©2007 UrbisMedia
I haven’t attended Sunday mass in over four decades. Someday I will tally up what I learned by reading the Sunday papers or a book against the intellectually-wasteful hours of repeating the same tired prayers and listening to the same boring homilies. But where I live I always know when it is Sunday. No, not by the tolling of the cathedral bells, or the faint refrains of hymns bouncing off some frescoed nave, or the tinkle of offertory chimes. No, it’s the sound of the chirps of car alarms being armed from the Lexuses (Lexi?) and the Land Rovers as the adherents of the nearby Self-Realization Fellowship Church take up all the parking space in my neighborhood and file off to see if the can realize themselves.
Usually I am whacking away at the major faiths, especially those who aspire to become de facto governments. I would rather leave the contemplative faiths alone to contemplate things like the meaning of life or whether they should get out of the market and into bonds, or even why in hell a traitor like Scooter Libby is walking around on a golf course. But I have been doing a little contemplating myself—about the parking in my neighborhood.
But before I “go there” I think you should know a little bit about the church I am picking on for this piece. Above the entrance to the Self-Realization Fellowship Church is a picture of benign visage of its founder, Paramahansa Yogananda. He was born Mukunda Lal Ghosh in 1893, in Gorakhpur, India, into a devout and well-to-do Bengali family. It is said that, “From his earliest years, it was evident to those around him that the depth of his awareness and experience of the spiritual was far beyond the ordinary.” Sound familiar? Yup. They are always a bit sensitive, these guys (have a look at that face again—above). Then he didn’t keep his original name; people could have gone around saying “Oh, my Ghosh! And Ghosh darn it!” Oh, well. Anyway, it doesn’t end there. The bio also has this: “On March 7, 1952, Paramahansa Yogananda entered mahasamadhi, a God-illumined master’s conscious exit from the body at the time of physical death. His passing was marked by an extraordinary phenomenon. A notarized statement signed by the Director of Forest Lawn Memorial-Park testified: No physical disintegration was visible in his body even twenty days after death. …This state of perfect preservation of a body is, so far as we know from mortuary annals, an unparalleled one. …Yogananda’s body was apparently in a phenomenal state of immutability. Amazing! Almost like, uh, you know, resurrection. This is just the sort of faith that a New Age Baby Boomer with an SUV and a terror of aging needs to get into.
Trouble is, they’re into my neighborhood. There is no place for any visitor’s to my condo to park for hours while these dim-bulbs are up the block trying to realize who the fuck they are! The oughta ask me!
I have to say that I have a soft spot for the contemplative, inner-focused, faiths. They’re usually not very evangelical, and that goes a long way with me. Of course, there is the usual amount of metaphysical BS, but I rather like the re-incarnation notion. Yet the whole “holy man” guru thing strikes me as some stinky stuff you want to scrape off the bottoms of your shoes. These guys always make their bones by spending years wandering from one holy man to another to get those deep answers, then the learn enough to become a holy man themselves, add some little gimmick, like wearing no clothes, or standing on one leg for three weeks, or having sex with a goat, to their act and start their own church or ashram. [1]
I tried this approach to metaphysics one time, traveling to India and visiting one holy man after another. But each one told me that there was one holy man who had the answer to life that would give me self-realization. They told me his unpronounceable name and said that he sat in a little cave at the top of a mountain in the Himilayas. [2] So I set off in search of him I spent years, but finally, one day I found myself, sick, penniless, and exhausted, scratching my way up the slopes of a mountain with an unpronounceable name, cold and bloody-fingered, but nearing the answer.
A the top the was the holy man, bearded, wearing next to nothing, sitting in the shivering air at the mouth of his little cave. “Welcome, my son,” he said. [3]
“Oh, holy man,” I said, “I have finally found you.” There were tears in my eyes. “I need to know the answer to life that will give me self-realization. Please, I beg of you, after all these years of searching and contemplating, can you tell me.
“I will give you that answer, my son, but then I will say no more and you must leave me alone and return to the world below.”
“Good enough, great master,” I said, happily. “Don’t make me wait a moment longer.”
The holy man looked deeply into my eyes, or was it my very soul. And then he said: “My son, all the questions of life will become answered for you once you know that a wet bird never flies at night.”
“A wet bird never flies at night?” I repeated interrogatively. “A wet bird never flies at night?!!!”
The he said to me: “Do you mean that wet birds really do fly at night?
I felt like kicking his shriveled ass down the freakin’ mountain!
OK, I just kinda made up that little story about the holy man on the mountain (but I had ya there for a while, didn’t I?) But you are right to ask me what the hell the point of all this is. Well, one is to never be afraid to challenge conventional wisdom; you might discover it rests on a foundation of bullshit.
The other point is about the parking, really. Now that might seem rather petty when there are people out there trying to figure out important stuff like what wet birds not flying at night has to do with their self-realization. So here it is: it’s because I pay property taxes to the city. Those taxes go for the maintenance and construction of streets, streets that I would like to be able to park on, or have my friends and family park on. But religious institutions are exempt from paying taxes. They get a free ride—and free parking. So I think I am well with my rights and deserving, as my erstwhile Roman Catholic Church would say—dignum et justum est—to bitch about having to pay for these people to fund their self-realization off of me and my neighbors. I am in effect, through my taxes, tithing to a church that is still trying to figure why a wet bird doesn’t fly at night. [4]
___________________________________
©2007, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 7.30.2007)
[1] A nice little book on this is Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East by Gita Mehta (1994)
[2] Ever noticed that all religions seem to involve mountains in one way or another? If you have a flat country you are never (no pun intended) going to get your religion off the ground.
[3] Ever notice that religious figures always want to be your father?
[4] This is not, of course the only way in which religious institutions are living off your taxes and my taxes. There is George Bush’s “faith based initiatives,” which is little more than a front that has funneled billions of our taxes to churches and religious (make that overwhelmingly Christian) institutions. The Supreme Court recently gave Bush ever more power to use our taxes that way, b arring taxpayers from challenging a president’s faith-based spending. See, http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-ed-standing26jun26,1,6854060.story?coll=la-news-a_section&ctrack=2&cset=true