The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Top ten reasons we'd Work For Diddy. Plus: Spaced and Olbermann invade The Soup and Mr. Spock gets all wicky-wack.
I told myself my faith had just retracted into safety, like a hermit crab into its shell. But really, it was eroding. What if the Jerry Falwells are right? I thought. What if God really gives people's bodies these delicate, needy parts and their brains these ferocious desires, and then punishes them for seeking satisfaction? And what if my new friends were right? What if God the Father was a tool of the patriarchy propagated to replace and destroy pagan worship of the Mother Earth?
Both answers sounded absurd. But then, so did my Church of Me, when I thought about it. What are the odds that the almighty and actual God, assuming there is one, has positions on political issues like gays and abortion, or that, if He does, those positions align with the hopeful musings of an eleven-year-old in Pearland, TX? Hadn't I just made up the answers I wanted to be true? Was anybody else doing anything more?
Sam had her own answers to these questions. Like me, she'd been religious from an early age, but we searched for God in slightly different ways. I became a district representative for my youth group; she dropped acid in cornfields. As a teenager, she hopscotched through the best rehab facilities of the Midwest and, along the way, met a therapist who became her mentor. In time, the mentor asked if Sam would like to meet her guru. Sam said hell yes.
Sam's guru's name is Mata Amritanandamayi Devi, which means "Mother of Absolute Bliss," but she goes by Amma, or Mother. In the West, she's known as the Hugging Saint because, in addition to heading one of the world's major charities, Amma spends most of her time giving hugs. Her hugs are her blessing, and they supposedly communicate her complete, divine, maternal love for her children, a.k.a. everybody.
Her website, Amma.org, estimates she's hugged twenty-five million people.
Her birthplace and home are in India, but she spends part of each year in the United States, visiting convention centers and hotel ballrooms where she hugs thousands of strangers, one after another, for hours at a time. Her website, Amma.org, estimates she's hugged twenty-five million people.
Amma sounded wonderful in theory, but when Sam asked if I wanted to meet her, I balked. As long as Amma was hypothetical, I could remain pleasantly neutral about her. I could hear stories about her without judgment or commitment. But if I met her, I'd form an opinion whether I wanted to or not. What if she just seemed like a nice lady — or worse, struck me as a fraud? And what were the odds that she could possibly seem otherwise?
Still, we'd been dating for about three months, and were at the point in the relationship where our ideas of one another were beginning to settle into reality — where, "she loves dogs" becomes "she lets the dog sleep between us." Asking me to meet Amma was risky on her part; agreeing to was risky on mine.
Two women in white greeted us at the door to the ashram. One handed me a number like the kind you take at a bakery. She explained that when the time came for Amma to give hugs, I would watch for my number range to be displayed, then I'd line up. "Is this your first time to meet Mother?" she asked me.
"Um, yes," I said. She grinned and stuck a yellow sticker on my shirt. She beamed.
"Don't lose that ticket," Sam said. I pocketed it. "And take your shoes off," she added. A salmagundi of shoes and sandals filled the shoe racks against the back wall and spilled onto the floor. I kicked off my Chucks and looked around. The back and sides of the room were filled with tables topped with science-fair-style displays, which were covered by bed sheets. In the middle, a dense crowd was seated on the floor. Many were wearing billowing white or khaki, or pastel yoga garb, but some were dressed like me, in jeans, like spectators rather than participants.
Then I saw her.
Sam, who shuffled and slouched through life, was sitting up perfectly straight, like a meerkat wearing a seatbelt.
I wouldn't have known or even guessed it was her if I hadn't seen pictures in Sam's room of the Divine Mother, sitting just like this: on a small pallet in the middle of a stage, wearing a white cotton sari. She was little, round and brown, with chipmunk cheeks and her black hair pulled back in a plain bun. She was adorable. I smiled almost involuntarily.
We tiptoed across the grounded crowd and wedged ourselves into semi-adjacent puddles of carpet. I could fold my bony ankles under my thighs or sit up straight, but not both. Sam, however, who shuffled and slouched through life, whose posture invited eyes to keep moving, was sitting up perfectly straight, like a meerkat wearing a seatbelt.
