different kind of people in a strange place than I did, people more at ease in their skins, people like the musicians and the trapeze artists who were after some erotic moment in which sensitivity and action fit perfectly together. Minty, striking up conversations and traveling with half the luggage I thought essential, opened up my life on that trip. Compared to him, I had been very crudely in pursuit of what life offered.
It was with Minty that I quit trying to know and began trying to be, is one way to put it. It was with Minty that I came to understand that you cannot eliminate evil through reorganization. “You think like a commando,” he told me once. “With you it is always strategic this and tactical that. We are not at war, my friend.” And then he’d laugh.
Laughter—that was something I had entirely missed, to find hilarity inside the grotesque. It did not come overnight, the transformation this insight precipitated. Indeed, in the beginning I thought something had been taken away from me. And then I worried that my urge to laugh was actually a sign of indifference or madness. If the suffering is so funny, I would wonder, why do we bother with compassion? You can see, possibly, that I was almost getting it. When I lay awake at night I would try to remember, for example, whether Job had ever laughed.
That was a long time ago, years when I felt the world was tipping over and that only I and a few others were keeping it from breaking completely apart. Minty died of hepatitis B in the same month my oldest brother was killed fighting alongside Cuban soldiers in Angola. I am not ashamed to say I missed Minty more. He made his life up out of almost nothing. No appetite, no idea seemed to possess him. My brother was a reminder of a family where each sibling was the aggressive missionary of his own truth, and no one of us wanted to be the other’s convert.
Minty had nothing to sell.
These were the long middle years of reassessment for me. I quit the Red Cross and, for reasons I cannot entirely understand even now, entered Union Theological Seminary in New York. I had been raised Roman Catholic but had drifted far from that practice. For me, Christianity operated like an irascible and reactionary parent. It didn’t want to make the acquaintance of anyone outside its own neighborhood; it didn’t want to face overpopulation if that would mean contraception or abortion; and it threw its hands up over the liberation theology of Gustavo Gutiérrez and the process theology of John Cobb and Thomas Berry. Talk of the rewards of the earth set it to drumming its fingers on the table, impatient as it was for the rewards of heaven.
Christianity as a philosophy, however, also vigorously championed the ideals I had so ferociously embraced as a youth—compassion, forgiveness, spiritual ecstasy. At the seminary I kept my distance from the rituals of Christianity, but I read closely the work of spiritual scholars like Elaine Pagels and Leonardo Boff and novelists like Shūsaku Endō and Graham Greene. I was trying to penetrate to the roots of what I might claim as my own: the meaning of sacrifice, the passion of the historical Jesus.
I took with me the question of a passionate altruism and a nonreligious devotion to the Divine, but put the seminary, with what I felt were its detachments from the world, behind me.
I went to San Francisco, where a friend from college living in the East Bay needed a house sitter. I spent my nights in a few clubs in Oakland where the music was very good, some jazz trios right up there with the ones Minty and I heard on our first trip to Paris, and during the day I gravitated toward the Oakland docks. I was feeding the romance of shipping out, and when my friend returned, I did. I sailed with containerized cargo for Inchon, three hours before sunrise on a cold, wet night, with no plan but to keep going.
Ships’ crews are rough and cynical. It’s another sort of destitution than I’d known,
It was with Minty that I quit trying to know and began trying to be, is one way to put it. It was with Minty that I came to understand that you cannot eliminate evil through reorganization. “You think like a commando,” he told me once. “With you it is always strategic this and tactical that. We are not at war, my friend.” And then he’d laugh.
Laughter—that was something I had entirely missed, to find hilarity inside the grotesque. It did not come overnight, the transformation this insight precipitated. Indeed, in the beginning I thought something had been taken away from me. And then I worried that my urge to laugh was actually a sign of indifference or madness. If the suffering is so funny, I would wonder, why do we bother with compassion? You can see, possibly, that I was almost getting it. When I lay awake at night I would try to remember, for example, whether Job had ever laughed.
That was a long time ago, years when I felt the world was tipping over and that only I and a few others were keeping it from breaking completely apart. Minty died of hepatitis B in the same month my oldest brother was killed fighting alongside Cuban soldiers in Angola. I am not ashamed to say I missed Minty more. He made his life up out of almost nothing. No appetite, no idea seemed to possess him. My brother was a reminder of a family where each sibling was the aggressive missionary of his own truth, and no one of us wanted to be the other’s convert.
Minty had nothing to sell.
These were the long middle years of reassessment for me. I quit the Red Cross and, for reasons I cannot entirely understand even now, entered Union Theological Seminary in New York. I had been raised Roman Catholic but had drifted far from that practice. For me, Christianity operated like an irascible and reactionary parent. It didn’t want to make the acquaintance of anyone outside its own neighborhood; it didn’t want to face overpopulation if that would mean contraception or abortion; and it threw its hands up over the liberation theology of Gustavo Gutiérrez and the process theology of John Cobb and Thomas Berry. Talk of the rewards of the earth set it to drumming its fingers on the table, impatient as it was for the rewards of heaven.
Christianity as a philosophy, however, also vigorously championed the ideals I had so ferociously embraced as a youth—compassion, forgiveness, spiritual ecstasy. At the seminary I kept my distance from the rituals of Christianity, but I read closely the work of spiritual scholars like Elaine Pagels and Leonardo Boff and novelists like Shūsaku Endō and Graham Greene. I was trying to penetrate to the roots of what I might claim as my own: the meaning of sacrifice, the passion of the historical Jesus.
I took with me the question of a passionate altruism and a nonreligious devotion to the Divine, but put the seminary, with what I felt were its detachments from the world, behind me.
I went to San Francisco, where a friend from college living in the East Bay needed a house sitter. I spent my nights in a few clubs in Oakland where the music was very good, some jazz trios right up there with the ones Minty and I heard on our first trip to Paris, and during the day I gravitated toward the Oakland docks. I was feeding the romance of shipping out, and when my friend returned, I did. I sailed with containerized cargo for Inchon, three hours before sunrise on a cold, wet night, with no plan but to keep going.
Ships’ crews are rough and cynical. It’s another sort of destitution than I’d known,
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