by Ashley Judd
These days, in addition to compassion and care, the monks were able to provide the sick with a measure of hope. Thailand had defied the international pharmaceutical companies that clung to their proprietary rights and started distributing a powerful antiretroviral cocktail of drugs that were reversing the symptoms of AIDS. Now, instead of crawling to the hospice only to die, a growing number of patients were being given the drugs and regaining their health, staying on the grounds in long-term facilities.
Professor Monk and Father Michael took us through the four-story hospice. At the moment there were no doctors on staff; very few in Thailand were willing to work with HIV/AIDS patients, which made me feel so sad and angry. (Did the Hippocratic oath come with an exception clause?) But there were volunteer nurses to administer drugs and palliative care. The first floor was for the “least” sick patients. They were terribly gaunt and suffering from everything from tuberculosis to thrush, a severe mouth infection. Yet they were beautiful to me. They beamed at their two fathers, the monk and the priest, and greeted me with gladness and appreciation. Having lost their families of origin, patients were told that they belonged to a new family now, one that would care for them and love them unconditionally.
I watched Father Michael glide from bed to bed with a kind word and a loving touch for every patient, as well as the kitchen workers, the cleaning staff, and the nurses. He made people laugh. I loved him, and I emulated his approach as I visited with the patients. Through his exquisite nurturing he was a masterful teacher, and that afternoon has enduringly shaped the way I want to be present in this work. I stroked backs, powdered the freshly bathed (ah, those memories of grandparents, again), massaged heads, held hands. I praised the semiliterate as they practiced writing. I snuggled, kissed, caressed, and prayed. We worked our way up through the four floors, with each story holding progressively sicker patients. We smiled with those who were feeling better, soothed those who were failing.
There was an especially weak and tiny woman who could barely open her eyes, who did not have the energy to move or speak. She was almost gone. Three weeks ago, in the middle of the night, she got on a bus alone in the north of Thailand and came to the temple. She had tapped into a profound resolve to essentially pilgrimage here. She knew where she wanted to die. And I can understand why.
Because this was meant to be a teaching moment as well as an educational opportunity for us, Coco Lee and I were joined at one point by some photographers to document our visit to the ward. I climbed onto a bed with a very sick and emaciated man, whose head was quite swollen, put my arm around him, and kissed him on the cheek as the cameras whirred. The message: If a famous woman isn’t afraid of catching HIV from AIDS patients, you shouldn’t be, either.
The next day that picture ran in full color on the front pages of Bangkok’s five morning newspapers. I was taken aback that the papers had barred out the patient’s eyes so that he couldn’t be recognized, as if he were a criminal. The positive publicity we generated was a significant step toward destigmatizing AIDS in Thailand, but even as it prepared to host the world’s largest AIDS conference, the country clearly had a long way to go.
Chapter 8
DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL
My soul sister, Seane Corn, and me at a spiritual retreat.
When one is out of touch with oneself, one cannot touch others.
—ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH
he time I spent with Father Michael at the AIDS hospice, observing his respectful interaction with Professor Monk and his honoring of the Buddhist iconography, gave me an awful lot to think about.
I am Christian. I practice my faith. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, I hold Jesus in the highest regard, in preference to all others. I am also inclined to believe that the deity I know and call Jesus is the same Consciousness others know as the Compassionate Buddha, Sri Krishna, the Creator. I was raised in an array of Protestant churches; because we moved so much, I ended up going to just about every kind, I think, sometimes attending whatever denomination was within walking distance. Papaw Ciminella was Catholic and I loved worshipping with him, though initially his church’s ways were strange to me. I wish I could ask him today what he was thinking when he encouraged me to take holy communion with him!
Except for a stretch of time early on at the University of Kentucky—when I was briefly attracted to a form of Christian fundamentalism practiced by a few friends but ultimately rejected it as intolerant and judgmental—I have, encouraged by both my mother and my father, believed the paths are many, the journey is one.
After my spell as a fundamentalist, I began to trust that God was big enough to handle my doubt, my scathing inquiry, my pain over injustice, and that such thoughts did not need to be shamefully repressed in order for me to qualify as faithful. I began to study and respect the Jewish tradition of intellectual probing, closely examining the sacred texts. I gained the confidence to wonder openly, and some of my pastoral counselors might even say harass the clergy, about the flagrant, chronic misogyny that has come to dominate interpretations of nearly all religions and most scholarship. I began to have the courage to identify, and to pray to, a nonpatriarchal God, a God beyond social and cultural constructions of gender. I didn’t want just Father God; I needed Mother God, too. I realized that perhaps, just maybe, I could expand my God concept to include a “God who looks like me.” And perhaps this God looked not just like me, but maybe like the dirty, poor, wretched, exploited, sick, and abandoned people in all corners of the world.
My God is inclusive. And with wonderful irony, it was some of the more conservative Christians in my life who helped me get there. Turned inside out by some of St. Paul’s infamous teachings about women, I was devastated when asked to read from them at a family wedding. Riding in the car with Uncle Mark, I wept bitterly. He is a minister and a chaplain in the Baptist Church, a seminary graduate, fully ordained in that congregation. Rather than using my raw vulnerability as a moment to lecture me about the “right” way to believe, or the superiority of a particular sectarian interpretation of scripture, he simply turned to me and with enormous tenderness said, “Ashley, I love you.” That moment has always exemplified grace to me.
I return to the same lessons repeatedly. While the Golden Rule is in the gospel, there are close versions of it in every faith. In the sixth grade I was in a pickle at school; I had some keen social dilemma that I can no longer remember. Mom happened to be home, and I decided to risk running it by her when she was putting me to bed. After listening, she asked me a question.
“What is the Golden Rule?”
I paused; I could not remember it.
“You know it,” she said. “Think about it.” Then she left.
A few moments later, it came to me: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I’ve always thought that was an inspired stroke of parenting on her part. She essentially told me that I have internal wisdom and that I must go inside to find my answers. Using the Golden Rule as the example was especially deft. Rather than encouraging me to rely on her for answers, she helped me see that I had already been endowed with spiritual formulas, applicable to everything in my life, that would lead me to solutions.
Many of my heroes are mystics, such as Thomas Merton, Mechthilde of Magdeburg, St. Teresa of Ávila, and certainly Gandhi. I love Native American ways, too; I have been given my native spirit name by a Cree elder in a powerful ceremony, I follow the cycles of the moon, and I regard all beings as my brothers and sisters. Hinduism makes sense to me: The God I love is so big, it can be helpful to focus on particular aspects of God’s personality rather than attempting to have a relationship with the whole of the vast eternal One. Buddhism, well, this I also love: compassion, loving-kindness, meditation, and service. I know that we all love the same God, in spite of our many cultural differences. Meditation, for example: I learned how to sit through yoga with Buddhist friends, yet all I am doing when I sit is being still, and my uncle Mark, that beautiful Baptist, is the one who taught me the scriptur
e “Be still and know that I am God.”
Yet after a while exploring the realms of ecumenical faith, I’ll be inexorably swallowed up by the resiliency of the specific tradition in which I was raised. I never stray too far. I often find myself yearning for the ritual of communion, I long for the little mountain church, icons of Appalachia, and Sunday dinner on the ground. I dream of the third pew on the left in the First United Methodist Church on Winchester Avenue in Ashland, Kentucky, where I learned the doxology. I reach for my own, deepest traditions in times of pain or stress. Which may be why, after an afternoon of witnessing the suffering of so many abandoned hospice patients, I found myself yearning for Jesus. And as I watched Father Michael pay his respects to Professor Monk by bowing slightly in front of him with his hands in the culturally appropriate gesture of respect and deference, I wondered about that commandment that says, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Once more, it was conflated in my head. I wondered how Father Michael explained it to his superiors, this easing from mass to Buddhist chants with radiant enthusiasm. I wanted to ask him if he tried to slip in a little Christ chat with patients. Even Mother Teresa of Calcutta qualified which deaths were “beautiful” on the basis of Christian conversation. But then I thought more about all the ineffable things I had seen today, the incontrovertible peace and palpable presence of grace, and how I was inspired by the monk and the priest working side by side in addressing the needs of the sick, rejected, and despised.
Then I remembered.
Sometimes I forget, but it does always come back to me: God is Love. Period.
That night I retreated to my hotel room in Bangkok to write up my journals and prepare for a big day tomorrow. Sleep didn’t come easily, and my stomach was uncomfortable. I figured I was hungry, as I typically eat a lot but hadn’t been doing so here, and I have low blood sugar, which can make me nauseated. Eventually I fell asleep.
A short while later I woke up sick as a dog, erupting from both ends. When I could lift myself off the floor, I’d go back to bed, trembling with aches, listening to my stomach build up for its next maneuver. I was writhing in pain.
I tried to put it in perspective. When Ouk Srey Leak in Phnom Penh gets the trots, she goes to an outside hole toilet. No running water for her, not even to wash her hands. One of the friends I met in the hospice lived at home for seven years, HIV-positive and ill, neglected by his family before he came to the temple. He had no one to comfort him, no one to offer him medicine, no one to help him heal. I figured I shouldn’t feel so bad, but I did.
I decided to reach across the international date line and call my friend Mimi in California—she would still be awake. She answered on the first ring, I asked for advice, and she suggested we call one of our yoga teachers, Seane Corn, for reminders about postures that would support and soothe me through this. Seane is an incredibly dynamic instructor who emphasizes the spiritual as well as the physical benefits of the practice. In fact, they are inseparable. The word yoga means “to unite” or “to yoke,” and teachers like Seane show us how there is a divine connection between mind, body, soul, and all creation. She also teaches that the body absorbs and remembers every experience, good and bad, and these in turn affect our health. The mind-body-spirit phenomenon has been increasingly studied and measured by plain ol’ Western doctors and has largely become mainstream. Seane had just returned from a weekend retreat on energy work and was flush with guidance and perspective to share with me.
Speaking through Mimi, who held a phone to each ear, Seane advised me to lie on the floor with my legs placed up a wall and reminded me of the simple, consoling relief of a cold cloth on a fevered forehead. Then she gave me the lesson I really needed.
Seane said what was actually making me sick was the devastation I had witnessed during my trip and not setting and maintaining appropriate boundaries as I did so. I had left myself too open to the suffering of others, extending myself beyond empathy to vicarious trauma. My body was manifesting the emotional pain. She said it was critical that I pray every morning before I left the hotel and pray upon my return, to ground and protect myself. Mimi agreed. They reminded me I could not take on the pain of everyone I met, the HIV-positive prostitutes, the orphans, the sick mothers in their huts, my farm friend trapped in a brothel.
Seane’s words flowed through Mimi’s voice. It said, “You can carry the message. But you are not the message. God’s love is the message. Quit taking on people’s stuff. Pray for the spiritual wisdom to have discernment between empathy and enmeshment. There is a God, and it’s not you.”
When I realized what had truly been bothering me, I broke down in sobs. I bawled and bawled until reasonable people would think a body would be dried out to its bones, then I cried some more. I wanted to forget, to go home, be in my yellow kitchen, wearing my great-aunt Pauline’s apron, baking a cake. I wanted desperately to lie with our dogs pulled up against me, their bodies running perfectly down my core, all of us breathing and sleeping and loving as one person. I wanted to sit on Squeaker’s little grave and fiddle with my roses, accompanied in the garden by our cats Bunny, Amelia, and Albert, and see Agnes on the upstairs porch, waiting in our spot for me to come brush her. I wanted to lie down on soft, old cotton sheets and share my pillow with Percy, who purrs in his sleep while we hold hands. I wanted my husband to hold me and for sex to be all that it is meant to be, beautiful and kind and fun and fascinating and a union between two bodies, characters, and souls.
Seane and Mimi were right. I had been trying to take on the pain of the world without realizing it, making myself sick—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I had been praying for the exploited, their abusers (well, sometimes), and those who try to help them, but not for myself. I had no mastery over my own trauma and unresolved grief, which was being seriously triggered. (It would be a while before I would even begin to understand what that meant and know what to do about it.) I had even done something genuinely embarrassing, perhaps the most embarrassing thing I have ever done in my life, because of my immaturity in this work. Holding that first HIV-positive, transgender sex slave in Svay Pak, unsure of what to do about her tremendous display of vulnerability, keen to help in any way I could, in my mind I had whispered, Give your pain to me, I can handle it. Give it to me. Now my own grandiosity took my breath away. Although it was well-intentioned, it was nothing less than overweening hubris! When I put all of this together, lying on the carpeted floor, words rushed to my mind: The Lamb of God is the One who takes on our suffering, having chosen to die that we might live. Cast all your care upon Him, for He cares for you.
I had felt the unmistakable presence of the Holy Spirit a lot on this trip, especially (strangely, perhaps) when I invited Her into the most desolate places. In the Pattaya bar, as I prayed upon entering, the power of the Holy Spirit was so instant, so enormous, characterized inadequately as a rushing wind, that I nearly dropped to my knees right then. I wish I had; it was obviously what I needed. I also saw God in action among the wat grannies and the gentle monks of Lopburi. But I hadn’t seen a lot of God in my bedroom. There, my self-will had cut me off from the sunlight of the Spirit.
I was reminded of one of my favorite pieces of scripture, an especially powerful series of verses, from Ephesians. It is about how to prepare for spiritual warfare—and make no mistake about it, that is what this was:
Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God …
Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness;
And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace;
Above all, taking the shield of faith …
And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God
I needed God’s armor. My thinking had become distorted; pain had tricked my heart into taking on God’s work, confusing it with my own. Seane was right: I could be God’s light, but I could not work out each person’s salvation. I could not rescue each person
. I could not heal them. Only God could. I repeated it over and over like a mantra, with my legs up the wall, a washcloth over my eyes, as I buckled down to wait out my own dark night of the soul.
As soon as the sun was up, I called Kate and told her I needed a doctor to settle my turbulent gut. I had obligations to meet, including an appointment with the prime minister of Thailand that afternoon. By midmorning it appeared that everyone in the hotel knew I was ill. When I called room service for ginger tea, they asked what else they could do to help me feel better. Housekeeping sent me pink lotuses and a get-well card. The hotel sent a Western-style doctor to my room who prescribed a typical round of pills that suppressed symptoms. Meanwhile, Kate tracked down a wonderful Chinese doctor who used acupuncture to calm my stomach. He determined that the heat had done me in, and I had to agree. It had all been a little too hot, too emotional, too intense. But I wouldn’t have changed a thing. I started taking his herbs and ignored the other doctor’s advice—except for his suggestion to eat warm chocolate pudding, my ultimate comfort food, so associated with Mamaw and Papaw, and those tender, musical summer nights in eastern Kentucky. God, it was delicious, and it was all I could keep down. I put on a clean white cotton nightgown and waited. Healing became merely a matter of time.