Reconnecting
May. 17th, 2006 06:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garranToday my sunscreen came open in my backpack. Most of my stuff weathered the storm surprisingly well, but cleaning the bag itself will not be fun.
Have you heard of Tenrikyo？ It's a fairly young Japanese religion which has its Mecca and Salt Lake City in Tenri, where we spent three days. I had previously known nothing about it, so I had only barely just realized what was going on by the time that, an hour or so after we got off the train, we entered the sprawling and beautiful temple which surrounds the spot that, according to Tenrikyo, humanity was first created. We've visit a lot of holy places, but I haven't felt the wonder and humility of being an accidental pilgrim quite so strongly anywhere else as I did at that moment.
Tenrikyo is interesting. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of Mormonism, though all my reasons are superficial enough that I doubt Rachel would see it: its youth (it was founded in the mid-1800s by a housewife-become-prophet), its active missionary effort and boasts of worldwide membership, its everyday overtness, its monotheism. (Though theirs is not the God of Abraham.) Unfortunately, it also shares a difficulty I encounter with a lot of evangelistic religions, which is that when its adherents are talking about it, rather than ritually practising it, it tends to sound a lot more like advertising than like sacredness. It gets glossy and white-smiled, and I get cool and wary. Say what you will about Buddhism, but not once on this trip have I felt like it's trying to sell itself to me.
The second day, we went to Horyuji, which temple is supposedly the oldest wooden structure in the world. It was built by a guy named Prince Shotoku, who I thought sounded pretty awesome. (On the morning of the third day, we visited another very old temple - Asukadera, which was, I understand it, actually the first outpost of Buddhism in Japan - which turned out to have been constructed by this guy who eventually assassinated Shotoku (and his son) in a bid for power. (We also visited that guy's probable tomb - he was himself killed, shortly after, by a pair of dashing young partisans of the aristocracy.) Obviously our prince was dead, but I didn't expect him to go quite so violently; it was a little shocking to me, like having your favourite character killed off unexpectedly part way through the movie. This parenthetical is totally out of control. I'd better start a new paragraph.)
After Horyuji we went to Nara, where there are incredibly tame deer wandering everywhere; I pet one, which is another in the long list of things I got to do for the first time while on this trip. In Nara is a temple called Todaiji; the name means 'big eastern temple', which really doesn't prepare you for how big the temple is. I mean, you might think that it's a long way down the road from your house to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to Todaiji.
Okay, now we come more properly to the third day. After we'd seen Asukadera and some old, proto-Shinto structures built from boulders*, and eaten lunch, we went to this big shinto shrine whose name I totally forget. (* Larry, in his most authorative teacher-voice: "Okay, so, that's something that was made by... People... Back before they realized that you don't really have to do that.") It's a shrine to the semi-mythical first emperor, and thereby very important in Shinto. In order to enter the sacred inner courtyard, we underwent a ceremony of purification for our 'outer body'; we bowed our heads, and the priest, a very composed and articulate man, waved a sort of spirit-duster around us, a stick dense with white cloth or paper fronds, all immaculately clean. Then we all approached the home of the kami (the emperor and his wife), and stood in a line as he led us through a ceremony of greeting and respect for them.
Then, before leaving, we went through a ceremony of purification for our insides, which involved taking a sip of ritually prepared sake. I'm not sure whether I would have gone through with this, had I known about it before we began the ritual at all. As it was, because I had already begun, because the context was so religious, and because it was such a small quantity, I decided that I would.
The taste was remarkable; I can only imagine what sort of bulge-eyed face I made at the miko conducting the ceremony. I had sort of imagined that it might just be like some strange and exotic juice, but it was awful, in that sickly-sour way that the smell of alcohol also has; and, just like in fantasy novels, once it reached my throat it seemed to be converted into fire, which I could still feel for some time afterward, travelling slowly down my esophagus. I guess that alcohol in general is an acquired taste that I have never acquired. Afterwards, I felt sort of cautiously off-balance, which I decided was probably psychosomatic (Marilee confirmed this afterward; she says that a whole orange has more alcohol in it than what we drank. Not so concentrated, though, I'll bet).
That was the sacred side of our time in Tenri. Allow me also to mention that we did our grocery shopping at one of the largest supermarkets I have ever seen. It had several mini-restaurants, including a Baskin & Robbins, for which I was inordinately grateful; there is iced cream everywhere here, but it's all vanilla or green tea, and that was the first place I've been able to get chocolate. It had groceries, of course. It had toiletries. It had an alcove full of UFO catchers. It had video games, including FFXII, and Mother 3. It had wacky Japanese t-shirts with their peculiar english. It had music. It had manga. It had one place where you could buy a Famicom for about 15 dollars (but I didn't). It had basically no walls at all between these things. Also, the music: unlike the banal
And that was Tenri. I am now in Tokushima, Tokushima, the city so nice that they named it 'Tokushima', where the local university has put us up in a really nice hotel (we all have single rooms) but where apparently it's going to rain a whole bunch more. (We're actually catching the edge of a typhoon.) I have taken a significant time to write this, and now I'm very hungry, so I'm off to have dinner.
The trip is halfway done.
Have you heard of Tenrikyo？ It's a fairly young Japanese religion which has its Mecca and Salt Lake City in Tenri, where we spent three days. I had previously known nothing about it, so I had only barely just realized what was going on by the time that, an hour or so after we got off the train, we entered the sprawling and beautiful temple which surrounds the spot that, according to Tenrikyo, humanity was first created. We've visit a lot of holy places, but I haven't felt the wonder and humility of being an accidental pilgrim quite so strongly anywhere else as I did at that moment.
Tenrikyo is interesting. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of Mormonism, though all my reasons are superficial enough that I doubt Rachel would see it: its youth (it was founded in the mid-1800s by a housewife-become-prophet), its active missionary effort and boasts of worldwide membership, its everyday overtness, its monotheism. (Though theirs is not the God of Abraham.) Unfortunately, it also shares a difficulty I encounter with a lot of evangelistic religions, which is that when its adherents are talking about it, rather than ritually practising it, it tends to sound a lot more like advertising than like sacredness. It gets glossy and white-smiled, and I get cool and wary. Say what you will about Buddhism, but not once on this trip have I felt like it's trying to sell itself to me.
The second day, we went to Horyuji, which temple is supposedly the oldest wooden structure in the world. It was built by a guy named Prince Shotoku, who I thought sounded pretty awesome. (On the morning of the third day, we visited another very old temple - Asukadera, which was, I understand it, actually the first outpost of Buddhism in Japan - which turned out to have been constructed by this guy who eventually assassinated Shotoku (and his son) in a bid for power. (We also visited that guy's probable tomb - he was himself killed, shortly after, by a pair of dashing young partisans of the aristocracy.) Obviously our prince was dead, but I didn't expect him to go quite so violently; it was a little shocking to me, like having your favourite character killed off unexpectedly part way through the movie. This parenthetical is totally out of control. I'd better start a new paragraph.)
After Horyuji we went to Nara, where there are incredibly tame deer wandering everywhere; I pet one, which is another in the long list of things I got to do for the first time while on this trip. In Nara is a temple called Todaiji; the name means 'big eastern temple', which really doesn't prepare you for how big the temple is. I mean, you might think that it's a long way down the road from your house to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to Todaiji.
Okay, now we come more properly to the third day. After we'd seen Asukadera and some old, proto-Shinto structures built from boulders*, and eaten lunch, we went to this big shinto shrine whose name I totally forget. (* Larry, in his most authorative teacher-voice: "Okay, so, that's something that was made by... People... Back before they realized that you don't really have to do that.") It's a shrine to the semi-mythical first emperor, and thereby very important in Shinto. In order to enter the sacred inner courtyard, we underwent a ceremony of purification for our 'outer body'; we bowed our heads, and the priest, a very composed and articulate man, waved a sort of spirit-duster around us, a stick dense with white cloth or paper fronds, all immaculately clean. Then we all approached the home of the kami (the emperor and his wife), and stood in a line as he led us through a ceremony of greeting and respect for them.
Then, before leaving, we went through a ceremony of purification for our insides, which involved taking a sip of ritually prepared sake. I'm not sure whether I would have gone through with this, had I known about it before we began the ritual at all. As it was, because I had already begun, because the context was so religious, and because it was such a small quantity, I decided that I would.
The taste was remarkable; I can only imagine what sort of bulge-eyed face I made at the miko conducting the ceremony. I had sort of imagined that it might just be like some strange and exotic juice, but it was awful, in that sickly-sour way that the smell of alcohol also has; and, just like in fantasy novels, once it reached my throat it seemed to be converted into fire, which I could still feel for some time afterward, travelling slowly down my esophagus. I guess that alcohol in general is an acquired taste that I have never acquired. Afterwards, I felt sort of cautiously off-balance, which I decided was probably psychosomatic (Marilee confirmed this afterward; she says that a whole orange has more alcohol in it than what we drank. Not so concentrated, though, I'll bet).
That was the sacred side of our time in Tenri. Allow me also to mention that we did our grocery shopping at one of the largest supermarkets I have ever seen. It had several mini-restaurants, including a Baskin & Robbins, for which I was inordinately grateful; there is iced cream everywhere here, but it's all vanilla or green tea, and that was the first place I've been able to get chocolate. It had groceries, of course. It had toiletries. It had an alcove full of UFO catchers. It had video games, including FFXII, and Mother 3. It had wacky Japanese t-shirts with their peculiar english. It had music. It had manga. It had one place where you could buy a Famicom for about 15 dollars (but I didn't). It had basically no walls at all between these things. Also, the music: unlike the banal
And that was Tenri. I am now in Tokushima, Tokushima, the city so nice that they named it 'Tokushima', where the local university has put us up in a really nice hotel (we all have single rooms) but where apparently it's going to rain a whole bunch more. (We're actually catching the edge of a typhoon.) I have taken a significant time to write this, and now I'm very hungry, so I'm off to have dinner.
The trip is halfway done.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-05-18 12:07 am (UTC)I don't know; I disagree that just being there is pushy. You can't actually "convert" somebody, as a transitive verb, right? But you can give them the information that allows them to become converted if they choose. Our missionaries know this, and if someone says "No thank you," they leave.
I'm not sure what your parenthetial means. Are you saying we don't have foreign missions? If so, I will mention that my three brothers and sister-in-law went to Brazil, the Netherlands, South Korea, and Russia. If you're saying that other missionaries go to foreign countries too, that's, uh, true. :)
(Really? It creeps you out? That surprises me, because I've always loved it. It means they're college-aged, with all the friendly, lack of stubbornness that ought to imply. And they go of their own choice and pay for it themselves, so they'd really have to believe in it to be out there.)
(There is training, of course; Missionary Training Centers. It's been reorganized in the last few years to be less memorization-oriented. Stateside missionaries usually get a few weeks in the MTC; foreign missionaries have a small number of months to learn the language before they leave.)
no subject
Date: 2006-05-18 02:07 am (UTC)I was trying, in the parenthetical, to say that while Mormon missionaries appear to be in the vast majority here in the States, they may not be otherwise; and that thus, to say that the Church of Latter-Day Saints is pushier because it has more missionaries here may be a statement biased by where I happen to live. That is, you could argue, hypothetically, that the Catholic Church is more pushy because there are actually (world-wide) more Catholic missionaries going around trying to convert people; they've just given up on the States.
I've been trying to write about why they creep me out so much, and haven't been able to come with anything worth posting. Sorry. :(
no subject
Date: 2006-05-18 04:06 am (UTC)I guess I don't understand your argument!
no subject
Date: 2006-05-18 07:40 am (UTC)B) You think that the college-aged are less stubborn? :-p
Since I'm all about the putting words in _Quinn's mouth -- it's part of my ongoing campaign to eventually be hired as his life's author -- I will make some attempt to guess why he finds it creepy. The fact that they're so young suggests that... This is hard to express. That they've been cultivated and indoctrinated. I saw a movie, about boot camp, in Sociology class last fall, and there was something said there that seems appropriate, that they prefer to recruit younger men as soldiers: the older can be convinced that war is necessary, but they can never be convinced that they like it.
C) I'm thinking about your question. I don't think that I've really felt at many points that it's selling itself to me, but I have also, now that I examine it, a conviction that this has a lot to do with the sideways way that I've approached the religion; I'm your friend, and so everyone relates to me as a friend or a friend-of-friend first, and a non-member second. This is probably why I've always been so resistant to talking to missionaries or taking classes from people that I didn't meet directly through you: because when I'm talking to you, I'm talking to you as my valued friend who also believes strongly in these ideas, so there is an unfilteredness, a certain basic honesty; but if I were talking to people such as that, I would be talking to them as official representatives of their religion, and so I'd be getting advertising. I definitely believe that your faith is capable of falling into that.
-Andy H.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-18 09:00 pm (UTC)B) The age thing is only sort of relevant anyway, because we have plenty of missionary couples (who are generally retirement age). For physical reasons, usually do the service aspects rather than the proselyting.
I don't think comparing the missionary effort to a literal army is helpful, though. Army training--push someone into the mud and scream in their ear--isn't even in the same universe as MTC training, which consists of study, prayer, learning effective teaching, and being taught the culture from people who've been there. It's just not brainwashing: this isn't a logical argument, it's a fact.
C) Similarly, if you talked to a missionary, you would be pleasantly surprised. "Official representative" is language that removes the face of the person you're talking to--they're kids, twenty, younger that you, and at home, they program and skateboard and play the violin. They're not going to lay out a brochure and point you at the exciting features of our church, allow 6-8 weeks for delivery. They're going to tell you about themselves, their own stories, their own testimonies. Because this is a real thing.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-20 03:48 am (UTC)As a matter of strategy, many evangelical Christians in Europe and North America now focus on what they call the "10/40 window," a band of countries between 10 and 40 degrees north latitude and reaching from western Africa through Asia. Christian missions strategist Luis Bush pinpointed the need for a major focus of evangelism in the "10/40 Window," a phrase he coined in his presentation at the missionary conference Lausanne '89 in Manila. Sometimes referred to as the "Resistant Belt," it's an area that includes 35% of the world's land mass, 90% of the world's poorest peoples and 95% of those who have yet to hear anything about Christianity.
* Probably this has a lot to do with that the majority of the American population is not Mormon, but is Christian, and is certainly acquainted with the basic notion of Christianity.
B) I don't disagree; of course, I'm not someone who is particularly creeped out by the missionaries, though I do find the practise kind of alien. I think that it's also fair to say that I am unusually well-educated about your church. For someone who is only looking at the outside, though, I can see how this sort of uneasiness would be easy to come by.
Here is the image of the Mormon missionary in popular culture: young, male, spotless business suit, short carefully combed hair, smooth even voice, plastic smile. A faith-salesman who comes to your door. For someone of his age, he seems unnaturally poised, and unnaturally convinced.
Religion, too, is kind of a personal thing, and for some people being approached about it seems a breech of privacy; like if someone came to you and said, "Excuse me, would you mind talking to us about your choice of contraceptives?"
It's a little weird for me to say that I don't want to have discussions about religion with people I don't trust, given where I am and what I'm doing. But even here I feel resistant to having such discussions with random people who aren't religious officials; it seems, as I say, inappropriately personal. And when we are talking to monks, sitting in on a service, or practising zazen, we're students, and there's a certain safety in that, and there's something... What I said about Buddhism up there is accurate; in conversations with monks, there's a way in which they're very matter-of-fact about their beliefs and ideas. These things are just there. There's no point I've found yet at which the conversation will turn even implicitly to the possibility of my own conversion, while with Tenrikyo or most forms of Christianity hints and tensions in that direction start happening almost immediately. A sort of a greedy look. "Look how appealing we are!"
(Less so, actually, in discussions with individuals about their faith, at least if I haven't met them in the context of their faith so that they feel like they're acting on its behalf. So maybe I'm contradicting myself, or, equally likely, I'm saying several things at once, and I have them all mixed up.)
I've sort of segued into C here, though I haven't been talking about the same things I was last time; I'm approaching it from a different direction. I wanted to mention that 'younger than me' is no defense; the Bible studies girl, for instance, is certainly that.
But that's not actually a criticism of the missionaries. Neither is the description of the archetypical gentleman up there; that was an attempt to help make it clear to you what causes the wariness in people like _Quinn. (It may not have worked; in a weird way, it's close to accurate, and you did grow up around that, so maybe you can't see what might be creepy.)
(Comment length exceeded; a second will follow.)
no subject
Date: 2006-05-20 03:49 am (UTC)(Out of benevolent curiousity, do you ever feel like my church is selling itself? I guess it has enough members that they can't all be accounted for, but my experience with missionaries (which is, uh, pretty extensive) is that they're unintrusive.)
I, of course, have essentially no experience with missionaries that I didn't have in your company. I have occasionally felt advertised-to by individuals, including your friends and acquantances, though I can't now recall any specific examples. I have certainly sometimes felt pushed. Your religion does have missionaries, and paid TV ads, and a central mandate to convince others that you're right.
(Would you say that this last isn't true? I'm pretty comfortable making the claim for Christianity entire, or at least such as falls within my experience.)
The university library is closing early because it's Saturday (they play a violin arrangement of 'Yesterday' behind the announcement of this), so I guess I'll wrap this comment up here.
-Andy
no subject
Date: 2006-05-20 07:33 am (UTC)Much more unfamiliar to me is the concept of religion being an uncomfortably personal topic. On first reflection, that was entirely alien to my experience, because I love talking religion with strangers. I wish I could do it more often. But after some thought, I guess there is something of a parallel for me, in that there are some mainstream Christians who believe I'm going to hell. And that's always awkward, especially if they're very benevolent. This leads me to suspect that acute spiritual privacy is probably much more common among people who don't have a specific religion, because a lot more people are likely to be secretly disapproving.
And then...
(Would you say that this last isn't true? I'm pretty comfortable making the claim for Christianity entire, or at least such as falls within my experience.)
Well, let's be specific. I probably would not use the phrase "central mandate to convince others we're right." It is true that one of the main goals of the church (as an organization) is stated as "proclaim the gospel." But...there's an extremely important distinction, which is that I, personally, am not right the majority of the time, and don't want anyone to think I am. But I do believe the Book of Mormon is absolutely true, and the other scriptures, and the words of the modern Prophet. I am a pretty weak person, and any missionary, prophet, or ancient scribe is only limitedly better. But we each believe in God as a Father who wants us to learn about him, and when we do our best, he helps us.
Imagine a person who had grown to adulthood and never met their parents. One day, a phone call comes in, and it's Dad. The person immediately rushes to call all their brothers and sisters afterward, excited to tell them the news. Would anybody call that an unhealthy response? Does it really have to imply some hidden motivation?
All I can say is that, to me, it feels like the most natural thing in the world.