Hubris

Absolutely No Soliciting

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

Elizabeth Boleman-HerringTEANECK, NJ—(Weekly Hubris)—12/20/10—I was going to title this column “Leave My God-D^%$ed Soul Alone.” But that seemed a little harsh. Especially at Christmas. Or Hanukkah. Or Ramadan. Or Insert-Whatever-Religious-Winter-Solstice-Holiday-You-Celebrate (or vehemently don’t celebrate).

In addition, I find it more difficult to swear like a sailor in print than I do in person. I spent the first 18 years of my life encased in virtual crinolines: never uttering nor hearing a four-letter-word; not owning a pair of trousers. I know it’s head-spinningly difficult for some to conceive of how fast and far women have come in my own little lifetime. But, there it is. I now swear all the doo-dah day, own practically no dresses, and never attend church. Never.

I really don’t like the company of most of the people I’ve found huddling in churches.

Nurtured in the huge Presbyterian “bastions against sin” (my father’s term) of Los Angeles and Chicago, respectively, I left my pew for good at 14, when the ministers of “Fourth Pres,” who’d just graduated me at the top of my communicants’ class, couldn’t answer any of my existential questions. That they couldn’t answer them doesn’t now surprise me. No one can. That they knew me and my family and didn’t see those questions coming, and have some sort of defensive strategy, is mind-boggling.

Since I left The Church, and churches, ashrams, madrasas, temples, etc., in general, many, many people, some of them my own blood relatives (though I should probably have asked them for some I.D.), and even some atheists, have tried to convert me to their own beliefs. In fact, my friends the atheists don’t believe what they don’t believe more vehemently than many of the other spiritual rapists I’ve encountered.

Spiritual rapists? Surely, I exaggerate! But no, in fact, the worst experience I had with a would-be saver-cum-rapist of my soul occurred when my father died (I was 20), and my uncle locked himself into the family sedan with me and vowed to remain there until I accepted Christ as my savior. I wish I could say I threw up my hands immediately, cried out, “You win! I’m saved!” and got on with grieving my parent. But no, I was an earnest, honest child. I sat in there with him for hours debating, till he convinced me I was going to hell.

One of the worst days of my life.

So, it is little wonder that, as an adult, I have so little patience for those convinced they’ve seen the light, and are hell-bent on showing it to me.

I’ve been assaulted at the door by Jevohavah’s Witnesses, a very well-named group. Boy, do they ever witness! I’ve been called on the carpet by Baptists. The Born Again of all stripes have shown me the error of my ways. Even one Yoga teacher insisted I could not, would not, graduate from her teachers’ class unless I learned, and sang, the “Prayer to Patanjali,” a being, half human and half serpent, who is patently as “historical” as the gryphon.

No longer 18, I do not now take kindly to such invasions of my spiritual privacy, and I do not think any of us should. Most of us are kind and evasive when faced, at our doors, with a pair of Witnesses. I, on the other hand, believe we should assure them it is we who have seen God’s numbered, secret list (and Santa’s), and they are not on it.

Come to my door peddling religion, will you!? I think not, My Pretties!

If I weren’t so furious about this sort of spiritual assault, I’d print out something and carry it around with me (this column springs to mind), and silently hand it to the next lunatic who believes his/her soul is saved, but mine is not—and wants to discuss it all with me.

I “read in the Spirit” every day. Well, almost every day of my life. My most personal book shelf (right next to me here in my study) is full of titles such as Reaching for the Invisible God, The Mystics, The Sufis, The Spell of The Sensuous, Your God is Too Small, The Space Within The Heart, A Path With Heart, Light on Pranayama, and everything Jung ever wrote, etc., etc.

It has been my life’s work to find faith; to reach enlightenment; to know God, if God is knowable. And I’m not there, yet, Brother. I’m not there, yet, Sister. And, considering the weight of my grey matter, if you’re there, and I’m not, you’re not going to be the one to save me. Trust me. I don’t really know how God rolls, but I pretty much know how He doesn’t.

Still, I will probably die with a “holy” book in my hands—not the Old Testament or the New, but a book all the same, and I think God, if there is a God, will cut me some slack. (Not so, the televangelists. Not so, those in Rome who believe in papal infallibility. Not so the Taliban, who’ll cut off your head if you don’t convert. NOT the way He rolls, Boys! And Mercy, Mercy, when he meets up with YOU!)

Still, speaking of the Old Testament, come to my door to tell me you’re saved, and I’m not, or to ask me about the state of my soul, eager to tell me about the exalted state of your own relationship with The Personal God, with your own Savior, and I am very likely to go all medieval on your buttocks.

I am likely to rise up in fury and quote someone else who overstepped his bounds and brought down, well, the wrath of God: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? . . . Where were you when [God] laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! . . . What is the way to the place where the light is distributed, or where the east wind is scattered upon the earth? . . . Shall a faultfinder contend with the almighty? He who argues with god, let him answer it.”

All from Job 38 and 39, by the way, in case you were wondering. And, if I could summon the voice of Whoopi Goldberg in a snit, that’s how I’d deliver my oration—at full throttle.

Cause I take my Spirit seriously. It’s not something you peddle door to door like vinyl siding . . .

. . . and because faith is not like some virus you can breathe into your neighbor’s lung. It is not some fire you can set in your neighbor’s garage. It is not some crabgrass you can root in your neighbor’s garden.

Faith, I believe, is like Grace. Faith is Grace. If you don’t have it, there is only one way you can get it, and it sure isn’t coming by FedEx, UPS, or via that demented Jehovah’s Witness two doors down.

My mother had faith. My father had faith. Even my son-of-a-b&^ch uncle seems to have had faith (though I think he was more interested in the power that comes from having a pulpit of your own, a luxury God was careful not to afford him).

I don’t “have faith.” Yet. Or, if I do, it’s faith as fragile and delicate as a mustard seed, and you best not be blowing on it; huffing and puffing. For that is the very best way I know of to sour me on the thing; the very best way to put out the light not lit by human hands.

So, No Soliciting at this house. Wouldn’t be prudent

Your Post Script of Zen: “One old Hasidic rabbi asked his pupils how they could tell when the night had ended and the day had begun, for that is the time for certain holy prayers. ‘Is it,’ proposed one student, ‘when you can see an animal in the distance and tell whether it is a sheep or a dog?’ ‘No,” answered the rabbi. ‘Is it when you can clearly see the lines on your own palm?’ ‘Is it when you can look at a tree in the distance and tell if it is a fig or a pear tree?’ ‘No,’ answered the rabbi. ‘It is when you can look on the face of any man or woman and see that they are your sister or brother. Until then it is night.’” —from After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path, by Jack Kornfield


Elizabeth Boleman-Herring, Publishing-Editor of “Weekly Hubris,” considers herself an Outsider Artist (of Ink). The most recent of her 15-odd books is The Visitors’ Book (or Silva Rerum): An Erotic Fable, now available in a third edition on Kindle. Thirty years an academic, she has also worked steadily as a founding-editor of journals, magazines, and newspapers in her two homelands, Greece, and America. Three other hats Boleman-Herring has at times worn are those of a Traditional Usui Reiki Master, an Iyengar-Style Yoga teacher, a HuffPost columnist and, as “Bebe Herring,” a jazz lyricist for the likes of Thelonious Monk, Kenny Dorham, and Bill Evans. (Her online Greek travel guide is still accessible at www.GreeceTraveler.com, and her memoir, Greek Unorthodox: Bande a Part & A Farewell To Ikaros, is available through www.GreeceInPrint.com.) Boleman-Herring makes her home with the Rev. Robin White; jazz trumpeter Dean Pratt (leader of the eponymous Dean Pratt Big Band); Calliope; and Scout . . . in her beloved Up-Country South Carolina, the state James Louis Petigru opined was “too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.” (Author Photos by Robin White. Author Head Shot Augment: René Laanen.)

6 Comments

  • Mano Scritto

    Now here’s a topic I can warm my haggis on.

    You can differentiate someone who is sanctimonious from someone who is imbued with sanctity. One wears religion on their sleeve, the other carries it in their heart.

    I don’t understand the audience of a televised evangelist. How can you become enraptured and enveloped in the simplistic mind numbing rhetoric of gospel garbage that passes itself off as divinely inspired? Saying it loud doesn’t add to it’s credibility.

    I am offended when on the street (for me it was on 5th Avenue at 43rd Street) there are guys with the audacity to confront people with the question “Are you Jewish?” as they try to convert a non-believer or, better yet, return a stray sheep to the fold. If you want to get in my face, just make sure that you’re Julia Roberts.

    I am incensed when at my doorstep a small mob of Jehovah’s Witnesses (always seems to be two women to present a benign image and a man to provide security) convey verbal and printed information intended to induce me to walk down the righteous path. My home is my castle. It’s literally my sanctuary from the world. I don’t even like getting solicited at home by mail for dish TV. After 5 or 6 rejections can’t they develop a “do not knock” list?

    Why would someone infringe on my privacy. Do they think their concept of God is better than mine? Are they accruing points towards their own perceived idea of salvation? With so many religions claiming to be the right one, it seems like washing machine detergent: they all get your clothes clean, but is any significantly better than the other?

    Hey zealots, think about this:

    Proselytize and moralize
    Impose your view of what to do
    It seems to me that you don’t see
    Your every word sounds absurd
    Chapter and Verse makes it worse
    Message uninspired, time expired
    Crusade or Jihad equally bad
    No one ought to coerce thought
    See the light, do what’s right

    On to another pet peeve. What about Original Sin? What did I do? How did I acquire it? I think that if it starts with the act of conception I should bear no responsibility for my parents lust. If it starts at birth what ever happened to Locke’s “tabula rasa”?

    I guess I’m a minority. My religion is within, it’s fractionalized and disassociated from what I was taught as a youth. Never the less it is comfortable, fairly coherent and pretty important to my own well being.

    From my mouth to God’s ear is not a punch line for the impossible. It’s an accurate statement of how I spiritually communicate.

  • Michael House

    At the risk of being a “spiritual rapist” – you live, you die. There is no no divine Average-Adjuster out there, to give you a fair shake in the next world if you haven’t had one in this. I’m totally baffled as to how this brilliant method of social control called religion, survives into the democratic era. We are lucky or unlucky. And for some – not you, e., since the Birth Fairy has provided you with lavish gifts – life is, as Thomas Hobbes has it “nasty, brutish and short.” If faith aids their passage through life, so much the better. But life’s winners don’t need it. I should never have opened the second bottle. Happy Winter Solstice.

  • eboleman-herring

    Heyyyyy, Scrooge! :-) I kinda like the second-bottle-ness of this comment. You, and Mano, above you, should meet at some point. Life (always) reminds me of that scene in “Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid” where Butch and The Kid have to jump into the river, and The Kid says, “I can’t swim,” to which Butch replies, “Hell, the fall will probably kill you.” Then, they jump. It doesn’t really matter what we believe on the way down: we all have to jump. But, whatever I believe, it will NOT be organized, or handed to me on a platter by old white men. That much I DO know. And you, MH, who’ve fought the good fight, on behalf of the poor and powerless, ALL your adult life, may find . . . you can swim just fine. Just sayin’…. Merry Winter-of-2010/11, M and D! Love, e

  • Wayne Mergler

    Hey, e, may I join the party? If I bring a third bottle? I knew I loved you, e, but now I am absolutely gaga. Nothing is more annoying than the bullying Christian, except maybe the cloying one. I could tell you about Hannah, who works with me, who has big hair, a Republican registration card, a T-shirt that says Sarah Palin 2012, and carries her Bible with her everywhere she goes. Hannah is constantly trying to convert her co-workers. I must admit, she has given up on me. Unlike our other co-workers, I am not politely attentive and quiet when Hannah speaks. I am quite sure she thinks I am the anti-Christ and that is okay with me. She did inform me that when the Rapture occurs, I will not be among the saved, to which I had to reply that I hoped it happened soon. I figure as soon as Hannah and her ilk are all raptured up into the great spaceship, the rest of us may be able to find some peace.

  • eboleman-herring

    Wayne, I’ve always been amazed at Jehovahs’ Witnesses and Born-Agains who are 100 percent positive God’s on their side. I mean, I consider my ego fairly massive, but the size of THESE folks’ egos is staggering. There must be some post-Rapture way-station or Principal’s Office for the Hannahs of our planet, where lots of spanking and writing on the blackboard occurs before they can even THINK about moving on elsewhere. . .