Friday's here again (and we beat Harvard)
Some random notes from the climate fight, and the next three chapters of The Other Cheek.
It’s been a grueling summer across North America, but autumn is coming--at least to the northern mountains. I took that picture a day or two ago, at the end of a short hike; I’m leaving this morning for a longer one, three days of bushwhacking off trail through the birch and beech and maple. Which explains why this Friday post comes to you a little earlier in the day than usual.
As I explained last week, these Friday sessions will be more informal and scattered than the newsletter on other days--it’s a time for catching up, within the community. For now they’re free just like the posts on other days; but beginning in October they’ll be for subscribers only, a little bonus.
Anyway, a few things of note this week, before we get back to the novel
+Can’t help noting one more time that the climate movement, after a decade of hard work, forced Harvard--the world’s richest university yesterday--to divest its massive endowment from fossil fuels. It’s one more signal accomplishment in what may be the largest anti-corporate campaign in history, with over $15 trillion in endowments and portfolios joining in. Such credit to all who fought so long and so hard, especially the students from @divestharvard
+The good people at the Carbon Tracker Initiative in London have an important new paper, arguing persuasively that in the six years since Paris the price of renewable energy has fallen so far that our story about the future should shift a little: “Mitigating climate change is no longer an expensive collective action problem; it is a technology revolution with enormous wealth-generating and redistributive potential.”
+A remarkable report from the Indigenous Environmental Network and Oil Change International found that resistance led by indigenous groups has derailed enough fossil expansion plans to Indigenous resistance to stop greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least one-quarter of annual U.S. and Canadian emissions.
+The Pope, the Orthodox patriarch, and the Anglican archbishop of Canterbury walked into a bar…No, they released a joint letter demanding swift action on the climate crisis. “This is a critical moment. Our children’s future and the future of our common home depend on it.”
+A new study finds that universities that divest from fossil fuels improve their rank in global academic standings. Doing good by doing right!
+200 of the world’s medical journals combined to publish a joint editorial pointing out that the climate crisis is the greatest threat to global health
+The Green Party is surging in Norway’s election polls, on the promise of ending oil exploration in the northernmost (and most beguiling) petrostate
+New data shows Alaska and New Jersey have heated faster than any other states
+Climate activists, including the filmmaker Josh Fox, are working to relieve New Orleans’ power woes by bringing in solar arrays. Meanwhile the intrepid energy reporter Antonia Juhasz traveled to Louisiana’s Cancer Alley to chronicle the devastation from Ida in that beleaguered territory.
+In one of those “should be in a novel but sadly isn’t” vignettes, the ski resorts in the mountains around Lake Tahoe have been using their snow guns to try and fight the massive wildfire threatening the lakeshore.
And now, speaking of novels, here’s the next installment of The Other Cheek.
If you missed the first 3 chapters you can catch up here.
Dusk was falling as the march neared the outskirts of Mandi, where traffic on the road was growing denser. They were not the only ones walking—small knots of men and women carrying statues came by in the opposite direction.
“Shivaratri Fair,” one of the DL’s aides was explaining. “They call Mandi the ‘Benares of the Hills.’ The Hindus have 80 or 90 different temples up here, each with its own cult. And once a year all the idols have to go visit the Madho Rai temple and bow down to Vishnu—he’s a gold Vishnu. And then they all come to the fairgrounds, and it’s a eight-day party, at the Paddal, where the Beas and the Suketri flow together. There are people from all over the Kangra. From the Punjab even.”
As he talked twenty long-haired men, stripped to the waist even in the chill, strode by, carrying a spangled deity on a pair of poles on their shoulders. The statue showed a woman with a crescent moon resting on her hair, in her raised right hand a club.
“Is that Devi Baglamukhi,” the DL asked one of the men.
“Yes,” he said as he hurried by. “From the temple at Bankhandi.”
“A very interesting deity,” the DL said to Loksak, who had taken the flag from him for the evening. “You see that with her left hand she is pulling out the tongue of that demon?” he asked. “She has the power to silence anyone. She is very powerful. She can turn each thing into its opposite—power into weakness, defeat into victory. Or to say it another way, she can see the victory hidden inside defeat. She understands that things are not what they seem.”
“But we are Buddhists, and she is Hindu,” said Lopsak.
“True,” said the DL. “But Buddhism and Hinduism are neighbors. And since you are a rapper musician, you should be very careful of anyone who can pull your tongue out.”
Their small party reached a guesthouse owned by a Tibetan exile—prayer flags hung in the evening air from the balconies of the two-story brick building. Word had clearly spread about their approach; a dozen people were lined up outside the door, most holding white katha scarfs to be blessed.
The first, owner of the house, murmured his greeting, bowing. “Your holiness, we welcome you.” Second and third in line were two old women, each too overcome to speak, trying to prostrate themselves. The DL pulled each one up, clasping both their hands in his, and to each spoke a short blessing.
The fourth greeter, a young man with a scratchy beard, held out the white katha in both hands, but as the monk approached he let the scarf drop. And in his right hand was a dull-gray pistol which he pointed at the DL’s chest.
“Your Holiness, I’m going to kill you,” he blurted.
“Okay,” said the Dalai Lama, who stood still, save for holding up his left hand to restrain Lopsak, who was starting to move toward them.
“I’m going to kill you because . . . you’re betraying Tibet,” the young man said, sounding less defiant with every syllable.
“That’s okay.”
The young man stood there, arm outstretched, for a few seconds, and then slowly started to droop. “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t.”
“That’s okay,” said the Dalai Lama, and he took the gun from his hand. “Don’t be ashamed. It’s hard for a Tibetan to kill the Dalai Lama. But I could do it.” He pointed the gun at his temple and smiled. “Let’s go inside and talk. And if, after we talk, you still think it would be better if I were dead then I will do it for you. Okay? Lopsak, help us here.”
The caterer’s assistant, and another young monk, half-carried the young man—who had gone nearly limp—into the guesthouse. The formal front room was lit by candles on an altar at its end, an altar with a golden Buddha statue, a photo of the Dalai Lama as a younger man, and another of the 10th Karmapa. They sat in the flickering light, the would-be assassin slumped at the end of a bench across from the DL, who was still holding the pistol—holding it in both hands as if he’d just gotten it as a gift.
“So tell me again why you wanted to kill me,” he asked, but the boy—in the light it was clear how scratchy his beard really was—just stared.
“Well then, tell me where your parents were from in Tibet,” he said.
“My grandparents. Chamdo. They left when they were young,” he said.
“Chamdo,” the Dalai Lama said, and waited. When the boy stayed silent, the DL said, “I’ve always wanted to land at the airport the Chinese built at Chamdo. They say it is the highest in the world. The runway is miles long, because there’s so little air pressure to slow the plane.”
“Why weren’t you even scared when I was going to shoot you?” the boy said suddenly, speaking in a rush.
“Actually, I was a little scared—I’m an ordinary monk,” the Dalai Lama said. “But monks spend a long time meditating every day. I get up at 3 in the morning to meditate. And do you know what we spend a long time meditating about, maybe more than anything else? About dying. Here’s what I think about it: Everyone will die, and only the time of death is unpredictable. Not a single individual will avoid death. We cannot hide in the mountains, or deep in the sea. It doesn’t matter how brave we are, death will find us. Most of us accept that, but since we don’t know when it will come we tend to think of it always as some ways off. If we think about it we know it gets closer all the time— years are consumed by months, months are consumed by days, and the day is consumed by hours. Our lives are a few hours shorter now than they were at lunch today.
“It could happen at any time. The body is like a machine, and machines can break. Our heart has to beat many times every minute, and it could always just stop. Mine almost did when I saw this gun.
“But if you have made your mind familiar with this process, at the time of death when it actually takes place you will be able to handle it, and you will face death contentedly. Or so is the theory. I am grateful to you for letting me find out that I need a little more meditation, because part of me was very scared.”
The boy was more alert now, his posture straightening. “I was going to kill you because they said you were going to surrender to the Chinese. We must fight the Chinese.”
“Many people, maybe most people, will agree with you,” said the DL, still holding the gun. “People have an idea about the proper way to fight, usually with a gun. They’ve seen that’s that how the Chinese fight, when they shoot monks or burn monasteries. At Chamdo, in the 1950s, they fought the Tibet Army and they won. I think that is probably when your grandparents came to India.
“But if you are going to fight, maybe it is not the best idea to choose the weapon of the other side. The People’s Liberation Army has two and a half million soldiers, the biggest military force in the world. There are three million Tibetans in Tibet, maybe. If each Chinese soldier shot just one Tibetan, there would be almost none of us left. I am not a gambler but even if I were those do not seem like good odds to me. So maybe I have given up, at least on the idea that we can tell the Chinese what to do. If you take a gun like this and sneak across the border and kill a few of their soldiers, they will kill far more Tibetans. That is the kind of trouble they are good at handling.”
“So you’re surrendering?”
“I’m walking back. I don’t know what will come of it. Not a Tibet free from the Chinese. But maybe they will have to react somehow. It’s like throwing a rock in the pond—where it was smooth before now there are ripples heading out. You don’t know what they will stir up. Maybe nothing, except an old man walking. You’re welcome to come.”
“Me? I was going to shoot you.”
“Well, that’s one way to look at it. Another way is, you didn’t shoot me. You saved my life, which leaves a good karmic imprint. Assuming you don’t want me to shoot myself now. Since you saved my life, you could be a bodyguard if you wanted. Not with a gun, just your body. Bodyguard! By the way, have you ever actually shot this?”
“Only this afternoon when he—when I was practicing. It shoots six times.”
“I’ve never shot a gun. Do you mind if we try?”
In the road outside the Shivaratri fair was in full swing—out front pickup trucks tooled slowly down the road, pulling statues of deities: many with amplifiers blasting chants as devotees danced behind. Dev Kamrunag from the high lake, Jhathi Vir. In the back yard of the guesthouse the owner set up a row of bottles on a wall, and the small huddle of monks gathered about thirty yards way. The kick of the small pistol surprised His Holiness, and the first shot missed right by feet. But he compensated, and the last bullet cracked the center bottle. “Fun!”
Cass Goldfarb sat in the back of Professor Gocciulupe’s afternoon seminar on Art and Action, and sighed. Tony—he would have been devastated if anyone had called him Professor Gocciulupe, or even Professor—had been diverted, and it would be some time before class resumed. Two boys had interrupted his introduction to a class on improvising guerilla theater to tell him the ‘news’ about a giant Pentagon magnet that was supposedly disrupting the flight of Canada geese on their southward migration. This was a standard SGI prank, relying on the fact that Tony was gullible—well, less gullible than so remarkably empathetic that any story of suffering tended to overwhelm him. Cass thought about pointing out that ornithologists actually believed geese migrated by reference to the sun, but too many of her classmates already thought of her as a suck-up, and so she leaned quietly back in her chair and went to work on a mental list she was compiling.
Is SGI actually Hogwarts?
Well-guarded. Not by spells, giant spiders, and so forth, but the “holistic center” that operated in the same building really was good cover. People came and went a week at time—right now a group of Reiki healers had arrived, practicing the art of healing massage that didn’t actually require touching the body, but instead channeling the pool of cosmic energy surrounding it into various chakras. Anyone who paid attention to the small campus in the hills was going to concentrate on the nutty stuff, not the school that served as a kind of hub for activist campaigners from around the planet. It was hard, Cass thought, to suspect anything threatening might be happening in a center devoted to no-hands backrubs. Also, thanks to Professor Lee, there was extremely strong encryption software constantly in use, which might be the current analogue to a spell.
Somewhat odd faculty. Maria was more or less normal—the rumor was she had once been a nun, and she was certainly tough enough. But Tony was called the Emoticon. Or, Right, as in right-brain, to differentiate him from his husband, Left. Professor Kinnison, who would have devastated any student who called him Mark, taught Factual Analysis. A national debate champion at Grambling University, he believed firmly that all campaigns for social justice rested on an edifice of data, statistic, detail, measurement, evidence. The undeniable success of their marriage was a source of constant discussion, as was the eventual temperament of their adorable twin infants, Rafer and Johnson.
Diverse student body. Cass had not, in fact, been informed of her admittance to SGI by an owl, but she had been tapped out of the blue in her sophomore year at Rutgers, after she’d helped lead a campaign to raise the wages of dining hall workers. A professor emeritus, who’d advised the cafeteria staff and their student allies, had urged her to apply for SGI instead of junior year abroad, telling her only it was an activist training program. She’d arrived at Denver International Airport to find a minivan waiting, and in it fourteen people roughly her age. Aina, Chandrike Rupesinghe from Bangkok, bossy Camile from Istanbul, Ramon from Bogota. Beautiful Matti from Norway. Every continent except Antarctica. They’d driven through the darkness to the center, where they’d been told of the need for secrecy, and been asked if they wanted to stay. It wasn’t exactly a train from an invisible platform, just a GMC van. And there weren’t enough of them to sort into different houses, just a girls’ dorm and a boys’. But they were as varied as could be—as they settled in those first days, the only thing they could figure out they had in common was that they’d all campaigned for something. Muggles maybe, but not Dursleys. Engaged Muggles.
Cass had followed this train of thought before, and she wasn’t the only one, for no matter the continent, these kids had come of age with Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe, and they were constantly ticking the air and saying ‘Three points for Hufflepuff.’ But she always reached the same conclusion. What made SGI different was the possibility of real magic.
The problem with the wizarding world, she thought, was how much like the Muggle world it actually was. Yes, you learned all kinds of spells and you watched for intruders on magic maps and so on. But at the end of the books push inevitably came to shove; it was always an anti-climax. Because it was just a fight. You concentrated really hard and then you shot a lightning bolt out your index finger, but that seemed, if you thought about it, very much like using a handgun. All the zappings tended to erode the magic; the magic world operated on force too.
Whereas the history they learned at SGI suggested there might actually be magic in the world, magic you could figure out how to harness and use. The bus boycotts and the salt-making on the beach in India; the student strikes of the anti-apartheid days, the sit-ins and teach-ins and die-ins that often failed and sometimes actually didn’t. The first week of the school had been one big joint seminar, with a common reading: Why Civil Resistance Works, an academic analysis of protest in recent decades showing peaceful uprisings were twice as likely to work as their violent counterparts, from Iran to Burma to oil-drilling in the Arctic. Yes, Hitler was a hard case. But for every Hitler a Gandhi—and Gandhi was a kind of real Dumbledore, who’d managed to beat the biggest and most powerful empire in the world without any guns at all. In his underwear essentially, like some Marvel superhero , but one whose power lay in somehow reaching the hearts and souls of a continent, and convincing them to act. Someone eventually shot Gandhi, and history resumed its usual course, though not precisely, because other people had been watching. Martin Luther King, say, who to Cass also seemed like someone out of a children’s book: he’d managed, with a lot of help, to take the humiliation of people and, with Gandhi’s example in mind, fashion it into a weapon strong enough to beat other people with real guns. Until of course he’d been shot too.
Cass wasn’t naïve—she knew it wasn’t actually ‘magic.’ But she knew she was not cynical, either. She was open to the possibility that the bloody world she was growing up in, with terrorism and rising temperatures and all the rest, had other subtler forces at work in it as well, forces you could maybe . . .
At the front of the room people were moving desks out of the way. Clearly class had resumed while she daydreamed; somehow the Canada geese had flown away. “The point of guerilla theater,” Tony was saying, “is that it makes people think again about the things they’d otherwise take for granted. Has anyone heard of the Yes Men? Of Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Now? Let’s pretend it’s the annual Exxon shareholder’s meeting . . .”
Shortly after class ended, Cass’s phone buzzed—the text was from Sister Maria and all it said was “meet me out front for a drive.”
She found the director behind the wheel of SGI’s Subaru Forester. She was still buckling in when the car shot out of the lot—the director was known as an aggressive driver. If someone expressed surprise that the woman who ran an alternative healing institute drove like a Dhaka cabbie, she always said the same two things. “I learned to drive in the Third World—fewer rules.” And “cops don’t give tickets to nuns, even former nuns. Just warnings.” They took Route 24 toward Colorado Springs, the nearest city.
“Are you enjoying yourself at SGI?” she asked Cass, and then quickly said, “actually, I assume you are, or maybe not. What I meant to ask was, do you have any idea why you were picked to come here?”
“Um, they said it was because of the cafeteria workers thing at Rutgers?” Cass said. “I mean, that we won?”
“People win fights all the time,” Maria said. “Generally, when you fight you win, which is why it’s such a shame most folks don’t fight. But anyway, I see bios of a hundred student campaigners every year, and they’ve all won something—stopped the gift store selling sweatshop sweatshirts, took back the night. It’s all good. What made you stand out?”
“Actually, I have been wondering. I don’t have any particular talent.”
“Right. You’re not good at networks and decryption like Raul or Ick, you’re not good at graphic design like Stefania, you’re not good at rigging and rappelling like the Rodriguez brothers. Also, you’re a white American, which is not ideal. What are you good at?”
Cass sat there, fiddling with the phone in her hand, wondering if she was offended—she wasn’t used to adults talking this way. Adults had always told her she was great, was doing great things, had a great future. But she didn’t feel particularly wounded, because Maria was clearly right about all the things she wasn’t good at. She decided to be curious instead of hurt.
“I don’t really know,” she said.
“I read the essay you wrote for your admissions exam to Rutgers,” Maria said.
“I thought that was confidential,” Cass said.
“Doubtless,” Maria said. “Most interesting things are, which is why we have Professor Lee and her gift for computer networks. Anyway, in it you said you’d read the Narnia books a dozen times—that they ‘shaped your sense of the possible.’ Was that what you really thought, or was that something for a college application?”
She swerved quickly to the left across a double yellow, passing an Audi and a BMW and then dropping back into her lane with at least three seconds to spare in front of an oncoming Escalade. The maneuver gave Cass time to think, and she said “Well, I did read them a lot, if that’s what you mean.”
“I thought so, especially when I saw you’d managed to work them into four term papers freshman year,” Maria said. “Tell me about Aslan.”
“Aslan is—the only way I’ve ever managed to think about God,” said Cass.
“Right,” said Maria. “That’s why you’re here.” She flashed her lights at the pickup in front of them.
“Because I like Aslan?”
“Because you understand stories. Stories are how the world works. Every campaign, every movement, is a story. You’re a Jew, right?”
“Not a very good one,” said Cass.
“Of course not. If you were a good one you’d be home finding someone to marry. But what’s the key story.”
“That . . . we wandered in the wilderness until we got to the promised land?”
Maria flashed her lights again, and the driver of the pickup held his middle finger out the window. “That’s not nice to do to a nun,” Maria said. “Right, Moses. There are a zillion other good stories in there too. The tower of Babel, Noah, Jacob wrestling the angel. Samson, that’s an excellent story. But coming out of Egypt, that’s the template. That’s the story that gets retold every Passover at the seder meal. God passed over our houses. God split the sea in half. God gave us food in the desert. God picked us. The point is, if you can tell a better story you win, and no one’s won for longer than the Jews.”
They hit a stretch of road with a passing lane, and zipped neatly around the pickup, Maria offering a cheerful wave at the driver. “Old guy,” she said. “They let them keep their licenses forever. Anyway, that’s your special skill, I think. You understand stories, or at least you like them, so you can come to understand them. And you have to, because if you control the narrative you control the outcome. The normal story is, ‘everything’s okay, the world is working fine.’ That has to be the normal story or you couldn’t have a society. But we constantly have to figure out how to say: ‘It’s not working. It could work better.’”
Cass looked at her, puzzled. “The old story for a long time was, ‘gay people are disgusting,’” Maria continued. ‘The new story was, ‘gay people are your uncle and your postman, and they want to get married, and weddings are nice.’ Once that was the story most people heard, then gay people won. Think of Dr. King. When he turned the story about black people into Exodus, what chance did the bad guys have? Because his people suddenly knew how the story was going to come out. ‘It might take a while but we’re going to get to the promised land.’ That’s a good story, especially if the other side grew up reading it too.”
They dropped down into the Colorado Springs, past the red and pink fins of sandstone in the Garden of the Gods. Before they got to the center of town, Maria turned north on to Interstate 25, and got off an exit later, right by the entrance to what looked like a college campus, big solid buildings surrounding one massive structure with a ten-story steeple. “Church of the Ark,” she told Cass. “Of all the megachurches in Colorado, the mega-est.” She parked and they walked briskly across a broad expanse of pavement into the lobby, where a touch-screen sign showed the night’s activities, from “Saving for the Lord: Christian Finance” in the Zechariah Ampitheater to “Striking Down the Enemy: Christian Bowling” in the Goliath Recreation Wing. A man in a blazer asked them where they were headed. “Ministerial Alliance Meeting,” she said.
He looked at his tablet. “That’s in the Exodus Room,” he said, pointing down a long hallway.
“See what I mean?” said Maria to Cass, as they strode down a long, wide hallway.
They slipped in the back door of the Exodus Room, where a man was talking—like most of the men in the room he was youngish, smiling broadly, and wearing khakis and a polo shirt. “Colorado Springs, obviously, is one of the most churched communities in North America, for which, obviously, we give thanks,” he said. (“That’s Reverend Joe Hardesty of SonRise Ministries,” Maria whispered to Cass. “This should be interesting.”) “But as we all know that doesn’t mean everyone fears the Lord. Nearly a third of our neighbors voted for Democrats in the last election. A third! We’re going to be coordinating a 24-hour pray-in next week to make sure that nothing like that ever happens again—to erect a prayer shield.”
“Thank you Pastor Joe,” said the man who was leading the meeting. “I’m sure as many of our congregations as can will join you for that important work.” (“That’s Tim Timmons—this Ark is his place. Very smooth. They call him Noah behind his back.”) “Are there other announcements?”
“Bob Tompkin, Cornerstone Baptist,” said a handsome man in a thin merino sweater. “I know Halloween seems like a long time away, but we’re already at work on our Haunted House ministry. As you may know, 431,000 people visited last October, and this year we’re aiming for half a million. I’m just sending out the word that we’ll need volunteers too—and ideas for new rooms.”
“I thought the part where the girl went to the rave and took drugs and died and went to hell was excellent,” said a cheerfully enthusiastic woman sitting down front. (“Never seen her before,” whispered Maria. “But clearly a comer.”) “I think we need to keep it all, like, in the news. What about a room where people are dying of something like covid? And they get saved right before they die so they go to heaven?”
“Yes, thank you for your excellent work,” said Reverend Timmons. “By the way, there’s been some talk here at the Ark about having a haunted house of our own—Scaremare, the kids are calling it. We’re praying on it.”
Reverend Tompkin seemed taken aback at the thought of the competition. “Well, we’ll pray on it too,” he said—a little aggressively, Cass thought.
“Are there other announcements?”
“I’m Janice Sanchez from First Unitarian,” said a woman. “I’m new here, and I’d like to thank you for inviting me. We have a soup kitchen for homeless people? And we could use some more volunteers? And soup?”
“Other announcements?”
Maria waved her hand energetically, and Reverend Timmons—a bit reluctantly, Cass thought—said “Sister Maria?”
“It is always so good to be here at Ministerial Alliance,” she said, suddenly speaking slowly, and with a noticeable accent that Cass had never heard before. “At New Life Alternative Healing Center we are busy busy busy. All of you can come. We have yoga with trees next month. You can pray to trees.”
“You mean pray amidst the trees, sister,” said Reverend Timmons.
“No, to trees. With trees. Trees are very old and wise. Aspens—their roots flow together. It’s all one connected organism. They teach us about sharing everything in common. And we teach them yoga.”
“Everything in common? That doesn’t sound right,” said Reverend Hardesty. “That sounds like the Democrat party.”
“Isn’t yoga Buddhist? Like from Asia?” the covid lady asked.
“It’s more like Hindu,” said Reverend Tompkin. “The sun salute? That’s paying homage to a Hindu god. Seriously. There was a yoga studio in our Haunted House last year. At our church we have PraiseMovers, which is stretching but with Bible verses. Very popular.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” said Maria. “Yoga is very popular. Everyone is doing yoga. For the next month we have Wiccan Yoga. It’s all sold out, but if people want to come, you are my friends.”
A hubbub erupted—all Cass could hear was people saying ‘Wiccan’ in loud voices. But Reverend Timmons hit a button on his console, and as the lights dimmed soft rock music filled the room. “Our meeting time has come to a close. It is so good to share fellowship in the Lord. Our youth leader, Tamara Haskins, will give us a closing prayer.”
A young woman in a knee-length skirt rose. “Oh Lord we give you praise Lord. We thank you for being Lord, Lord. All praise to you, Lord . . .
Cass felt a tug on her hand, and Maria led her out the back door, walking quickly back towards the lobby. They passed an ATM, a busy fitness center with a giant mural of Jesus doing bicep curls, and a Chick-Fil-A outlet with a sign that said “Nourish Your Body, Supersize Your Soul.” The same volunteer they’d seen on the way in opened the door for them, and they walked to the North lot where they’d left the car.
“Fun, right?” said Maria, as she accelerated out of the church, using its own on-ramp back to the interstate. “You wonder who voted for Trump? That’s who.”
“What on earth were you doing?” Cass asked. “I thought we were supposed to be hiding away up in the mountains. Wiccan yoga? Those people are going to be all over us. And why were you talking with that accent?”
“Oh, they might have been suspicious otherwise. I mean, tree yoga is a little over the top. But the combination of Catholic and foreigner—they’ll believe anything bad about that. Especially now with Francis, talking about the environment.”
“But they’ll be all over the institute,” Cass repeated. “They’ll go crazy.”
“My thought exactly,” said Maria. “For years no one has paid us much attention. We’re just a little New Age center up in the hills. If anyone gives us any thought, one look at the webpage should convince them we’re harmless nutjobs. But I have a feeling things are going to get more intense, that people are going to be looking a little harder than before. This Dalai Lama stuff means the Chinese government, it means the American government, it means everyone. So I think we’re going to need some serious smoke covering us. If I know Joe Hardesty—and I do, because I went on two of his prayer warfare SEAL team expeditions—he’ll be up there praying by Sunday evening. You know what SEAL stands for? Son’s Evangelical Artillery League. They have uniforms and everything. Night vision goggles.”
“But if they’re there, won’t they figure out what we’re doing?”
“It’s called misdirection,” said Maria. “Sleight of hand. If every time anyone googles us they come to 200 stories about tree yoga, that’s all they’ll think about. No one would take seriously the idea that we were both dangerous subversives and aspen worshippers. Think of it as our prayer shield. I feel much safer now.”
There was almost no traffic, and their progress back up Rte 24 was extremely rapid. “I felt sorry for the Unitarian lady,” Cass said.
“Janice?” said Maria. “She’s still new in Colorado—she’ll stop going to the Alliance meetings soon. Her soup kitchen is great—I go down and help some weeks. You should come.”
“Everyone just ignored her,” said Cass.
“Back to stories,” said Maria. “Unitarians are probably the best people in the world. If there’s a good thing going on in any community, chances are some Unitarians are doing it. But most people aren’t Unitarians, because there’s no story. There’s no Jesus, there’s no Moses, there’s just doing the right thing. It’s like their Scripture is Bartlett’s quotations, and only the nice quotations. And for most people that’s not enough.”
“Are they Christians?” Cass asked
“They were once,” said Maria. “But now they’re . . . everything. What do you get if you cross a Jehovah’s Witness with a Unitarian?”
“I don’t know,” said Cass.
“Someone who knocks on your door but can’t remember why. I mean, there’s 300,000 of them in the whole country. And compare that with—there are like 5 million Mormons. Mormons have a story—it’s kind of an odd one, but it works. What I’m trying to say is, as you study at SGI, your job is to think about how to make campaigns into a story that makes people drop what they’re doing and come. Think about Moses. Think about Jesus—the story of one guy getting executed for no reason, that’s still driving people all over the world today. Some of them are nuts and some of them aren’t, but they’re all thinking with that story. Whatever the fight is—someone wants to build an incinerator in your neighborhood? You need the facts, but you need the story. That’s your job.”
Cass was silent a long moment, as they pulled off the highway and on to the long driveway up to the healing center. She figured it might be a while before she got to ask Maria more questions, so she said, “Do you have to believe in your story to make it work? Like, can anyone take Moses or Jesus or something and use them to make their point?”
Maria didn’t answer immediately, and Cass thought it was the first time she’d ever seen her look even slightly indecisive. “I’m not sure,” she said. “That’s a good thing to think about.”
She pulled into a parking spot on the outer edge of the lot, which was filled with cars belonging to visitors there for the Reiki workshop. (The Prius next to them had a bumper sticker that said “If You Can Read This You’re Close Enough for Me to Feel Your Energy State.”) Before Maria could unbuckle, Cass asked her another question. “Is this place really that important? We’re just a few professors and fifty students—would it really matter if someone tracked us down and closed the doors? Don’t people start new movements every day with no help from us?”
“Ah,” said Maria. “Another excellent question. Probably not. Or maybe so. My job is to tell the story of this place, at least to a few people. It might matter to them. It might matter to you. And it might matter to the bad guys, if they came to think we were important. And that might help. Remember, misdirection.”
Cass was thoroughly confused, but Maria was out of the car, and striding toward the center, and she had to hurry to catch up. Just as she caught up, though, Maria’s assistant Ron came out the double doors to meet them. “Glad you’re here, boss,” he said. “Trouble.”
“The DL?” she asked.
“Oh. No, sorry. Not important trouble. Local trouble. One of the Reiki students is insisting that there was gluten in the gluten-free carob brownies.”
“Was there?”
“Of course not. I tasted it—completely inedible. But he says he has a hive. He’s threatening to give us one star on Yelp.”
“See if he wants a free week of tree yoga,” Maria said. “Tell him it’s the next big thing.”