Catharsis on the Fly

Some time ago

violetisblue

did this interview meme and I asked her for questions.  She asked good, probing ones, as she always does when this meme comes around, and it took me a while to generate my answers.
1. Knowing what you know about me as a person, would Buddhism be a good path for me? Why or why not? (I’m not looking to convert, just curious.)

At this point, I am inclined to say that Buddhism would be a good path for *everybody*.  Let me clarify that by saying that I think *some* form of Buddhism would work for most people, if they could make contact with it.  You might be attracted to the teaching of Thich Nhat Hanh, which is an outgrowth of Vietnamese Zen, a kinder gentler zen with no sitting and getting whacked while your knees ache, or to the Insight Meditation groups that have come out of the southeast Asian Theravadin traditions.  I don’t think you could make a good connection with Tibetan Buddhism; it might remind you of Catholicism in ways you don’t want to be reminded.

2. What is the thing you love the most about Baltimore, and the thing you hate the most?

I love the old traditional Baltimore that is a network of neighborhoods, each with its own distinctive character.  I love the eccentricity of Baltimore, and the eccentrics, which Homicide: Life on the Streets and the movies of John Waters celebrate in different ways.  I love white marble steps, hard crabs, the Inner Harbor, my little jewel of a neighborhood, the old-style blue-collar people and the funky artists.

I have to admit, though, I pretty much hate our transit system.  It’s crowded, it’s inefficient, there aren’t enough lines, there’s no easy and cheap link to D.C. that runs on weekends as well as workdays, and they put up pretty signs about not smoking, eating, drinking, or making noise with your music but never enforce them.  (People don’t actually smoke on the bus, not usually, but they do eat and drink with impunity, and I am elitist enough to *really hate that*.

3. You’re given creative carte blanche and a healthy budget to design and cast your own dream TV series. What’s it about and who stars in it?

It’s a night-time drama/soap opera called Forty or Better.  It revolves around a largish cast, the core group of which are between forty and sixty years old.  Some of the characters are married, some are divorced or never married.  Some have kids who are nearly adults, others started later and have younger kids; no one has grandchildren yet.  Everyone knows everyone else in some way, is interconnected.  There’d be lots of relationship drama, stuff about money and job changes, midlife crises, dealing with aging parents, and also spiritual upheavals.  It would be clear that people who’d been married a long time were still having sex and enjoying one another; maybe one married couple would be notably unhappy.  I’d have both gay and straight characters. I know I’d want TonyHead to be in it, Candice Bergen, Juliet Stevenson, David Spader… all sorts of fun and interesting people.

4. What do you think is the single biggest, most urgent problem facing the world today, the one where if we don’t address it NOW everything else will start to fall apart? Be as specific or general as you like.

I had to think about this one for a while before I hit on the answer, but once I did, it seemed obvious and right.   I think that the biggest, most urgent problem facing the world today is fundamentalism: the belief that there is only one right way of doing things, and it’s MINE.  Religious fundamentalism is the most obvious example, of course.  Non-fundamentalist religions don’t send their adherents out to bomb others who disagree with them, to gang up on women and beat them up for not dressing with proper decorum, to hold riots about the depiction of a religious leader in a cartoon.  Those examples sound like I’m picking on Islam, I know, and Islamic fundamentalists are loud and often dangerous, but they’re not alone.  The fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints who insist on holding onto polygyny, generations after the mainstream church gave it up in exchange for mainstream acceptance; the evangelical Christians who pointed to America’s tolerance (bare tolerance) of feminism and homosexuality as the cause of the 9/11 bombings, instead of our economic and foreign policies; the Chinese Communists who deny that they have a religion but have persecuted Buddhism in Tibet and China both with nothing but religious zeal.

And religious fundamentalism isn’t the only thing I see as a problem.  There’s also the political fundamentalism which turns members of the Other Party into the Devil’s Minions instead of the Honorable Opponent.  There’s the scientific fundamentalism which insists that the answers of science are complete and final and which turns atheism into a crusading religion of its own.  It seems like in every aspect of life and culture, there are fundamentalists who take the most extreme positions and then defend them as The Only Right Way.  There are environmentalists who think that the only way to “save the Earth” is to get rid of all the people, but I don’t see them volunteering to go first.

I think what’s so exciting for me about the Integral Approach is that it’s the very opposite of fundamentalism: Integrating all perspectives into a whole.  Unless we can do that, yeah, I think we might be doomed.

5. What’s a book you’ve always meant to read, and want to, but never seem to get around to reading?

I’m stumped on this one.  When I worked at a Christian bookstore, there were a number of Important Authors whose books I always meant to read, but never did: Jurgen Moltmann, Edward Schillebeeckx, Raymond Brown come to mind.  I occasionally issue a vague sigh because I haven’t read more Great Novels, and even more occasionally I read a classic novel and find it awesome, as I’ve done with Huxley, Orwell, and Sinclair Lewis (It Can’t Happen Here and Elmer Gantry.  But I read so much that there isn’t a lot I really want to read that gets by me.

–If you would like to play, leave a comment and ask me to interview you, or feel free to ask me five new interview questions.