When One Religion Isn't Enough by Duane R. Bidwell

Author:Duane R. Bidwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press

CHOSEN AND FORMED FOR MULTIPLICITY

As a Buddhist priest, the man who calls himself VG oversees a congregation, leads contemplative retreats, and teaches students how to comfort others with the dharma. Seeing him at Starbucks or on the city bus, you probably would not know he is a lama—or that he is a former Christian monastic and army therapist who worships weekly at a Jewish synagogue and keeps human skulls on a tantric altar in his home. He seldom talks about his multiplicity.

“My religious experience, I cannot, I don’t know, I cannot communicate that,” he says. “I would like a more simple life, a life like—you know—‘the herd.’ You know: what everyone does. . . . I cannot communicate to people fully my experience. . . . I try my very best to communicate. And no one gets me.”

VG didn’t choose spiritual fluidity. It chose him, generations ago, and his great-grandmother groomed him to preserve the family vocation.

“There were always spiritual practitioners in my mother’s family . . . for generations before . . .,” he says. “It was not chosen. But I do know it was manufactured. This I know: my childhood, my great-grandmother, planned it. . . . She chose even before I was born. She chose. I knew this only in my late thirties or forties. I knew. I suddenly realized, ‘Oh. She planned this all along.’ . . . It was not choice. I was beaten by life into cooperation with it.”

VG grew up in Singapore in the 1970s. When he was very young, his great-grandmother removed him from his parents’ home to live with her. He grew up in her village, where she raised him in isolation and took pains to introduce him to multiple religions: “She would take us to pray at the Muslim shrine on Thursday. On Friday, we go to some other shrine, and on Saturday, we go to a Hindu shrine. And on Sunday, my parents took me to church. . . . It goes like that every week. . . . So I grew up with this multiple tradition. I don’t participate as a guest. I participate as a full member.”

VG’s great-grandmother was a tantric Buddhist shaman and animist. She meditated on decaying corpses, used Arabic words from mystic Islam to explain Buddhist doctrine, and communicated with ancestors, gods, and spirits through complex daily rituals. Some villagers bowed to her out of respect; others, out of fear: the old woman could control the weather (useful for soccer games and harvests); watered plants with fish blood to control the (potentially harmful) spirits in her garden; and dried lizards, tree frogs, puffer fish, and other creepy-crawlies under her bed to make poison. She could cast a spell to shrink a man’s penis if he crossed her.

Neighbors made offerings to VG’s great-grandmother, seeking her advice and healing energies. She had the power to curse or bless, and she never seemed to take a break from hosting religious ceremonies and the ongoing preparation they required.

She constantly honed VG’s spiritual sensitivities.

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