I didn’t much like any of the five, who seemed coarse and offensive to me. It was 1954 and I’d just been reassigned to an Army intelligence and reconnaissance platoon stationed in Friedberg, Germany. There were six of us from the platoon who occupied a small barracks room at the regimental headquarters of the Seventh Division – Benny, Sal, Mort, Henry, Gage, and me.  We were all draftees and Privates in an infantry company. The five others, the ones I didn’t like, were “good soldiers” I think you’d call them, but in the barracks or out on a weekend pass, they and I had nothing in common. On paydays, they would take their pittance of a Private’s pay and head up to Frankfurt to get drunk and laid. They knew all the bars where prostitutes hung out. Monday morning reveille invariably found them hung over and broke, with nothing left for the rest of the month but card games and the endless boastful chatter they kept up. I suppose I felt superior to my five barracks mates, but mostly I just didn’t know how to relate to them. Perhaps it was easier to dislike them than to admit to myself that I felt awkwardly disconnected and lonely in their presence. I tried to bullshit with them but the pretense failed to be even the least bit convincing, especially to me. To their credit, they tolerated me at least as well as I did them.

There was one unoccupied bunk in our room and Benny was using it to store his copies of Sports Illustrated that his parents had subscribed for him. But when George Gurney arrived and was assigned to our platoon, Benny had to give up the space. George Gurney was from the tiny town of Boswell in Choctaw County, Oklahoma. He told us this when he plunked his duffle bag down on the empty bunk and introduced himself by his full name: “I’m George Steven Gurney from Boswell, Choctaw County, Oklahoma,” he announced, and insisted on shaking everyone’s hand. When Benny’s turn came he pumped away on George’s hand and said, “Well I’m sure glad to meet someone from Choctaw County. I’m Benny Edwin Roberts from Brooklyn, New York” Everyone but George was grinning, and I knew the razzing had just begun. George, having exhausted his repertoire of prepared conversation, appeared suddenly shy and busied himself putting his things in his locker. With George’s arrival, there were now seven of us in the room, all draftees, George having been drafted right out of high school, though he’d rather have kept his part time job at the Boswell Garage.

From the start, the others were continually concocting ways of generating laughs at George’s expense, who either didn’t mind or didn’t notice he was being made fun of. Between themselves they dubbed him “Okie.” To his face, he remained “George Steven Gurney” until the humor in saying so wore out and George Steven Gurney was reduced to simply “Gurney.” But for all the rough teasing he underwent, George fit in with the others better than I had. For one thing he liked to play cards and wasn’t half bad at it, winning an occasional hand. But he wouldn’t gamble, saying it wasn’t right to waste good money, and noting rather wryly I thought that the others seldom had money to gamble with. “I don’t need any IOU’s,” was how he put it. Discovering he had some experience in auto mechanics, the Regimental commander put George to work at the motor pool. But you’d never know it to look at his hands. He’d scrub with a brush until his nails were clean and the tips of his fingers pink with abrasion. He kept his bunk neatly made and spent his first month of overseas pay to buy some fitted uniforms and a starched cap in replacement of the floppy nondescript Army issue. He was big and muscular with freckles and wavy red hair that he combed whenever he passed a mirror or window glass that reflected his image.

The guys liked to quiz George about girls. Was he getting laid (a term they had to explain to him) back at Boswell High? He always waved aside their inquiries by telling them that he didn’t like to talk about girls that way. I don’t know how they pried it out of him, but they discovered somehow that George was virgin and that he’d barely tasted beer if even that. And so the scheme was hatched between the five of them to get George drunk and laid, as if his not having been drunk and laid were some sort of violation of the natural order of things. I’d already observed this rather unimaginative manhood ritual in basic training at Fort Ord, California where guys who very likely rarely drank at home and perhaps had never had sex with a girl felt suddenly compelled to get drunk and laid now that they were in the Army. To hear them tell it, they’d all had regular sex back home and were horny from lack of accustomed action. George had apparently come through basic training in Oklahoma without ever acquiring his rightful manhood. It was something that simply had to be fixed.

At first, George refused to go to town with the guys, and spent his weekends at the base Service Club library where I thought he was a little sweet on a young German girl, Eada, who worked there. I was a reader myself and so I’d see George there and how he’d hunt out a book in the stacks somewhere, check it out, and then sit with it at one of the library tables with an open book that he never read a page of. What he did instead was watch Eada as she moved among the stacks re-shelving books. And then he’d check out another and yet another until he was peering out from behind a veritable stack of unread literature. In the meantime one of the guys, I think it was Gage, brought George a German pornography magazine he’d picked up in Frankfurt. George, though initially reluctant, couldn’t resist looking at it. After that first look, he looked a lot, and the guys started razzing him about spending so much time in the restroom.

When the second payday after George’s arrival came round, George left for Frankfurt with the other five on a one-day pass. I was asleep when the guys got back from Frankfurt and so the first I knew of their return was about 6 a.m. when George woke me with an agonized cry of “Oh God! What have I done?” What he’d done was awful. He was smeared with his own feces from his neck to his knees. How he’d managed in his sleep to distribute the mess over so much of his own flesh still puzzles me. The others were hung over, but when they heard George’s call, they staggered out of their bunks to see what was wrong. Benny was the first to see what had happened. George was trying to get up but Benny said, “Just stay put, Gurney. Don’t get up. We got to figure this out. Quit crying. We’ll fix it.” And George, with his knees drawn up in the bed, was rocking back and forth in his own mess, saying, “But what have I done, Benny.” “What you’ve done is shit on yourself,” Benny said.

They did fix it as Benny promised they would. They recruited me to make sure the hall to the shower room was unoccupied. There was no one in sight and so when I’d turned on the shower and got the water to the right temperature, I gave them the all clear whistle. Benny and Hank in their underpants and bare feet came down the hall with George all smeared with shit and mumbling “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!” It was as sorry a sight as I ever expect to see in this life. But stay with me on this when I say it was a touching sight as well, especially when Benny and Hank got right into the shower with George, scrubbing him down and standing barefoot in the brown drizzle that washed off him. When they had George clean and toweled dry, they scrubbed the shower floor with disinfectant. In the meantime Mort, who was assigned to the post laundry facility, had stripped George’s bedding and hauled it over to the laundry to wash it. Sal and Phil hauled George’s smeared mattress over to an empty barracks and exchanged it for one of the mattresses there. The five of them, well six including me included, managed all this without outside detection.

It was almost a week later when I overheard George ask Benny if he got laid. “Yeh man. Don’t you remember? She said you were the best ever.” George looked pleased with the news. I knew better. Benny had already told me in confidence that once he got started George drank two German beers, which are about the same proof as red wine. After that he was pretty much out of it. But they’d still gone ahead with the plan to get George laid. But by the time the woman got George into one of the upstairs rooms, he more or less passed out on the bed before she could get his pants down. George simply wasn’t in shape for any sort of manhood ceremony. She told the others to come and get him that she’d need the room later on.

How am I to regard this whole episode? It was five against one with five of my barrack’s mates out to get a few laughs out of George. And I suppose they did get some laughs. But at what cost to George? Of course they didn’t expect it to end the way it did. They didn’t plan as Benny put it for George to “shit all over himself.” And when things went bad, they went all out to set them right again. Apparently, George was their buddy after all.  Even the sourest circumstance is often tinged with an unsuspected sweetness. I’ve had to learn over the years that most things come in pairs – a twin birth. What I witnessed at 6 a.m. on a hung-over morning at Friedberg Kaserne was one life’s more unlikely occurrence of these matched siblings.

After Benny’s doctored report about George getting laid, George had an unmistakable swagger about him; he seemed happy with his newfound manhood. But he was so chastened by the aftermath of his night of conquest that he didn’t try a repeat and went back to evenings in the library where he actually began to talk to Eada.

(Writer’s note: If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Zen and from life itself, it’s the value of doubt. Doubt has the capacity to question certainties that need to be doubted -particularly certainties of religious belief. The following essay explains in detail one of my grave doubts regarding Buddhist teaching. It’s a doubt that survives my years as a Zen teacher and author. No book publisher or Buddhist magazine has been willing to publish so controversial a dissent. So I’ve published it here for anyone whose interests might bear upon questions of philosophical or religious belief. Lin Jensen)

One of life’s more profound journeys is the travel taken between the two covers of a great book. When I first enrolled as an English major under the GI Bill at California’s San Jose State University, Professor Harold Miller, chairperson of the College of English Studies, gathered the incoming English majors for an orientation. He told us that we had opted for one of the most challenging of all possible fields of study. I thought he was referring to the hard work and academic discipline required of an English major, but instead he was talking about a much more far-reaching, even dangerous aspect of literary studies. Let me recreate as best I can Professor Miller’s words that day:

“In these next four years, you will each of you read books that by the time you’ve read the closing sentence will have revealed truths to you that leave you a far different person than when you first opened the book’s cover. At times you’ll regret what you have learned and want to turn back the clock. But a truth once seen, can’t be unseen. There will be no going back, no way to recoup the innocence with which you began. This is the power of great literature to transform; it can be a wrenching and exhilarating journey, one that can reroute your entire direction in life once you have taken that first step.”

It turned out that Dr Miller was right: a book can alter your very person in ways that leave you doubtful as to whom you really are. But what he didn’t tell us in that initial orientation is that a book can effect its life altering force upon you without you being aware of it – at least not until sometime later and maybe not even then. In books as in life, time and circumstance reshape us in ways we may never consciously recognize. These unseen changes may very well be the most transforming of all, more so than those changes we are cognizant of, the latter merely changing our idea of ourselves, the former actually changing who we are.  A great book can distill into the space of a few sentences a potent amalgam of sudden insight. Such literature poses a hazard to anyone who wants to control personal outcomes. I could list hundreds of books that you shouldn’t read if you want to remain comfortable in anticipating your life’s directions.

Since the day Professor Esther Shepherd recited the opening lines of Homer’s Odyssey to a group of us in her freshman class on World Masterpieces, I’ve been a student of  classic literature. Story has always been a source of insight and redirection for me. Among the stories we were assigned that first semester was the Purgatorio from Dante’s Divine Comedy. In the Purgatorio, Dante is led by the Roman poet Virgil down through the nine circles of hell where he witnesses the suffering of those who’ve sinned. He first descends into the circle of limbo where the relatively innocent are being held, and from there down through circles of lust, gluttony, greed, anger, heresy, violence, fraud, and treachery where each pitiful inhabitant suffers the consequences of his own wrongdoing.

Of all the suffering inhabitants of Dante’s hell, the ones I most identify with are those in the circle of heresy. It is there that the non-believers, such as the Epicureans who held that the soul dies with the body, are trapped in flaming tombs. Like the Epicureans, I’m not good at believing things myself, especially a belief in some sort of life after death. Had I lived in Dante’s time, I’m certain to have been thrown into the flames along with all the other dissenters. Those such as the Epicureans punished for their dissent from the institutionalized authority of the church had only to renounce their heretical viewpoints in order to be released from their suffering. But they would not, and the courage of their resolve entered into me by stealth like that of an exchange between two adjacent cells in the body of truth. Today, fifty six years after that first reading of Dante’s Purgatorio, I, like the Epicureans, hold views heretical to virtually all religious orthodoxy, a dissent purchased at a cost of some degree of social and personal alienation.

My own first hand religious experience has been limited but deep – first in my youth as a Christian and afterwards as a Buddhist. I can no longer claim to be either a traditional Christian or Buddhist. The irony in this is that Jesus himself was a heretical Jew as was the heretical Brahmin, Siddartha Gotama, who had the courage to say “No” to much of the long held religious orthodoxy of his time.  We live today in an expanding circle of heresy wherein religious orthodoxy is rightfully held to account by an exercise of reasonable doubt.

We in the West are sons and daughters of the Age of Enlightenment with its insistence on subjecting beliefs to the test of reason. Among the beliefs that reason compels me to say “No” to is the widely held Buddhist belief in rebirth, an element of orthodoxy for which there exists no objective verification. The only evidence offered for rebirth are the tales people sometimes recite of their past lives. Aside from the difficulty of ruling out the element of persuasive suggestion, there’s simply no means -even if it’s my past life that I’m entertaining- of distinguishing between historical fact and an inventive imagination.

If you conduct a weekend retreat designed to put people in touch with their past lives –and such retreats are in fact held- of the fifteen or thirty who attend, the same number will identify a past life. Most of the participants “discover” that they were nobles or great artists, martyrs or leaders of some sort. In the animal realm, leopards and eagles are particularly popular. Very few recall being truck drivers or warthogs. No one with the least experience of the persuasive power of imagination can possibly accept such subjective accounts as proof of past lives. And without real verification, rebirth is a merely fanciful proposition.

When a religious teacher’s word is held sacrosanct and a student feels dependent upon those words, then such dubious notions as that of rebirth may go unchallenged. And this is particularly true when the words are those attributed to the Buddha in the Mahasaccaka Sutta:

“When the mind was thus concentrated, purified, bright, unblemished, rid of defilement, pliant, malleable, steady, & attained to imperturbability, I directed it to the knowledge of recollecting my past lives. I recollected my manifold past lives, i.e., one birth, two…five, ten…fifty, a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand, many eons of cosmic contraction, many eons of cosmic expansion, many eons of cosmic contraction & expansion: ‘There I had such a name, belonged to such a clan, had such an appearance. Such was my food, such my experience of pleasure & pain, such the end of my life. Passing away from that state, I re-arose there. There too I had such a name, belonged to such a clan, had such an appearance. Such was my food, such my experience of pleasure & pain, such the end of my life. Passing away from that state, I re-arose here.’ Thus I remembered my manifold past lives in their modes & details.”

If you can imagine a human mind capable of recalling “many eons of cosmic contraction & expansion” comprised of a hundred thousand past lives “in their modes and details,” and to do so in a single sitting, then you may regard the words of this sutta attributed to the Buddha as conclusive evidence of at least one man’s multiple rebirths. But if you can’t imagine a human mind capable of such a feat, then you’ve already questioned either the accuracy of the Mahasaccaka Sutta’s attribution to be the words of the Buddha or, having accepted the attribution, you’ve questioned the words of Buddhism’s foremost teacher. Either way, doubt makes good sense here.

Much of Buddhist literature is of questionable attribution, and much of Buddhist teaching is questionable. The Buddha was a human being, not a god, and the generations of Buddhist ancestors who have annotated the Buddha’s teachings in accord with their own understanding and cultural biases were human as well. We do well to judge the content of these teachings for ourselves. That’s what Siddartha Gotama did with the Brahmin teachings he encountered, and why, by virtue of his own native skepticism, he came up with a core of original and practical insights constituting a new religion that came in time to be called Buddhism. We can take the Buddha’s own example as an assurance that we needn’t forfeit our minds to the authority of any teacher, principle, or practice regardless of longevity or stature. We can all benefit from a reliable teacher’s guidance, but we need to be an active participant in the exchange, allowing ourselves to question what’s being taught. Every tradition originates in fresh invention and its survival as a living practice and philosophy requires more of the same as it reinvents itself in accord with changing circumstance. If we exempt religion from criticism and doubt, we effectively forfeit its participation in our everyday lives. Heresy is the flame that burns away superstition.

For me, the most unfortunate aspect of the widely accepted belief in rebirth is its impact on the way karma is viewed. Karma is a core concept of traditional Buddhist practice and one of great value that deserves better than to be linked to notions of rebirth. According to traditional Karmic teachings, a child born with a cleft palate is suffering the consequences of actions taken in a past life. Again, it’s a teaching drawn from the Mahasaccaka Sutta:

“With the divine eye, which is purified and surpasses the human, I saw beings passing away and being reborn, inferior and superior, beautiful and ugly, fortunate and unfortunate, and I understood how beings fare according to their actions thus: those beings who behaved wrongly by body, speech, and mind, who reviled the noble ones, held wrong view, and undertook actions based on wrong view, with the breakup of the body, after death, have been reborn in a state of misery, in a bad destination, in the lower world, in hell; but those beings who behaved well by body, speech, and mind, who did not revile the noble ones, who held right view, and undertook actions based on right view, with the breakup of the body, after death, have been reborn in a good destination, in a heavenly world.”

So there you have it in words once again attributed to the Buddha that we’re destined for heaven or hell dependent on something we did in a past life. It’s screwy reasoning that makes a suffering child the perpetrator of his own victimization, thereby promoting the heartless view that he’s getting what he deserves. The truth is that practically no one wants to believe this to be the case, but fearing that it might be so, Buddhists often pursue a path of self-interest wherein they work toward an accumulation of merit to insure their own favorable rebirth. They are encouraged in this by such teachings as that of a Roshi who explained to the monks in her charge that unresolved negative karma was like a bag of rotting fish that one was doomed to carry about until the karma was resolved. In the complicated reasoning of rebirth everyone is born with a bag of rotting fish, since theoretically a person with fully resolved negative karma wouldn’t be reborn at all. The parallel in this conceptualization to that of “original sin” in the Christian tradition is troubling in that a Christian superstition makes us all heirs of Adam and Eve’s fall from Eden, fated to live out the consequences of something we’re not personally responsible for and can’t remember doing.

Is there no such thing in the world of rebirth as innocence, a fresh unencumbered start in life? How many parents could possibly look upon their newborn infant and believe that it has come to them as the roshi claims smelling of something rotten or that the infant bears the taint of original sin? And yet these very same parents may adopt a purely theoretical belief in this impossible conceptualization that’s much better suited to celibate monks and priests of whatever religious persuasion who’ve never been parents. Is this rebirth not among the most unnecessarily troublesome ways of accounting for personal wrongdoing and misfortune? Can no one claim to suffer simply because of present circumstance or admit responsibility for the consequences they’re suffering as a result of mistakes they’re making or have made in this present life?

Karma’s appeal to the believer lies partly in the rationale it offers for the troubling inequality that exists among humans. Karmic philosophy refuses to attribute the inequality of humankind to accidental circumstances, to matters of chance. Buddhist master, Mahasi Sayadaw, speaks from this viewpoint when he writes, “No sensible person would think of attributing this unevenness, this inequality, and this diversity to blind chance or pure accident.” Well, no sensible person would want to explain all inequalities as attributable to blind chance or pure accident: but the very ones -like deformity at birth- thought by believers to be attributable to past life transgressions ought to be among the first to qualify as accidental. Orthodox Karma provides a comforting rationalization of why one person is born to wealth and another to poverty, why one is of high intelligence and another retarded, why one is kind and considerate and another criminal and cruel, why one is born gifted with artistic athletic, literary, or musical talents and another born congenitally blind, deaf, or deformed. It’s a means of explaining away the disturbing fact that through no visible fault of one’s own some of us are cursed and some of us blessed from birth.

Admittedly, many misfortunes such as poor health due to cigarette smoking or over-eating, broken marriages due to infidelity or neglect, imprisonment due to embezzlement or murder are obviously not a consequence of pure chance but rather of bad decisions and behaviors of the sufferers themselves. For the most part, we are responsible for our own happiness and misery. We can all of us witness for ourselves that some consequences are by choice and some aren’t. The need to argue for something so self-evident would never occur hadn’t generations of Buddhists perpetuated a dated and improbable conceptualization of the Hindu religious belief in rebirth. Adherents to the philosophy of rebirth are acting on a belief that was prevalent in India long before the Buddha’s formulation of it in his own teaching.

To deny the validity of rebirth is not to deny that one generation influences the behavior of the next, and that we often behave the way we do because of foundations laid down in our various cultures centuries ago. But these are influences easily accounted for by ordinary means of cause and effect. And it is equally true that a child born into a particular culture is in a sense a victim of that culture’s attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs, but once again this is all the clearer when not muddied by notions of karmic retribution for wrongs committed in past lives.

Karmic rebirth among western spiritual aspirants enjoys considerable surface popularity. If you’ve hung out with Buddhists as much as I have, you’ll have heard how glibly references to karmic incarnations are insinuated into casual conversation. “The minute I saw you, I felt a karmic connection to you,” a woman at a Zen sesshin once told me. She felt certain we’d had some significant contact in a former life that deserved acknowledgement in this life. A married couple once confided to me that they’d been in love in some former life, but had passed each other by and were correcting the mistake now in their present life. A recovering alcoholic had no recollection of a particular sort but was of the opinion that his addiction was due to “something evil” he’d done in a past life. The problem with this is that the believer perceives present circumstance as necessity, a fate to which one was born. No one who thinks this way need take responsibility for the circumstance he finds himself in. The woman who felt a karmic connection with me doesn’t have to recognize the present sources of her attraction; the married couple who feel they were drawn together by the force of karmic necessity forfeit credit for their own good judgment in choosing a life’s partner; the alcoholic becomes a victim of something he can’t remember doing and forgets that no one forced him to drink in the first place.

The persistence in the West of a belief in rebirth among otherwise reasonable persons is partly explained by the fact that the whole convoluted notion is reinforced by the corroboration of contemporary western Buddhists teachers. The founder and abbess of one Zen monastery believed herself to have been a tiger in a past life, thereby putting pressure on the resident monks -most of whom had received virtually all their Buddhist training from her- a near necessity to concur with her claim. How do you go about doubting the words of someone in whose hands you’ve put years of trust?  Another Zen priest once described to me an ordination ceremony he conducted for a common Scrub Jay that he’d nursed back from a broken wing. He told me that when he asked the Scrub Jay, “Is it your wish to become a Buddhist?” the Jay inclined its head toward him in such a manner that the priest was convinced the Jay was responding affirmatively to the question.

I’m actually touched by the affection and concern the priest had for the bird, but I’m less touched by the fact that the basis of his concern was a belief in the transmigration of a human essence into the body of the bird. The whole point of conducting the ordination was to clear the way for the Jay’s more favorable rebirth as a human being. What’s wrong about being a Scrub Jay? And why is its value as a being supposedly enhanced by its being an incarnation of human life? What makes human life superior to other forms of life?

A friend of mine just returned from a week’s celebration of Jukai at a Soto monastery and she had this to say about the cross-species exchange of bodies: “An unanticipated event in our week was the death of Rev. Shiko’s kitty “Maisie,” who had been ailing for a long time.  A funeral service was held and all the Jukai retreat participants were there – word is that it was the best attended cat funeral they’d ever had. While I don’t know that I am quite as religious as the monks in terms of belief in offerings of merit and rebirth, I’d say that cat left this world with money in the bank – I just can’t imagine a cat wanting to return as anything other than a cat – they seem so satisfied with their catness.”

And so are most people and animals content with what they are in this life, desirous of no other speciation or identity in some other life, but still the notion of rebirth persists among Buddhists of all traditions. Take for example the belief in the reincarnate Dali Lama. Senior Lamas actually go out looking for a child that seems to have some recollection and attributes of his predecessor, stitching together the most coincidental behaviors as evidence that they’ve found the incarnate prior Lama. This tradition requires a fabulous exercise in the suspension of reasonable disbelief. The first recognized reincarnation of a Dalai Lama lived from 1391 to 1474 and the present Dalai Lama, recognized in 1937 still lives. How one might ask can a whole culture sustain belief in such an insupportable notion for over six hundred years?

It can do so for the same reasons that Christians are persuaded to believe in the resurrection and immortality of Jesus and hence in the immortality of the individual believer. However mythical a belief might be, if it offers a promise of some orderly, stable, predictable and lasting element in this world of impermanence and unpredictable change, it is a belief that will be adopted by many. In the face of verifiable evidence to the contrary, people clung for centuries to the belief that the earth was the center of the universe  for much the same sort of reasons. When Copernicus in the early 16^th century first introduced his evidence of a heliocentric solar system, his findings were adamantly rejected by the Catholic Church. As late as the 17^th century the majority of philosophers and clerics still subscribed to an earth centered universe, and when Galileo’s work brought further evidence of the accuracy of the heliocentric view, his findings were denounced as “false and contrary to Scripture” and he himself as “vehemently suspect of heresy.” In the end, he was forced to recant and was kept under house arrest for the rest of his life.

People cling to even the most improbable beliefs because they’ve invested so much of themselves into it: the belief itself forms an integral element of personal identity. I’ve done the same myself: I once was a Christian, once was a Buddhist, and the loss of these identities was painful to me. I’m not certain that I’d be true to my doubts had not those unfortunate Epicureans in Dante’s hell shown me the way. To doubt a long-held cherished belief is to doubt not only one’s judgment but one’s identity as well. So much is at stake that a person might feel as if he simply can’t afford to doubt, and when contrary views raise in him even the faintest doubt regarding his belief, he may react as if in defense of his life. A belief long indulged can be powerfully entrapping, and that’s why it’s good for us to doubt even those beliefs that are seemingly the most invincible to doubt. Doubt is the universal corrective of error, and every truth regardless of how self-evident it might appear ought to be subject to the best doubt that can be brought to bear.

Unquestioned beliefs -all the virgin births, the heavens and nirvanas, the resurrections and rebirths- ought to be subject to humor as well. We could laugh them away. A  friend of mine once caught the perfect silliness of rebirth when he said his worst nightmare was being reborn as himself. Perhaps a sense of humor can dissuade us from this nonsense after all.

In the past I can recall nothing beyond an almost studied indifference to anything other than the utility of what I wore.  My clothes had to be practical, durable, and cheap.  Once purchased, they had to be faithfully cared for and made to last as long as possible.  I would no more think of discarding a usable garment for its lack of current stylishness than I would think of throwing away a shovel or hammer that still had some work left in it, a virtue acquired from days of need.

As a child, I watched my father go off in the dark of the morning wearing the stiff gray work shirt and pants issued him by the gas company and carrying a lunch pail with his name scratched on it.  I watched his return in the evening, where he often worked until bedtime trying to make the farm pay off.

In those days, my father and mother and my brother and I, even my baby sister Evelyn seemed to live out our precarious lives in deadly earnest.  My father was proud and scorned those who had to settle for jobs with the National Public Works Project.  “Make-work,” he called it.  But when the gas company laid off his entire crew, my father too had to accept help from the project.  He no longer had work clothes issued to him and he sometimes had to go to work in old Sunday clothes that had become too frayed to wear for good.

I suspect my parents initially put my brother and me into jeans because jeans were durable and could be bought a size too large and still last long enough to be grown into before they wore out.  Along with a few simple shirts and a jacket, these jeans constituted our school clothes.  When they became too frayed for school we wore them for work.  Each of us, my parents included, had one outfit that we wore only for church or other dress-up occasions.  Otherwise, our good clothes hung in the closet safe from wear or harm.  The necessities that drove my family to these frugal measures ended long ago, but the habit persists.  I have seldom regarded my own clothing as a source of pleasure or beauty.  I have carried austerity into all my doings, a certain strain of renunciation that seemed to come quite naturally to me.

But recently, with practically every item of clothing I’d allowed myself pretty well worn out, I went out shopping.  The first thing I found was a pair of tightly woven sandwashed khaki cotton pants.  In the dressing room, I unbuttoned my jeans and slid them off and hung them aside on a peg.  I pulled on the new pants.  They felt and looked unfamiliar: the fabric lay smoother against my skin than the jeans, the cut was roomier so that the garment felt almost airy in its lightness. But they were comfortable, and in some indefinable way, the image reflecting from the dressing-room mirror pleased me.  There were cuffs, and there were pleats that spread when I pushed my hands into the pockets. I took the pants home, and that was the beginning.

Since then I have bought three more pairs of pants, some T-shirts in soft colors with a pocket on the front, a cotton seersucker shirt in a pattern of thin alternating stripes of green and bone, a short-sleeved cotton shirt of tan, and a dozen pairs of socks in tones of earthen green and light brown.  I like wearing these things, and I have recently found myself recalling with pleasure the remarkably beautiful robes the Buddhist monks wear for special ceremonial occasions.

Sometimes when I see my new clothes hanging in the bedroom closet, some unexplained tenderness, some melancholy, some softly rising joy comes to me.  This puzzled me until on one such occasion I recalled the time of my father’s new suits.

By 1945 the farm was finally paying enough that my father no longer had to work a second job.  In fact, earnings from the farm had reached a little beyond absolute need.  For the first time since immigrating in 1923, he had a small surplus at his discretion.  He spent some of the money to have two suits custom tailored for him.  The social circumstances of this tailoring was an issue of some delicacy to my father for reasons that I must explain.

My father had a deformity on his back in the form of a hump that bulged out on one side in the area of his shoulder blade.  This defect was not terribly severe but certainly noticeable enough to draw a child’s attention and elicit questions.  But my mother intercepted any such curiosities while I was still very young.  She expressly forbade us children to ever speak of it to my father.  She gave only vague intimations of early injury or sickness in explanation of the source of the deformity.  Then we were instructed to put it out of mind and out of speech.  Being thus enjoined to silence on the matter, this unspoken dialogue between my father and me became for a time our most persistent conversation, the language of an obvious and awkward avoidance audible in all we said.

I was always intensely aware of any circumstances pertaining to what I had come to designate as “Father’s back.”  If he took pain medication for his back, I knew of it.  If he undertook any physical therapy or received chiropractic intervention or took heat treatments, I knew of it.  In the same manner I somehow learned that my father’s new suits were to be custom fitted to accommodate the hump on his back.  For the first time in his life he would have a jacket that hung properly.  Though only twelve at the time, I understood the significance of this.  His tailor, I learned, was an acquaintance who had also immigrated to this country and with whom my father felt comfortable.  I understood the point of this as well.  It must have seemed to me as if everyone I knew was conspiring to guard this most public of secrets.

The formal declaration of these undertakings came one night at the supper table.  Whenever father had something important to announce such as the birth or marriage or death of one of our distant Danish relatives, he would stop eating, lay whatever utensils he happened to be using at the side of the plate, fold his hands in his lap, and look out on the rest of us in an attitude of expectation.  Since he would do this in the midst of eating his meal, it would naturally draw our attention and signal to us that Father had something to tell us.

On this particular night, he proceeded to tell us something to the effect that the ranch had done very well that year and had cleared over twelve thousand dollars.  We would be buying some things we needed but we couldn’t buy whatever we wanted because, if we weren’t careful, he could find himself out “carrying a lunch pail again.”  And then he added, “I am having George Wanger cut me two dress suits.”  This done, Father resumed his meal.  And though none of us pursued this subject any further, I remember being pretty impressed with the event, as if I had been present at an important public function.

During the next several weeks, I was aware that my father went regularly to the tailor’s shop for fittings.  I couldn’t prevent myself from trying to imagine how George Wanger could get the cloth to fit properly to Father’s back.  I imagined him stretching the material to form a sort of accommodating bulge or stitching in extra material where it was needed.  I was driven to these speculations by the heartfelt wish that Father’s suits would turn out right and by the fear that they would not.  I had come to think of my father’s deformity as a sort of painful disease, bad enough that it mustn’t be spoken of, and from which he could never be cured.  I earnestly hoped that the suits would somehow help to make my father okay again, the way he must have been before whatever it was that had happened.  My fantasies of tailoring were prayers for his healing.

The suits came home without my ever knowing of it; so I was surprised when my father gathered up my brother and me shortly after lunch one day and told us, “I have something to show you boys.”  He led us into his and Mother’s bedroom, an act which in itself was unusual because it was somehow understood that we boys were to stay out of there.  He pulled open the closet door and stood aside, inviting us without a word to look within.

And there were the suits.  They were unlike any other articles of clothing that hung among my father’s things.  One was dark, a blended wool of rich browns; the other was light, a blended gray with closely spaced darker threads running through it.  They were both double-breasted and had wide lapels.  Father took each in turn from the closet and laid it on the bed so that we could better see the front with its pocket and the lining, which he exposed for us, and the startling inside pocket, a feature I had no idea even existed.  And then he put one of jackets on and I tried to make out what George Wanger had done to the back to make it fit so well but there was nothing obvious to be seen. And of course I couldn’t ask about because the subject was forbidden. Father also showed us the trousers that day with their with pleats and cuffs.  And then he held the suits up by their hangers, one in each hand, and with the air of one who is disclosing a confidentiality of the most serious kind, he said, “These suits are made of the finest material money can buy.”  I had a habit in those days of whistling tunes a lot, particularly when I worked.  All that afternoon while I went about my farm chores, I kept whistling, feeling that now things would be okay.

In the following year the ranch continued to prosper.  Father began to do things he had never done before, and he did most of them in his new suits.  He and my mother took lessons in ballroom dancing from Carla Wanger, the tailor’s wife.  When they had learned a new dance, they went to Vivian Lairds, a dine-and-dance club all the way over in Long Beach, thirty miles away, to try out what they had learned.  They looked grand to me going out the door together, Father in one of his new suits (he was quite whimsical about which one he might on any occasion choose to wear) and Mother in a slinky mauve gown with a matching jacket she could discard when they took to the dance floor.  Father seemed to love wearing his suits, and he would sometimes dress up just to go to a dance lesson or to do some banking or other casual thing.  I recall him on one occasion driving away in our old Hudson sedan wearing his gray suit with a handkerchief folded in the pocket, on his way to the dentist to have his teeth cleaned.

In those wonderful days of my father’s new suits, I felt safer than I had ever before felt as a child.  And the safest place of all was at Sunday service in Trinity Episcopal Church where my father had begun to serve as an usher.  He greeted the other members as they arrived and showed them to their seats, helping some to remove their overcoats and hanging them in the cloakroom. Best of all, he distributed and collected the offering plates during the service. Sitting in a pew beside my brother and sister and mother, I felt that some mournful curse had at last been lifted from my father’s back, that we were all rich, and that father would never have to carry a lunch pail again.

And he never did.  Yet in the course of a few years, my father quit his new church functions and withdrew once more into the guarded privacy of his past behaviors, devoting his energies almost exclusively to keeping the ranch solvent.  “One really bad year could wipe me out and I could lose everything,” he would sometimes say.  His suits hung idle in the bedroom closet.

Nevertheless, standing before the mirror in my own new garments, the resurrected father in his marvelous new suit, his face as serious as if our collective salvation had been put in his hands, carries the offering plate up the aisle to the very altar itself.  It is received by Reverend Hailwood, who lifts the plate up, up, upward, and we all rise and sing the doxology, and my father is still there, there where the whole congregation can acknowledge the importance of what he has just done, there at the very front of the church, clothed in the very best material that money can buy.

Oh Father, is it not strange that after all the frugal self-discipline and denial, after all the secrecy and fear, we are drawn now toward one another as much by our minor self-indulgences and the small amenities we have allowed ourselves as ever we were by our shared sacrifices?

In a monastery outside Mount Shasta, California, I watch a group of Soto monks gather in the temple.  There are forty of them, all clothed in dark robes draped with ritual cloths of deepest purple and saffron.  They approach the altar where they form themselves in four equal lines facing the figure of the Buddha.  Their movements are measured and exact as they unfold their kneeling cloths, forty squares of embroidered white silk drawn off their shoulders and spread on the floor before them.  The temple gong sounds.  The monks drop to their knees and, in a movement as sudden and delicate as the beat of a moth’s wings, arch forward to touch their foreheads to the floor, the purple and saffron of their vestments fluttering and settling over the squares of silk like brilliant insects drawn to white blossoms.  It is an homage paid in beauty to the source of beauty before the altar of its being.  It is the chrysalis unfolding to the light of its own awakening.  It is the bright face of mutual recognition reflecting itself in the image of its own true nature.

(Reprinted here by permission of Wisdom Publications)

(In the fall of 2004 with the war in Iraq entering its second year, I began sitting daily peace vigils cross-legged on the sidewalks of my hometown of Chico in California’s central valley. I kept this up for two years, during which I was shown the perfect simplicity and directness of the genuine heart of peace.)

When the “uprights”—as I have come to call those who use the sidewalk more or less for its intended purpose—want to talk to me, they often adopt the same postures adults use to talk to small children. It’s a touching courtesy on their part that brings them into a more conversational correspondence with me. They will bend down from the waist with their hands resting on flexed knees. Some squat momentarily, and some even touch down on one knee, and very rarely on both. But what the uprights don’t do is plunk their rear ends right down on the raw concrete. This is a posture reserved for actual pavement-dwellers.

So one hot day when a man sweating in a full-length wool overcoat settled down on the sidewalk beside me as casually as though it were a living room sofa, I knew he was accustomed to being there. He didn’t say anything for a bit, content apparently to just keep me company. But after a while he dug into one of the overcoat’s pockets and extracted a half-eaten roll with a smear of yellow mustard dried on it and darkish stains of a sort that looked like he’d extracted it from the gutter or from a trash can where cigarette ashes had also been. “If you’re hungry,” he said to me, “you can have this.”

It’s extraordinary that a man who had nothing more to eat than a stale hunk of perfectly horrid bread would be trying to feed me. I believe it was for him a matter of street etiquette that you don’t feed yourself first if someone else might be hungry.

I didn’t accept his offer—a choice I regret to this day. Instead I said, “No, thanks,” explaining that I’d recently had lunch and wasn’t hungry (which was true enough) and that he might want the bread later when he himself was hungry. But you see, it was the one thing he could offer me and I’d turned it down. He looked at the roll then, possibly seeing how unappetizing it really was. Then he stuffed it back in his pocket and in a few minutes got up and left without a word.

He was a man more generous than I’d managed to be. There’s an oft-repeated Christian maxim that tells us “It’s better to give than to receive.” But receiving is a giving of its own kind that allows for the approach of those who come with offerings. To refuse another’s gift may be as much a stinginess as is hoarding. This man, sweating in his wool overcoat had simply turned up and seeing me there on the sidewalk took the opportunity for a little company. He didn’t ask if I was good company or bad, giving me the benefit of any doubt he might have. And then quite without design the thought occurred to him that I might be hungry and he dug into his pocket since he’d stashed something there to eat. He probably didn’t calculate his own loss in the act or weigh a single advantage or disadvantage that might accrue. He simply offered what he had, assuming perhaps that I’d do the same if I was the one with a piece of bread.

If I came to the street seeking the way of peace, then I saw that day something of its genuine heart. It was shown me in a gesture so simple as the offering of stale and soiled bread in the hand of a town’s homeless vagrant.

I learned a little more of the nature of such peace one day sitting in front of Pluto’s a little before noon. A man with a head of dark curly hair and a bright face stopped to tell me that Pluto’s had excellent bread and would I like mine with “no butter, margarine, or real butter?” Having once refused an offer of bread, I said, “Real butter.”

He was gone awhile, longer it seemed to me than it would take to get a simple order of bread with real butter. I was thinking that maybe he’d changed his mind when he came back with a single slice of buttered bread on a blue plate with two napkins. He set the plate on the sidewalk between us and sat down facing me, all the time very concerned to let me know that his hands hadn’t touched the bread at all, or even the napkins. He was telling me these things seated in clean slacks and a sport shirt on the sidewalk in front of Pluto’s with pedestrians and traffic all around, and yet he behaved as if we were drawn up to a table set with linen and silverware for some special occasion.

Then, repeating that he’d not previously touched it, he took hold of one end of the buttered bread and held out the other end toward me, which I took hold of and pulled until the slice broke in half. We ate then, and he never took his eyes from mine.

And he looked so pleased with the whole thing that I felt equally pleased myself. We kept grinning at each other, which made swallowing a little problematic at times. And when we were through, we wiped “real butter” from our mouths with napkins—my napkin untouched by my host’s hands. I think we were both a little sorry when the bread was gone and our shared feast was over. He gathered up the plate and napkins then, but before he got up he said, “I feel good. I don’t know why.”

That’s it, I thought, peace comes without reasons attached and you don’t know why. It comes with or without real butter and sits undistracted on the public sidewalk and grins at you. It’s contagious and, if allowed, will spread itself to your own face.

From my earliest years, my parents taught me the principle of consideration and respect for others including people I didn’t much like. Who could disagree with such an obvious social ethic? And so I was content to follow my parent’s guidance until I met my first concrete challenge to its observance during my seventh and eighth grade classes where Leo Schroff, the schoolyard bully, was avoided and shunned by all the rest of us. Leo was bigger than the rest of us as well, having outgrown the class median height and weight as a consequence of being held back several grades for incomplete work. Leo was unpredictable and often mean. Once when a kid named Jerry stepped into the bus line in front of Leo to talk to a buddy of his, Leo yanked Jerry out of line, smacked him across the face, and threw his books into a mud puddle. And then when Jerry’s buddy complained, Leo grabbed him as well and knocked him to the ground and spit on him. Leo often came to school scabby and bruised, and he’d let his nose drip without doing anything to wipe it. All in all, he was a social outcast, and most of us wanted nothing to do with him. Confronted with an apparently insoluble dilemma, I didn’t know how to take even the first step toward granting Leo the consideration and respect I’d been taught was owed him.

Leo wasn’t very bright either. Teachers seldom asked him questions in class or tried to include him in any way, and when they did try to include him, he’d often say something that made no sense at all. One of my classmates looked up the word “idiot” in the school dictionary and found that it referred to an adult with a mental age of less than three years. And so Leo was alternately dubbed an “idiot” or a “retard.” Leo would sometimes get into our lunch bags on the shelf in the cloakroom and take whatever he wanted for his own lunch. He once stole a sandwich and chips from me. I was too intimidated to protest, and I wouldn’t eat what little was left of my lunch for fear Leo might have touched it.

Still, witnessing Leo day after day in his isolation, I felt at once both frightened of Leo and visited by daily guilt over my complicity in the exclusion of him. Leo’s mother had been dead for several years, and Leo lived with his father, Duncan Schroff, in a partially boarded up shack on the Friedson dairy where his father worked as a farm hand. The dairy itself was run-down with propped up fences, barns with leaking caved-in roofs, the dairy herd standing in mounds of its own waste. The dairy had been shut down on occasion for failing health inspections. But still, Friedson, himself widowed and feeble with age, hung on to what little was left of a once hopeful enterprise. It was upon this economically marginal dairy’s unlikely survival that Leo and his father depended for their scant livelihood. Passing the Friedson dairy on my way home to my own farm further out of town, I knew the hardship under which Leo lived. But I feared Leo and found him distasteful in every way and so, along with all the rest of my classmates, I shunned him and tried to put him out of mind. He was I suppose the proverbial outcast who simply stood outside the bounds of normal human consideration.

The day Leo’s father showed up during recess challenged my view of him. I don’t know what Leo might have done to so anger his father, but suddenly there was his father coming across the schoolyard shouting at Leo that he was “a dumb bastard.” Seeing him, Leo froze on the spot.  Leo’s father was a big man, and when he shoved his face up into Leo’s, Leo looked small by comparison. I heard him say once more, “You’re nothing but a dumb bastard,” and then I saw Leo’s head pop backward, and his father was gone and Leo was left spitting blood on the grass. And he was crying! I’d never before seen Leo cry and I’d never known him as a victim of anyone else’s bullying. I felt confused by this whole turn of events: I’d more than once been a victim of Leo’s bullying and I knew only too well the fear and humiliation of being violated in that way. But now Leo was the one so violated.

I don’t remember planning to do what I did next, but I somehow found the courage to walk up to Leo. Snot was dripping from his nose and blood was splattered on his chin. In a voice I could barely recognize as my own, I asked him, “Are you okay?” There was a long frightening pause while Leo wiped his nose on a sleeve before he said, “What’s it to you, you little bastard?”  Well, I suppose that what it was to me was that for the first time I actually saw Leo as someone I could relate to. Since my own father beat me as well, I knew what Leo was probably going through, and seeing him bullied in this way I understood how he might want to dish it out to others. Had I not been too small, hesitant, and fearful, I might have been a schoolyard bully myself.

Not long after Leo’s father appeared at school that day, a new student, Ron Coleman, showed up at school. Ron was athletic and as big as Leo, but he was also quiet, easygoing, and not at all inclined to use his size as a threat. Apparently size itself was threat enough to Leo who picked a fight with Ron the first week he arrived there. Leo knew nothing of fighting fair and had given Ron a bloody nose before Ron even knew he was in a fight. But after that, Ron held his own, and being quicker and smarter than Leo, soon had the advantage. It was a shameful spectacle to watch because Leo was so slow to comprehend that Ron could simply snap the fingers of a hand above Leo’s head and Leo would quite stupidly look up, dropping his guard and leaving Ron to hit him at will. It was a pitiful sight to see him fall for it over and over.

A bunch of guys had formed a circle around the fight, egging Ron on and taunting Leo with any insult they could think of. And then Ron, realizing the sad limits of the person he was fighting, simply stopped, and shaking his head in what I took to be disgust in his part in it turned and walked away. But everyone else kept the circle closed around Leo, taking advantage of the opportunity to pay him back for his bullying. Leo was bleeding from the mouth and his eye was swelling shut. That’s when I went into the circle with Leo. I don’t know what I intended, but this time Leo didn’t insult me or push me away, and so I just stood by him. And that’s also when Ron came back and took Leo by the hand and, with an arm around his shoulder, led him from the circle of taunters.

Dick Ranney, the school’s unofficial P.E. teacher, had come upon the fight just in time to see how it dissolved. And the very next day, he herded a bunch of us into a cleared space in a maintenance shed at the far end of schoolyard. He had pairs of boxing gloves, and he explained to us that boxing was a gentleman’s sport and that if we were going to fight, we needed to learn to box properly. And so the weekly lessons began, and Leo seemed to take to it. Those boxing sessions were the occasion of the first mutually friendly exchanges I’d seen between Leo and any other students. The only ones big enough to spar with Leo were Ron and Dick Ranney himself. But Leo got better and better at boxing until only Ranney, who’d once been on a college boxing team, was able to seriously challenge him. The consequence of this was that Leo now thought of himself as a boxer and would tell anyone he could get to listen that boxing was “a gentleman’s sport.”

In time, Leo more or less quit bullying us, though you still couldn’t risk crossing him in any obvious way. Ron started bringing extra lunch items to share with Leo and some of the others of us would hand him an extra apple or orange or hard-boiled egg from time to time. After that, Leo only rarely stole from our lunches, for which we were thankful. I think most of us quit casting Leo so much in the role of an outsider. We’d learned from Dick Ranney and Ron Coleman to at least partially include him.

Leo left school for good at the end of that school year, having outgrown the age of attendance required by truancy law. After Leo’s departure from school, I’d see him from time to time at Friedson’s dairy wearing splattered rubber boots and herding cows through the muddy yards into the milking shed. Eventually the dairy was shut down and the last small remnant of the dairy herd was sold and carted off for tallow or dog food. After that, the weeds took over the whole place and that was the last I saw of Leo.

We’ve come to Act V, Scene III of Shakespeare’s tragic tale of Romeo and Juliet. In the relative darkness of the theatre seats, we watch the drama played out onstage. There, in a circle lit by a solitary stage light, Romeo kneels at the side of his beloved Juliet who lies in apparent lifelessness in the Capulet family crypt. He speaks to her from the grief of a broken heart:

. . . . I still will stay with thee;

And never from this palace of dim night

Depart again: here, here will I remain

With worms that are thy chamber-maids; O, here

Will I set up my everlasting rest,

. . . . Eyes, look your last!

Arms, take your last embrace! and, lips, O you

The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss

A dateless bargain to engrossing death!

. . . . Here’s to my love!

And with that, Romeo drinks a vial of deadly poison and dies on the instant just as the apothecary who sold it to him said he would. We in the audience watch this in horror, not only because of the death of this beautiful young lover but because his death is a colossal error and waste of his life, for we know as Romeo does not that Juliet isn’t dead but has merely taken a potion that feigns death in order to prevent her forced marriage to another. And the situation only worsens when Juliet revives and, seeing her dead lover there, takes up Romeo’s knife and stabs herself to death.

We in the audience are swept into the passion of all this, shaken by what’s transpiring on stage. What then prevents us from shouting out to Romeo that it’s all a mistake? “Don’t Romeo! She’s not dead! Don’t drink the poison!” What keeps us from rushing on stage to wrench the fatal knife from Juliet’s hand? We don’t do so because somewhere in the heat of our temporary belief and involvement, we retain the aesthetic distance to know that it’s only a play, that no one has really died and that Romeo and Juliet are portrayed by actors who will rise and go on with their lives once the curtain falls on their death scene.

The classical analysis of live theatre takes account of the fact that audiences simultaneously respond to the drama on stage as if it were real while reserving sufficient detachment to know that it’s make-believe. These apparent contraries are sustained as a result of a delicate balance between “the willing suspension of disbelief” essential to emotional involvement and “aesthetic distance” essential to retaining an awareness of the performance as make-believe. It’s aesthetic distance that keeps us from leaping onstage to prevent a homicide or attack a villain. But it’s also aesthetic distance, with its reassuring safeguard of the play as only a play that permits the viewer to participate in the drama as though it were real life. It’s this provisional accommodation between the equalizing forces of distance and involvement that characterizes drama and, as we’ll see, characterizes life itself. It’s a balance requiring a discriminating distinction between what’s make-believe and what’s real. Conventional theatre with its proscenium arch and  curtain is instrumental in maintaining this distinction.

When the necessary distinction between fact and fiction breaks down, life itself threatens to become theatre. T.V. news coverage for example becomes theatre when the event being covered is accompanied by the endless chattering commentary of a news anchor reading from a scripted dialogue and when most news items get but a moment’s coverage before moving to the next item, and when advertisement for beer and toothpaste are interspersed throughout the scant half hour allotted to world’s current events. It’s a formula for potential confusion between reality and entertainment that’s enhanced by the fact that the viewer himself isn’t on hand at the refugee camp or present at the mop up operations after a devastating earthquake but is sitting on a comfortable sofa in his own living room.

The danger here for all of us is the spread of a media-weary emotional indifference to actual events. When the real lives of people are perceived as just so much additional theatre, we lose the raw capacity to respond as human to human. Contemporary media permeates every instance of our lives and makes of us one vast worldwide audience. We have our ticket in hand, have taken our seats, and watch as the play goes on. All we need do is wait for the curtain to be lowered so that we can go on to the next act, or lower the curtain ourselves with a simple click of the TV remote. Our very lives have become popular entertainment. On March 21, 2003, the United States launched a massive aerial attack over Baghdad. Seventeen hundred sorties were flown. Five hundred and four cruise missiles launched. Seated as an audience in living rooms distant from the attack, we were treated to an entertaining television spectacular packaged as a night of “shock and awe.” But by then so many of us had become so jaded by the spectacular violence of action movies that a disappointed acquaintance of mine complained that the “so-called shock and awe” turned to be not such a big deal. For at least one viewer, the televised destruction of a city and consequent loss of life was mediocre entertainment.

Television is a passive entertainment experienced in the containment of one’s own home. You don’t have to do anything about what you see on the screen. You can watch a house or car explode into flames, a murder committed, an explicit sexual encounter take place, and still retain the appetite to grab yourself some chips and beer during the commercial interruption. Within the framed image of a television or computer screen, life itself gets randomized as a series of images in which fiction and reality merge and the whole show appears as make-believe. The image of an Iraqi father holding the shattered body of his little daughter is viewed with the same unresponsive detachment as an actor in a play. With lengthy and repeated exposure to random events of life and death, it takes more and more to feel less and less. This numbed response toward the portrayal of normally upsetting events measures an increase in the expansion of aesthetic distance that, while appropriate and necessary to theatre, has profoundly negative psychological and social consequences when applied to life itself.

Monk Eko, Abbot of Shasta Abbey, whose monastic life wasn’t exposed to the onslaught of contemporary media, once had a television installed in his quarters so that he might watch the evening news. He felt an obligation to know what was happening in what for him was the “outside world.” He told me that he couldn’t watch the news without crying. This was during the early phases of the Iraq war, and I had to ask myself how any of us could watch the news without crying. We would be a nation in tears if we hadn’t made theatre out of our lives. Eko’s grief was the sole human response appropriate to present circumstances. He’d retained the normal passions of the heart. We all of us need to cry over the evening news.

Then why don’t we? One obvious reason is that we can’t be crying all the time. It isn’t that we’ve lost the native capacity to cry. We can quite readily cry over a movie or a theatre drama because these only engage our emotions for an hour or two at best. But the media’s contemporary theatre of actual life is interminable, and so we protectively smooth over the rough spots as best we can. But it’s a comfort we purchase at the cost of superficiality and indifference.

The actual world isn’t theatre, isn’t a make-believe circumstance to which aesthetic distance is an appropriate response. As real people, we’re not divisible into audience and actors, stage and seating. It’s time to lower the curtain on the final act, extinguish the stage lights, bring up the house lights, and see who’s sitting alongside.

Knowing the nature of travel, Yogi Berra said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Yogi, who spent most his career in baseball squatting behind home plate for the New York Yankees, offers here another of his wry teachings on how life itself continually forks in so many potentially obscure and unknown directions that we might just as well surrender ourselves to a life of rambling cross-country travel. Yogi’s fork in the road lays down for us a journey of no fixed itinerary and no certain destination. It is this very uncertainty that accounts for the extraordinary freedom chance accords. Even the most familiar track, worn by years of travel -say between the farm kitchen and garden compost heap- are steps no one ever takes twice, every traverse of it a journey of its own. Our travel options are as wide and varied as the 360 degrees that radiate out from where each of us stands at this very moment. The next step any one of us takes will determine of its own nature the direction that choice and chance accords.

Often in life a fork in the road is negotiated without our ever being aware that we’ve altered the direction of travel. We simply find ourselves in unfamiliar territory with no memory of having consciously chosen to go there. It was that way with the consequences of my brief chance engagement with Calvin Floyd and Sanford Cain. In 1954, I was drafted into the Army and sent overseas to a post in Friedberg, Germany, where I first met Calvin and Sanford. For a time the three of us were assigned to the Regimental Headquarters’ office staff. Calvin and Sanford were both university graduates. They talked a lot about books they’d read and studies they were interested in. I hadn’t much to say on most of the things they talked about because I’d not been to college and in fact had gotten by on high school grades barely adequate to graduate me. All I really cared about and wanted at the time was to put in my two years’ stint in Army and get back to farming, which was the way I was raised and the way I wanted to live my life.

The truth is I wasted high school and was a disappointment to most of my teachers who thought me capable of better work. But while I didn’t attend to class work and seldom read what I was assigned to read, I did read a lot on my own. When my classmates were studying high school texts on chemistry and social studies, I was wearing out a 1940 Random House collection of The Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and struggling to understand Le Comte du Nouy’s Human Destiny. But my reading was a private thing that I seldom spoke of even to my parents or brother with whom I shared a room. But one day I did say something to Calvin and Sanford about a passage I’d read in one of Emerson’s essays or perhaps in Thoreau’s Walden; I don’t recall which. But after that disclosure the two of them took an interest in what they referred to as my “intellectual development,” apparently judging, as my high school teachers once had, that I was capable of more than they’d previously known.

They took me to the Post Library and picked out books for me to read. The first was Herbert J. Muller’s Uses of the Past. I was a religious skeptic at the time and Muller’s book confirmed my own doubts regarding biblical religious history. They set me as well to reading early English classics as diverse as Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and the novels of Jane Austen. They introduced me to the English Romantic poets and were pleased when I preferred Keats and Byron to Wordsworth and Shelley. Sanford, who’d taken a degree in World Masterpieces, was insistent that I read Cervantes’s Don Quixote,Goethe’s Faust, and Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Both of them,Calvin especially, questioned me about the things I read, and we talked of them conversationally in a manner livelier and more penetrating than any of my high school interviews with teachers. And so I spent my years overseas with a book in hand much as I had as a boy, but now under Calvin and Sanford’s guidance new directions born of language and story were taking hold of my mind.

Not content to simply leave me to my reading, Sanford taught me the basic elements of English versification and urged me to write a poem of my own. Later, when I was assigned to an intelligence and reconnaissance platoon and spent my days running about the German countryside, I had Sanford’s own personal copy of Rilke’s Duino Elegies secured in a pocket of my fatigues. And then one night in the barracks, huddled under a blanket with a flashlight so as to not awaken others, I put down the final line of a poem I’d been working on for weeks. And when Sanford saw what I’d written, he managed to have it published in the literary section of the Stars and Stripes overseas newspaper. With that final critical event, I’d unwittingly negotiated Yogi’s fork in the road

At discharge I went home to farm, not yet knowing that Calvin and Sanford had altered for good the direction of my life’s travels. In hindsight, I see how it was. It’s no surprise to me now that within a year or two, I enrolled in college, earned a graduate fellowship to Stanford, and spent the next thirty years of my life teaching college literature and writing. It’s not too surprising either that I write books such as the one I’m writing now.

You can only walk the road you’re on and, as in Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” you’ll always wonder who and where you’d be today had you taken the other fork and not the one you chose, or more accurately, the one that chose you:

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

A remarkable thing happened on December 24^th, 1914, in the trenches of the British sector during World War I.

There, on the Western Front, the Germans and British faced and fought each other in the most brutal and terrifying conditions of warfare that one might imagine. The infantry of these two armies were equipped with repeating rifles, machine guns, and artillery support. Each had the capability to unleash a barrage of firepower that could rip an advancing foot column to shreds. There was no way that mere flesh could protect itself, and thousands upon thousands of men died in the process of learning that. You couldn’t hope to stay alive exposed above ground for longer than it would take someone to squeeze a trigger, and so both sides did what anyone would do: they dug in.

In time a whole network of parallel trenches had been dug, snaking their way along the front lines for miles and miles. The soldiers, German and British, burrowed their way along these muddy ditches like moles, unable at times to get so much as a peek at the upper world for fear of being shot dead by a sniper. The British and German trenches were sometimes as little as thirty yards distance from each other. You could overhear conversations, and frequently these enemies would call out to each other.

From time to time, one side or the other would be given the command to attack, hoping to rout the enemy from his trench and thus gain a few yards of territory. Such an attack was a drastic undertaking, because the attackers were put at an extreme disadvantage. Not only were they exposed above ground but they also forfeited firepower in their desperate rush to cover the distance between trenches without being gunned down. And, if they made it to the rim of the enemy’s trench, they were left with the prospect of shooting it out at point blank range or stabbing away with a bayonet. Most often the attack was repelled, but either way a horrid slaughter was an assured consequence.

It was in circumstances such as these that an unlikely and spontaneous Christmas truce occurred, in which enemies met in the fields of prior death that separated their trenches as though they were friends. Different versions are given of this event, but all versions show it to have arisen spontaneously between the two sides. The rains that had been falling for days quit that Christmas Eve toward evening, and some reported that you could hear laughter coming from the enemy trenches. And then soldiers from both sides started to call out to each other. Some began to sing carols, and were applauded from both sides.

There were voices that called out to please not fire, and then a few figures began to appear in the darkness above the rims of the trenches. And, amazingly, no one fired. And little by little the men came up out of their muddy holes and shared cigarettes and joked with each other and sang songs, celebrating Christmas together.

Apparently this truce involved hundreds, if not thousands, of soldiers up and down the front, including some in the French and Belgian sectors. One report has it that the Germans managed to sneak a chocolate cake into a British trench with a note requesting a cease fire later that evening and inviting the British to a concert at 7:30 p.m., at which time the Germans would signal the start of the concert by placing candles on the parapets of their trench. The British took the offer, and at the proposed starting time, the Germans lit their candles and came up out of their trench and began to sing. When they asked the British to join them, it’s said that one patriotic British youth shouted, “We’d rather die than sing German!” a comment to which one of the German singers quipped, “Yes, and it would probably kill us if you did.”

The following Christmas day, the celebration resumed with soldiers on both sides sharing gifts they’d received from home. On January 1, 1915, the London Times published a letter from a British Major reporting a soccer game the British and Germans played on a field where they’d previously gunned one another down. The Major lamented that the British were defeated 3 to 2. In areas where the dead still lay exposed, these “enemies” helped each other dig graves to give the fallen soldiers a proper burial.

When the British high command got word of this fraternization, they condemned it and shut it down. But they couldn’t immediately squelch the good will that had on its own accord risen in the hearts of the soldiers, and in parts of the Western Front, soldiers were reluctant well into 1915 to resume combat. Michael Duffy, who researched the Christmas Truce, concludes that “Today, ninety years after it occurred, the event is seen as a shining episode of sanity from among the bloody chapters of World War I—a spontaneous effort by the lower ranks to create a peace that could have blossomed were it not for the interference of generals and politicians.” Threatened with punishment and even death if they continued to fraternize, the troops dug in once more and the slaughter went on for four more years until the Armistice in November 1918.

This nation we call the United States of America is no less dug-in than were those hapless soldiers of the Western Front so long ago. Our particular trench is a national fortress bristling with armaments. In our greed and arrogance, we have so alienated the peoples of this earth that we dare not relax our guard for even an instant. We worry that our borders are insecure and that we will be overrun by the hungry, desperate poor that continue to slip in among us no matter how hard we try to exclude them. And we have trenches within trenches, as the wealthier among us barricade themselves within their gated communities, fearful that the privileges they hoard might be stolen from them by someone desperate enough to try.

And yet no matter how entrenched we become, no matter how sophisticated and fearsome our weaponry, someone with sufficient humiliation and rage will find a way to breach our defenses. On a command to launch our nuclear arsenal, we could destroy an entire nation within minutes, yet we all stood and watched in disbelief as the two tallest buildings in the world fractured and collapsed in a heap of smoking rubble. Some of us saw then that we could never dig in deep enough to keep ourselves safe.

Yet we Americans, like most of the world’s people, continue to live out our lives in the trenches. Nothing has fundamentally changed. We have merely adapted the mentality of trench warfare to new technologies. A few of us, huddled here in this ditch of our own digging, yearn for a truce. We would light candles on the borders of the world. We would sing songs of peace. Please don’t fire. Before you scorn this notion as mere romance, look to the inclination of your own heart.

Do you not feel the tug of some sympathetic impulse that draws you from your fear and hatred toward the love that Jesus must have had in mind when he told his followers to love your enemies? Do you think your heart is that different from the heart that drew the men of the Western Front out of their trenches to greet each other? If you can imagine the anguish of those whose bodies plummeted to death in fall of New York City’s Twin Towers, if you can see their faces and hear their cries, can you not as well see the faces and hear the cries of those who perish beneath our bombs in distant lands?

You have only to witness an event once to know that the possibility of such an event exists. And while it is rare, there have been other times when soldiers have laid down their arms, not in surrender but in acknowledgment of a shared humanity. These are the times when we see ourselves in the person of another, though that person is regarded as an enemy. This is a penetrating and deeply humanizing perception in which such arbitrary distinctions as “ally” and “enemy” no longer pertain and we acknowledge each other as fellow human beings.

In the third century B.C., Asoka, the great Buddhist emperor of India declared he would never again go to war for any reason and that he “wishes all living beings nonviolence, self control, and the practice of serenity and mildness.” It’s heartening to know that at least once in the long bloody history of nations, one nation had the courage to lay down its arms for the sake of common humanity, swearing never again to resort to violence.

The remarkable thing about Asoka’s disarmament of his nation was that it came at a time when he had achieved a successful conquest of surrounding nations, greatly expanding the vast empire over which he ruled. But touched by his discovery of the Buddha’s teachings of nonharming and compassionate regard for others, Asoka’s heart was exposed to the shallowness and brutality of his previous ambitions. Deeply repentant and shamed by the suffering and loss of life he’d caused, Asoka gave back all the territory he’d conquered and dismantled his army for good. His nation was thus left without defenses of any kind, other than those of good will and kindness. He was, after all, bordered by nations he’d previously overrun, nations with grievances enough to warrant acts of retaliation and revenge. But no historical evidence exists to show that any neighboring nation ever took advantage of Asoka’s kindness and attacked him militarily. They seemed instead to have been inspired by his example, and peace prevailed in the region for as long as Asoka lived.

I too have disarmed. I may not fair so well as Asoka, but if I don’t resist as best I can the advance of war, who will? And should my efforts fail to bring about a lessening of violence, isn’t the failure still a thing of some small hope like that of a shape emerging above ground on a darkening night beckoning others to follow. It is the United States alone, like Asoka’s kingdom of old, that holds the necessary power to halt the long centuries of killing, a fact that puts my town and your town on the front lines.

That unplanned and unprecedented truce between deadly combatants on December 24^th of the year 1914 in the trenches of World War I occupies my mind these days, coaxing my heart a little further out of its dark hiding into the light where love’s a true possibility.

Every time I surface, she’s still there.  If she thinks I’m looking at her, she waves to me.  I wave back.  I clear the faceplate, blow the snorkel clean, and kick my way down through columns of kelp with an abalone iron in hand.  Ten, fifteen, twenty feet under, I still feel her eyes on me.

Nearly an hour has passed since I entered the water and she hasn’t moved at all.  The wind has come up, raising dust and blowing her hair about, which from time to time she tries to pat back in place.  I wish she’d get back in the car.

My mother isn’t very large, a slight woman, almost frail.  She looks no bigger than a child waving to me from the high cliff above the beach.  She’s not daring at all.  Under any ordinary circumstances, she would never consider risking the climb down that cliff face.  Besides, she can’t swim.  Yet my mother is doing all she can to guard my life.

What does she do when I’m down under?  Does she hold her breath?  Does she know when I need to surface for air?  What if I failed to reappear?  Or came floating to the surface, my body washed lifelessly back and forth on the swells?  Would she scratch her way down the cliff and come into the water in her skirt and sweater and hose trying to reach me?

Mother is afraid for me.  She doesn’t think I should come diving here alone.  I could drown she tells me and no one would know where I went down.  So she comes along to keep watch.  Again and again I disappear into the deep water and she is never certain I will come back up.  When I do, she waves to let me know she is still here.

Sixteen years old and hot with self-intent, I don’t want my mother watching over me.  Her presence on the cliff puts me in doubt, troubles me with a lesson I’m not yet willing to learn.

Within a year that lesson will be learned and my mother watching from the bleachers of the Anaheim High School football stadium will have her worst fears realized.  The son who was needed at home for after school farm chores and who’d repeatedly nagged to please be allowed just once to go out for football lay unconscious, his flesh split open, his skull fractured, his helmet awash in a pool of blood.  The son to this day retains scattered fragments of that event.  He recalls the blurred outline of his mother’s face, her voice reaching him through a haze of searing pain.  He remembers what she said, her words following him the whole of his life.  “I’m here, Linley.  I won’t leave you.”  He recalls as he was wheeled into surgery her plea to the doctor to please do all that he could, that cost was “no consideration,” that she could pay whatever it took.  It was a guarantee without basis in fact, just so much hopeful waving from a cliff top.

There are certain lonely offices of the heart undertaken in the absence of either hope or means.  These are the lowliest of our duties, the tasks from which we wrest our humanity.  For Mother it meant attending to my survival when the Anaheim surgeon told her I probably would not survive.  It meant not despairing when it was explained to her that, should I live, I might never think of speak clearly again.  It meant watching her son waste away through weeks of semi-consciousness until his robust young body, once so manly and firm, weighed less than her own.  It meant bringing him home, too weak to walk on his own, his head hanging perpetually to one side as if shielding itself from some anticipated blow, his world repeated in duplicate from the severe diplopia with which he suffered.  It meant coaxing him, spoonful by spoonful, to eat again.  It meant awakening in the night to his screams and holding him down in his bed until the doctor arrived to sedate him.  It meant putting aside her own affairs for nearly a year that she might devote herself to drawing her son back into life, hauling him to doctor’s appointments, providing for his special dietary needs, tutoring him in his schoolwork, slowly, day by day, returning him to the natural world.

- – - – - – -

Mother looks so tiny in her coffin, something like a life-size doll, her cheeks lightly rouged, her lips reddened, her body clothed in a suit I don’t recall her ever wearing, her hands folded beneath her breasts.  My sister, Evelyn, and I have come to say goodbye. I’m trying to take a last look and walk away.  Mother’s hands and face are cold to the touch, as unyielding as plaster, not at all like living flesh.  Her eyes, that once searched the sea for my reappearance, are sightless now.

I start to go, but turn back again to the coffin.  Evelyn is seated on a wooden pew in the front row of the chapel.  The others have left.  I look at Mother and then at Evelyn.  I say, “I’m sixty-seven years old and for the last seven of those years our parents have more or less been in our care, yet some residual in me hasn’t grown up until now that the last of our parents has died.  There’s no one to look out for us anymore.  We’re it.  There’s no one else to do it.”  “Yes, we’re it,” Evelyn replies.

At the coffin I taste the true sorrow of guarding another’s life.  “I’m here, Mother,” I tell her.  “I won’t leave you.”  Then I turn my back on her and go.

(Reprinted here by permission of Wisdom Publications.)

A human foot is a complex system of interdependent parts with an integrity of its own – an organism, a life form, a living thing. A foot has a mind of its own that it’s best not to meddle with. When an inclination of yours arises contrary to the direction your feet are taking, it might just be best to follow your feet.

You can’t really walk on purpose if by “purpose” is meant the willful execution of the anatomic/physiological details of walking, without which no walking occurs. The same might be said of typing these words you’re now reading as well as your reading of them. Were I to attempt typing on purpose, willfully hunting out the location of each letter before pressing the keyboard, I would be reduced once more to hunting and pecking my way through every letter I might type. But my fingers, having once learned the keyboard, know the topography of the keyboard in a way I’ve long ago forgotten. I don’t really type anymore; my fingers do. And you as reader are equally dependent upon the anatomic/physiological details of reading these words of mine. You can’t read on purpose anymore than I can type on purpose, willing the essential details of eye and brain coordination that comprise even so common an act of comprehension. Your reading is reliant on forces other than those under your detailed control.

By an exercise of intention, I can get up now from the desk where I’m typing these words and walk anywhere I want. But to do so, I must take that first step wherein intention, though crucial, is a minor event in the actual execution. You can read why this is so in many reliable sources on the anatomy and function of the human foot. The human foot and ankle it turns out contains more than 26 bones, 33 joints, more than a hundred muscles, tendons, and ligaments, all of which must be synchronized in walking. Not only that, but the foot in turn relies upon various leg muscles, cellular activities, and a system of nerves wired to the 100 billion neural passages of the brain. So who does the walking? Wherein does the capacity to do so reside? Do I walk or does the walking walk me?

What I’m interested in is the latter: where will I end up when I follow the direction my feet are taking, letting the walking walk me? And this has sometimes been difficult for me because I’m one who wants to have a destination in mind. When my daughter Krista was still in her teens, she and I used to go on long walking tours in the high country of California’s Sierra Nevada range. I always had an itinerary in mind, with calculated distances, travel times, and fixed destinations. It wasn’t that we always clung to the marked trails. We didn’t. In fact we mostly traveled cross-country, but always with a compass and topographical map to guide us. So the real fun and challenge of cross-country for me was in managing to get where I intended to go. But in time, the actual circumstances of back country travel began to modify this, forcing of its own accord the necessity to lay plans aside, sometimes abandoning initial intentions altogether.

The routine was to break camp of an early morning, shoulder our packs, and take off for the next destination, say Lake Ediza at the foot of the Minarets. And so all morning and early afternoon, we’d walk in the sunshine through woods of pine and fir and flowering meadows crisscrossed by little streams of clear water only to arrive at Lake Ediza in time for an afternoon thunder shower that left us huddled up in a tent for hours waiting for the storm to subside. The next morning might be clear with the slant of the morning sun lighting the Minarettes and casting shadows on the lake. But if our plan had been to move on that day, we might well walk ourselves right out of an idyllic morning setting into the next perfectly predictable afternoon cloudburst.

It was Krista who first questioned the sanity of what we were doing and suggested that we stay put in the morning and hang out or fish or sunbathe and move to the next site during the afternoon rain. “We have all the rain gear we need,” she pointed out, “and it would be a lot more pleasant out walking in an afternoon rain than getting to our next camp only to spend tedious hours in the tent waiting for the evening sky to clear.” Of course I couldn’t argue with the obvious logic of my daughter’s reasoning, and could only wonder why I hadn’t thought of it myself years sooner. But alas, such is the power of intention and habit to override alternative. All those hours spent lying stiff and cold in a tent pitched by some high country lake at the end of a morning’s travels because I’d paid more attention to my predetermined route than I had to what circumstances were telling me

After that Krista and I began to idle away our hours and days in the mountains, much as I recall doing before the days of elementary school schedules, homework assignments, farm chores, appointments, editorial deadlines – a time of brief boyhood rambling about, going wherever my feet took me.  I walked those days in footsteps of their own accord, crossing farm fields through groves to the river until I found myself sitting among the weeds and brush under a canopy of cottonwood trees without ever having chosen to go there. Now all these years later in the mountains, it got so that Krista and I rarely walked to get anywhere in particular, but more or less just wandered about wherever we happened to be.

My travel these days is determined as much by foot as by mind. The 26 bones, 33 joints, 100 muscles, tendons, and ligaments, 5 arteries with their branching veins and capillaries, 7200 nerve endings, all conspire with the 100 billion neural pathways of the brain to execute my very next step. Walking has become a trusting accord, dissolving the border between spirit and matter and giving birth to the very soul of movement.