Rosa came up and hugged her, and there was another bow from my daughter toward another holy man, more nervous this time, as if she were in awe. She was right: the beach was no place for any kind of open conversation. By unspoken agreement we angled up toward the main road and crossed it, then continued along a side street, shaded by eucalyptus trees and lined on both sides with cars parked so close to one another their bumpers were almost kissing.
“I can’t speak,” Anna Lisa said. “Really. I’m so excited I can’t get words to come out of my mouth. The two holiest men of our time! Four of the five people on earth who mean the most to me, and all together in my city!”
“We are also excited,” the Dalai Lama said, but these words came out with all the thrill and spark of someone asking for the olive oil at the dinner table. He was a kind man, kind, wise, exceedingly joyful it seemed to me. But he didn’t seem to have a setting for “excited,” not in our sense. It was a Buddhist thing, I decided. I’d heard the word “equanimity” thrown around. It wasn’t a word you heard very often in Catholic circles, and not a trait that seemed particularly suited to the Italian way of life, with its great sweeps of emotion, effusive warmth, moods of historical despair. All this made me wonder, as we walked along Rimini’s quiet side streets, what my daughter saw in the alien faith.
Anna Lisa had always liked to talk. As a little girl she’d sometimes wake up, already babbling in her bed, and go through an entire breakfast with barely a pause for breath, recounting her unbelievably elaborate dreams in unbelievably elaborate detail—“And, Mommy, then an animal, like a giant dog, came out of the trees and the animal came up and sat next to me and babbo, and she started brushing my hair with the hairbrush nonna gave me, except it tickled so much I started to laugh, and then the animal started to laugh, it was like a big fluffy dog only it had the face of a cat…” And so on.
How was a person like that going to make a three-year silent retreat?
As our odd fivesome went along the shaded streets I listened to her, letting the sound of her voice make a warm vapor around my heart.
“I feel like I should get down on my knees or bow or something,” she was saying.
“Exactly what we don’t want,” the Pope told her. “Your father and mother have arranged for us to be ordinary human beings for a few days. No fuss.”
“The world is looking for you, frantically.”
“We know,” the Pope and Dalai said at the same time.
She turned around and glanced at me over her shoulder. “It’s freaky seeing you like that, Pa. Not to mention you, Your Holinesses. Did Mom’s people do you?”
“Mario.”
“I love Mario!”
“Is he the fifth person?” I asked, somewhat surprised that she knew him. “You said you were with four of your five favorite people.”
A blush, uncharacteristic.
“A boyfriend?” Rosa guessed.
Anna Lisa nodded.
“Serious?”
“We’ve been dating for months but I’m private about these things. You know how I am, right, Pa? He’s Buddhist, Your Holiness. We met at his meditation center.” She turned to the Pope. “I’m sorry, Holy Father. I still pray to Mary, still sometimes go to Mass. I don’t find the two faiths contradictory at all.”
“I was hoping you’d talk to us about that,” the Pope said. “I couldn’t possibly have such a conversation with any other young person on earth.”
Her beautiful smile shrank almost to a pout. She pursed her lips and squeezed her eyebrows together. “I respect you so much,” she said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You couldn’t possibly.”
I had the sense of trouble coming, a premonition that I should reach my hand forward and place it on Anna Lisa’s shoulder, to calm her, to warn her, or that I should ask how the local soccer team was doing, shift the conversation to lunch, pizza, chicken cacciatore, could we have some wine? But I was preoccupied, turning my head left and right, alert for an army lieutenant or a police captain who was hoping to spot the kidnapped Pope, bring the kidnapper into custody, and take home the reward. It’s not the easiest thing, being wanted by an entire nation, by much of the world. Kidnapping a pope in Italy was a capital offense, worse, even, than blowing up a vodka distillery in Belarus or setting off stink bombs in the bordellos of Amsterdam. One might associate those national treasures with sin, but the Pope—Italian or not—carried the lamp of sinlessness through the bel paese. This Pope, especially, was beloved. His kidnapper would be seen as a friend of the devil.
“The rules, mainly,” Anna Lisa said, unapologetically. “The sexual rules. Birth control, premarital love. But other things as well. Women’s roles. I’m sorry.”
“You shouldn’t be. These are issues that should be discussed openly.”
“But it’s not just the rules. The Buddhists—” she stopped and glanced at the Dalai Lama—“correct me if I’m wrong, but they have an approach to life that makes sense to me. They believe in reincarnation, for one thing, which explains a lot of the apparent unfairness in the world. But even without that…they have techniques for calming the mind, and I know we—you—have prayer and so on, and going to Mass, but that can be like checking off a list to prove you’re a good person. People go to Mass and come out and act exactly as bad as they did before they went in.”
“Not all people.”
“No, of course not. But if you’re addicted, say, or if you’re prone to anger, or afraid of something, Buddhist meditation seems to get right down into that place and help you fix it. I love that, I love the calm of that kind of prayer.”
“We have centering prayer,” the Pope said. “The Rosary. In our monasteries we have a long tradition of contemplative prayer, Lectio Divina, and so on.”
“I know. Those things are almost the same, and actually I combine aspects of the two faiths all the time. I’ll say five Hail Marys and then do a Dzogchen meditation!”
“Ah,” the Dalai Lama said, as if that word meant something to him.
“Sounds like you have a bee in your mouth,” I said.
“It’s Tibetan, Pa. A tradition of Buddhism. Dzogchen. It came from Padmasambhava.”
“Yes, of course, Padmasambhava,” I said, as if I’d heard of her. One does not want to look stupid in front of one’s child.
“Dzogchen means ‘the Great Perfection.’ It’s so wonderful!” She turned and walked backward, facing the Dalai Lama, all reticence gone now. “I was thinking, I’m sorry Your Holiness, when I heard you were here I was thinking you could give me one word of guidance.”
I watched my cousin’s face, searching amid the blond hair for signs of distress. Here was my daughter, practically a niece to him, raised Catholic, and right in front of him she was praising another faith, and asking for spiritual guidance from an alien master. He’d said it didn’t bother him, that he wanted an open conversation. I wondered if he’d expected one this open.
“Why is it so bad to pray both ways?” Rosa asked, when the Dalai Lama seemed to hesitate.
“Not bad!” the Dalai Lama exclaimed. “Buddhism doesn’t require you to leave your faith. It does not mean leaving Christ, just the opposite. It means a way to know Christ better!”
“But you would never say something like that, would you, Holy Father? A Catholic couldn’t speak that way about another religion.”
Now the Pope did shift his gait in an uncomfortable way. I could see the muscles of his face flex—when something was bothering him, he had the habit of puffing a little air into his cheeks, keeping his lips closed tightly and squinting his eyes. It made him look angry, though I’m sure he wasn’t. “No,” he admitted. “For us, as you know, there was one Son of God sent to earth. Buddha we can acknowledge as a special man, but a man, not a divinity. No offense meant, Tenzin.”
The Dalai Lama laughed. “Buddha, I think, does not care too much what we call him. ‘Divinity’ is not what he could want people to say.”
“But we care, Tenzin.
I’m sorry. I respect every faith, as I’ve said publicly, and many times. We have complete respect for sincere seekers in all traditions. I’m not in the business of convincing people to become Catholics. I’ve said that, too. But I’m afraid this is one point where we can’t find common ground. In the style of prayer, yes, of course, we can learn from you. I’ve said as much. And Anna, I understand completely why certain ancient rules would be problematic, and why you’d be drawn to this kind of interior prayer. I pray that way myself, in fact, though in a Christian version. I know the benefits. But Christ’s unique divinity—we can’t rewrite that. If we believe in the Resurrection, we can’t compare him to anyone, not even Buddha.”
A difficult silence fell across our little group. I could hear echoes of history’s thunderous clashes, the sacred bloodlust, the insistence on victory, not peace. From an early age we pledged ourselves to a certain system of belief—usually because our parents had embraced it—and its codes were then etched into the walls of our brains and hearts. We defended those codes, argued for them, fought for them, devoted ourselves to them. And that led some of us to salvation…and others to war.
Anna Lisa made a right turn and stopped in front of a building with maroon-and-gold trim around the door. From the street we’d just left came the blast of a police klaxon, rising, then fading away—“the song of suffering,” my mother had always called it. “When you hear that sound, someone, somewhere, is suffering.” She’d encouraged us to say a silent prayer for them, so I did that. But I was wondering, at the same time, how close the police might be to catching us.
The Dalai Lama said, “I say sometimes now, ‘My religion is kindness,’ because to say other things only divides people. All peoples can be kind. Those who worship Christ, Buddha, Mohammed…the Hindus, the atheists. This, I think, makes for less anger. Less hatred.”
Anna Lisa, carrying her mother’s gene for bluntness, could not be stopped. “You’re both so wonderful, so beloved. But, Your Holiness, I have to say that sometimes what’s hard for me is that there didn’t seem to be much warmth to the Buddha. He was a great teacher, he seemed like he truly cared about people, but I hear a coldness in his words that I don’t like. I guess I’d prefer to have a personal figure who went around teaching and hugging.”
“Christ wept when his friend died,” my cousin put in hopefully.
“He did, yes. That’s what I’m saying, I guess, Uncle Giorgio. I like the internal aspects of Buddhism and the external aspects of Christianity. People accuse me of having a ‘cafeteria faith,’ taking a little of this and a little of that. I guess I don’t see what’s wrong with the cafeteria idea.”
I could sense that the Holy Father wanted to say something else then, but he and the Dalai Lama had learned to keep their voices from being heard, and a few people were coming up the walk and heading for the doorway, so the conversation evaporated. At that moment I wasn’t concerned with the religious differences. I was thinking about the siren, about being found and apprehended, and it was casting a shadow across the sunny pleasure of being with my daughter. Something else was on my mind, too: the sense—vague, and oddly disconcerting, spawned by my early-morning conversation with the Pope—that a new spiritual challenge waited for us another few hours down the road. The hand of history, it felt like. The hope for a grand reconciliation, or at least a step into some new territory. Twenty years earlier there had been a Vatican-sponsored colloquium that examined the “shared concerns” of Catholics and Buddhists. But the idea of shared concerns was one thing—dry, intellectual, official. What I was thinking about felt more personal than that, more immediate: if smart, good young people like Anna Lisa were mixing traditions and gaining in peace and faith…if the Pope and the Dalai Lama had been brought together for some purpose larger than a simple road trip…if Rosa and I had a small role to play in that…well, it unnerved me.
“This will be pretty short,” Anna Lisa said, opening the gold-trimmed door. “Twenty minutes or so of meditation, then Piero talks for a while. That’s it. Can you manage it, Pa?”
“Of course,” I said. “I’m insulted that you even have to ask.”
“Well, you’re not exactly the kind of guy who sits still a lot.”
Over the years of being a father it had occurred to me, more than once, that children are mirrors. They show us to ourselves. We go along for two or three decades just being who we are, accustomed to our foibles and quirks, our flaws, blind to them, perhaps arguing about them with a spouse, but basically certain we’re okay as is. And then this other being comes into our life. We have ten years or so when they’re blind, too, loving, accepting, watching with an uncritical eye, having nothing against which to compare the king and queen who rule over them. And then they break out of the eggshell of family life. They gain their own perspective. They begin to see you critically—too critically at first, perhaps. They shed a light. Until that moment I’d never really thought of myself as being the kind of guy who has trouble sitting still, but as we stepped through the painted door, me with a small sting on the skin of my brain, a tiny emotional concussion, I decided it was probably true.
The interior of the building was composed of a large room with black meditation cushions set in four even rows, a low stage up front with a door behind, and two well-used sofas guarding the back wall. A nice-looking, wide-shouldered young man in a maroon robe sat cross-legged on the stage, one of the black cushions beneath him. Anna Lisa waved to him; she seemed completely at ease. “Sit wherever you’re comfortable,” she told us. Another few seconds and she’d left us, chosen one of the cushions, and was crossing her legs and settling herself. The Dalai Lama, still wearing the oversized sunglasses, which were even more ridiculous now that we were indoors, walked up and took the cushion next to her. Rosa ventured a step in that direction, then thought better of it, made a U-turn, and sat on one of the couches. The Pope sat to her left. I took my place beside her on the right.
We waited a minute for things to get started. Another handful of people came through the door. No one spoke. Most of them sat on the cushions, but one rather elderly woman took the last seat on our couch, to my right.
“Allora,” the young man up front said, lifting his face to us. This is a commonly used but untranslatable Italian word that means something like “okay” or “all right now” or “here we go” or “so…,” depending on the circumstance, but it always points a short distance into the future. “Allora, let’s add up your bill.” “Allora, let’s stop talking and get to work.” “Allora, let me show you something now.” The young man’s spine was as straight as a streetlight, his hands cupped in his lap, and his Italian bore a slight Romagnolo accent. “Per quelli che non sanno…for those of you who don’t know, I’m Piero. Welcome, everybody. We’ll sit quietly for twenty minutes and then I’ll say a few words, and that’s all that goes on here. Our motto is ‘No fuss.’ We come together like this every day, and twice a day on the weekends, and you’re welcome to join us as often or as infrequently as you like.”
A little bit different from the Catholic message, I thought. No pressure. It wasn’t a mortal sin if you missed services. The whole easygoing feel was slightly awkward and alien for me, however—the robe, the cushions, the cross-legged sitting. Still, it seemed to make my daughter happy, and to a father, what matters more than that?
It soon became apparent that everyone else in the room had closed his or her eyes and was sitting quietly. I looked at the Pope, who seemed comfortable enough. Rosa had her eyes closed, too, and appeared to be mouthing a prayer, or lyrics from a favorite song, so I closed my eyes and listened to Piero giving final instructions, “Just watch your thoughts and find something to come back to—your breath, a mantra, the image of someone you love. Just do that over and over again when your mind wanders, and see if you can allow it to settle. Let’s begin.”
We began. Or they began. I immediately opened my eyes again and looked around the room. A soccer ball in one corner—that was a bit odd. Curtained windows
. A table with a neat stack of books. The Buddha statue behind Piero made me think back to the Mussolini bust in the restaurant in L’Aquila. I don’t mean that in an irreverent way; they just seemed to be made of a similar material—brass, or imitation brass, or gold-painted wood—and to be positioned similarly, observing all who entered. I watched my daughter, thought about the “not exactly the kind of guy who sits still” remark. I looked at the Dalai Lama, perched cross-legged on his cushion and apparently not breathing. I glanced again at the Pope, at Rosa. The woman next to me coughed and I wondered if she was upset at me for my lack of stillness, so I closed my eyes, took a breath, and tried to settle my mind.
For a short time when I was a boy—between the ages of eight and ten—my parents owned a dog. The dog was called Pazzo, which, in Italian, means “crazy.” Pazzo was appropriately named. He was a small mongrel with curly white hair and a square snout, and he was a prime example of the kind of dog that is constitutionally unable to be still. Pazzo heard noises where no noises existed. He’d rush to the front door and bark, and his bark was the quintessence of annoyance, a high-pitched yap-yap-yap that went on and on as if marking the passing half seconds. Then, suddenly, he’d think he heard something at the back door, and he’d race across the tiles, toenails ticking, and put his forelegs up on the screen and yap there, on and on. Then he’d jump up on the couch and look out the window—more yapping. Finally, someone on the verge of a nervous breakdown would let him outside, and he’d race over to the metal fence and yap furiously at the dog next door, an eerily peaceful golden retriever named Cielo, or “sky.” Cielo would languidly turn her head, rest her eyes on the yapping Pazzo just long enough to ascertain that the fence between them was intact, the territorial boundary impenetrable, and then she’d set her head peacefully on her forelegs until Pazzo exhausted himself and gave up. But, though he’d stopped barking for a minute, Pazzo hadn’t truly given up, and he was far from exhausted. He’d race around to the front gate chasing a real or imaginary bird, or he’d sniff something on the breeze—anything, another dog, a cat, a pasta Bolognese being cooked five blocks away—and bark crazily about that.
The Delight of Being Ordinary Page 15