscan order and the garden outside the church. Then we got to the end of the tour and the older lady asked him for his thoughts on abortion (I know. But she really did). And the monk was so completely lovely and thoughtful and non judgmental. He said something like as a rule Franciscans are always for life, and then he explained that this had been one of the hardest things for him to accept when he became a monk, so the way he had reconciled that with his feelings was to say that sometimes the life that needed saving was the life the mother wants to live, and that children are a gift but the thing with a gift is it’s not very nice to force it upon someone. And then he went into explaining how saint Claire of Assisi is the patron saint for mental health, and that he figured both she and Francis understood it’s important to take care of yourself and your needs in order to be able to help others and be a good person. And that that doesn’t always mean having the baby.
I don’t think I’m doing a very good job of explaining what he said and the warmth and understanding with which he said it. But he certainly gained my respect.
And then the other people left and I was standing there waiting for my friends and before he left he kind of winked at me and said “You know, I think it’s a misunderstanding to think of God as something outside of you, that’s going to come punish you if you behave badly. Hell to me, is knowing I had the opportunity to be a good person today, I had the opportunity to help someone and make a difference to one person, and I chose not to do it”.
I figure if that’s a religious person, it can’t be so bad.
(Um, and sorry for length and amount of clichés)
I loved reading it!
:)
Dude, that’s a fantastic story! Thank you so much for sharing! I’m always amazed how how tolerant and sensitive most of the truly religious dudes I meet are — especially ones who belong to religions that, going by stereotype alone, aren’t especially aligned with my personal beliefs.
I think lots of people spend time shouting about their religions, and what they have to say isn’t very interesting, but when you actually talk to someone, you can learn an awful lot.
Fantastic story. Makes me want to get to a monastery right friggin’ now.
when i read that i teared up a bit. that is my dream, finding people who are devote not just religious by word. and handling a subject like abortion with such tact, amazing!
Dude. This is one of my favorites. As is the Assisi story.
As a somewhat religious person myself, I still find myself being judgey. We saw a guy standing on a corner outside a baseball game with a sign that said “repent or perish.” A little blonde girl in pigtails stood next to him, handing something out. My instinct is to think he’s a lunatic and feel sorry for the kid.
But maybe the point is, not everyone standing on the street corner is crazy.
Nice! So…what IS the Bhagavad Vita about? My only knowledge of it comes from John Lennon’s “God” and I figure if a Beatle doesn’t believe in it, why should I? I kid, I kid. Seriously, I’m curious now.
sounds awesome, like a great many of your mini-adventures :)
I moved from the Boston area to Arkansas for college and over the course of the 3 years I was there (I studied abroad one year in France), I met all kinds of “Christians.” I grew up in a religious household but a very liberal type of Congregationalism (a hippie dippy variety of Christian in comparison to the other churches around NE).
I find talking to people about their religious beliefs to be really interesting and usually stop to talk to people giving out flyers on the street. I’d never seen one until I moved South. My boyfriend thinks I’m insane for talking with them but even the crazy ones teach me something I didn’t know.
Thanks for your story.
It reminds of one rainy evening in Dublin (Ireland) when I answered the door to a damp bloke who, by the desperate look in his eyes, was obviously selling something.
I noticed the fish badge on his lapel, took him for a proselytising evangelical Christian, too pity and let him in.
I offered him a cup of tea. He asked if we had home insurance.
It turned out he was selling financial packages, not Jesus at all.
I wasn’t buying. Either option. Still – he left happy. It was apparently the first time he’d been asked in instead of turned away for being Christian.
i really liked this. great post.
So I’ve been meaning to get over my irrational fear of commenting by commenting more (my own personal NTKOG project, if you will) but then I was thrown into a frenzy of last-minute packing and cleaning. So. My back is in pain and my heels ache after a long day, but this? Makes the pain feel rather insignificant. This was beautiful.
When I read the first bits I totally thought this was going to be about the repent or perish guy who’s always hanging around Park Street and Copley. I’m pretty pleased that it was not. I wish I had a better word than nice, but this was a really, really nice story.
ahem. I don’t mean to be obnoxious, but it’s the Bhagavad Gita, which means “song of god.”
ZOICKS! This is what I get for: 1) writing before I actually started reading it; 2) being a total, complete, irrefutable oaf. I feel absolutely idiotic. I was just skipping along, thinking, “Yup, clearly the Latin root for life must be present in the name of any text.”
Correction most humbly accepted and appreciated.