All That Is Bitter and Sweet (20 page)

We drove a few hours north of Bangkok into some low, verdant mountains to reach our first destination, Wat Phra Bat Nam Phu, an AIDS hospice run by Buddhist monks in the village of Lopburi. As we arrived, I saw a Buddha rising through the trees above a hillside monastery, radiant in his loving, benevolent smile. I figured he must be delighted with the monks who lived and worked in the whitewashed buildings below, because they were the embodiment of kindness, compassion, sympathy, and equanimity—the four tenets of Therevada Buddhism.

We entered through a spired archway and were greeted by the abbot, an energetic, round-faced, middle-aged man in saffron robes whose ordained name is Alongkot Dikkapanyo. His warm, scholarly manner made me think of him as “Professor Monk,” and indeed, he was highly educated, with a master’s in engineering. Along with him was Father Michael Bassano, a Maryknoll priest from upstate New York who volunteered at the hospice. In 1992, while visiting a local hospital to comfort the sick, the abbot met a man in the last stages of AIDS who had been abandoned by his family. He held the man’s hand as he died and in that moment decided to establish a hospice for AIDS victims at his monastery. There was so much need. In Thailand, the stigma of the virus was so great that as soon as a person was diagnosed with HIV/AIDS, he or she was shunned by the whole family and cast into the street. Many made arduous treks across Thailand, hoping to arrive in time not to die alone. Some were so frail and exhausted from the journey, they literally crawled the final mile up the hill to the temple.

The original hospice had eight beds for full-blown AIDS patients. Now it was a four-hundred-bed complex with four floors of patients and a waiting list thousands of names long. The hospice had never received funding from the government. It relied on donations from tourists, corporations, and NGOs like PSI. By 2004, the understanding of AIDS had improved, but the stigma had not abated. Father Michael presided over the cremations of those who died in their care. Afterward, the ashes were scooped into small plastic sacks and marked with the names and dates of death. If they were rejected by the families—and almost all were—the ash sacks were placed alongside an enormous Buddha in an open-air temple on the grounds. I was deeply moved to be invited to sit in prayer and meditation with the monks and Father Michael as we joined in perfect ecumenical observance to pray for the souls of the dead, each of us according to our faith. I placed my hands in prayer at my heart, as I had been taught as a small child in Sunday school, chin lowered. Thousands of sacks of human remains towered before me, a monument to the heartbreak of AIDS.

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.

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 scripture “Be still and know that I am God.”