Discovering faith in uncommon places
There was a seventeenth century poet from Japan named Matsuo Basho who wrote a short sketch called “A Visit To Sarashina Village”, which begins by saying: “The autumn wind inspired my heart with a desire to see the rise of the full moon over Mount Ubasute. That rugged mountain in the village of Sarashina is where villagers used to abandon their aging mothers among the desolate rocks.”
The name of the mountain, Ubasute, means “abandoning an old woman”. Sarashina villagers would take old or sick family members to Mount Ubasute and leave them there to die. Those burdens, in the old world, could not be carried. This vaguely brings to mind the seemingly inexplicable words of the western world’s Jesus of Nazareth: “If any man comes to me, and leaves not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”
In Japanese poetry from Basho’s time, the full autumn moon was often associated with this practice of “abandoning an old woman”. Basho, now accompanied by a servant in his tale, continues:
“The Kiso road that led to the village was steep and dangerous, passing over a number of high mountains. We did our best to help one another, but since neither of us were experienced travelers, we felt uneasy and made mistakes, doing the wrong things at the wrong times. Above our heads, mountains rose over mountains, and on our left a huge precipice dropped into a boiling river, so that, perched on my horse’s high saddle, I felt tricken with terror.
“We passed through many dangerous places, the road always winding and climbing, so that we often felt we were groping our way in the clouds. I abandoned my horse and went on my legs, for I was dizzy with the height and unable to maintain my balance from fear. My servant, on the other hand, mounted the horse and seemed not to give the slightest thought to the danger. He nodded in a doze and seemed about to fall over the precipice. Every time I saw him drop his head, I was terrified.
“It occurred to me that every one of us is like this servant, wading through this world blind to the hidden dangers, and that God looking down on us from on high would surely feel the same fear for all our lives as I did for my servant.”
Basho’s tale goes on. He tells of a heavy-burdened priest he and his servant helped along the way, and of the shrines and temples where they stopped to pray. In the end, when they’d finally made it to Sarashina, Basho could not watch the full autumn moon rise over Mount Ubasute because it was obscured by clouds.
He closed “A Visit To Sarashina Village” with a poem:
In my dream
An old woman and I
Sat together in tears
Admiring the moon.
Any of the spiritually-minded among us would do well to read Basho. A notable aspect of Basho’s wanderings is that he stops to pray at all the temples and shrines he passes along the way. His writing offers clear glimpses of these places and of ways of life that seem to be gone and has inspired many in Japan to follow in his footsteps and see these strange holy places as he did.
Few of us here could afford the spiritual luxury of travelling to Japan to follow Basho’s path. But to believe such a luxury is necessary to see life as Basho did is foolish. A peculiar thing happens when you read Basho closely and look back up at our own world today. You see that those old travelers and their ways are not really gone.
On Canyon Drive, in a very modest neighborhood, there’s an old rundown schoolhouse. Passing by the place, you would never remember it. Walking up its worn steps, the old school feels abandoned. The windows are boarded from the inside. Just inside the heavy front doors, there’s a dark room that no longer echoes with laughing children. The floors and walls are dirty inside and the only echoes now are your footsteps. In the back of this darkness is an entryway to another room that is full of light.
This old school has been converted into a Hindu temple called Gujarati Samaj. Those who worship here believe in their devotion to God, “dan” (charity) and “daya” (mercy toward fellow human beings).
The room full of light holds a shrine with seven statues of seven gods. A pool of water surrounded by three golden pitchers is before the gods. In a bowl at the edge of the shrine are fruits, nuts and berries. The wide-eyed, unmoving statues stare down at you standing there in confused awe. It doesn’t matter that you are unable to utter a prayer. Before these gods, it seems that they’re laughing at you and you feel forgiven. Their holy book, the Bhagavad Gita, says: “We behold what we are, and we are what we behold.”
In Brainerd, hidden on a small road that’s nearly impossible to find, is the Society of Friends meeting house. Those who have lost their way in other faiths find their spiritual home here. These Friends meet in a plain room with brown wooden floors. They sit on plain wooden chairs. For an hour every Sunday they gather here to sit together in silence.
“There is no pastor or priest,” they say. “Friends gather here to seek divine guidance and listen to the Inner Light and a living stillness that has great power.” A large, uncurtained window lets the morning light fall silently into the room with them.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux said, “Believe me, for I know, you will find something far greater in the woods than in books. Stones and trees will teach you that which you cannot learn from the masters.”
There are people who gather once a month, hidden in a bamboo grove at the bottom of Lookout Mountain, who believe what St. Bernard said. In this shadowy grove these people meet in prayer and meditation. This gathering, on the fourth Sunday of each month, is called Bamboo Encounter. It was born out of Seminary Of The Wild, a Christian group whose hope is to kindle a “wild awakening to our deeper nature, and to what life truly is.”
Bamboo Encounter holds nature up as the true temple of God and believes the untamed wild will lead us onto a path where “Earth becomes the doorway to a deeper, wild wisdom of the Incarnated Christ.”
And there’s an old overgrown cemetery near where the county dump used to be. Poor folks are buried here. The tombstones are faded and the graves are sunken. People have dumped old couches and garbage here and thorns and overgrown grass has taken over the place. There’s a pig farm nearby. When the wind blows you can smell the pigs among the wild blackberries.
A concrete statue of Jesus is on the hill. This man, who elevated the poor and demanded we leave those we love behind to follow him, stands among the briars and weeds in this forgotten place. If you stand near this statue quietly, rabbits will peek out of the thorn bushes or from behind the fallen gravestones.
The holiest person I’ve ever known was an old white-haired woman who used to take me to pick the blackberries in this cemetery. She made cobblers in the summertime. She could name every wild plant in the woods around there. She taught me nearly everything I know but never once spoke to me about faith in God.
She lived in a cabin in the woods. Black bears would come onto her porch. She put apples out for them. An unknown number of young and old cats lived under her house. She cussed them all the time but made sure they had food too.
Often she would make you be quiet in the dark to hear a sound that was never there. She’d shush you harshly and look around at the silence. She’d look away into the dark for a moment, then look back at you with eyes that asked, “Did you hear it?” You never heard it, but she did. Words were always spoken softly after this and it was soon time to sleep.
Outside in her garden one morning, I asked her what she was going to do when she gets very old. What’ll you do when you can’t take care of yourself? She laughed and said you can just take me up to the mountains and let me die. I smiled back at her and she kept tending her flowers. I was just a child then. I didn’t understand and felt ashamed of what I’d asked her.
Life goes by fast. I grew out of the boyhood I spent with her, passed through young adulthood and survived everything I did to myself only because of the things she taught me. Eventually I became whoever I am now and very often, like Basho’s desire to see the full autumn moon rise over Mount Ubasute, I want to go see her again.
But I can’t go see her again. She died one night in those woods where she put out apples for the bears. She died in the dark, alone. No one was with her.
It was drizzling rain the day we buried her. She’d asked for her body to be wrapped in a white sheet and for her coffin to be closed. The last time we saw her was the last time we would ever see her.
A preacher nobody knew wore an old suit and stood before us all when we gathered at her grave. We sat before this nameless preacher waiting for him to comfort us. But he was not there to comfort us. He told us that he had spoken with her not long before her passing and she’d asked that he not offer us any comfortable eulogy. She had left a message for us instead:
“Go, and do something good for somebody.”
That was it. The preacher left. We couldn’t stay there either. Her goodbye to us, as we left her behind, was as simple as that.