TROUBLING

The truth is, I have always been skeptical about Scientology--and skeptical is perhaps an understatement.  It first came to my attention a long time before I came to the United States.  I was living in London at the time, sharing a house with a handful of Cambridge alumni who had each taken a room.  My neighbor on the top floor was a friend from our Cambridge days, a man of great intellectual achievement but, well, let's say genuinely eccentric in his interests.  It was he who brought home a copy of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics and immersed himself in the study of Scientology.  I don't honestly know--or don't recall--how far his interest took him; but I do remember, even at that early date, that I was somewhat spooked by it, and nursed some rather disparaging judgment about my friend's sanity.

This would have been, I guess, around 1959 or 1960.  Between then and now, I heard occasional reports about what seemed to me this dangerously controlling cult.  Living in Hollywood, I have been aware of the expansion of its real estate empire, including some historic landmarks in the area.  From where I lived for many years, I would frequently drive by their "Celebrity Center" on Franklin Avenue--and always with what I have to admit was a shudder.  Nowadays, I'm more likely to drive past that dreadful blue monster between Sunset Boulevard and Franklin Avenue, the one with the billboard-sized lettering identifying it as the headquarters of SCIENTOLOGY.  I experience the same shudder as I catch glimpses of the residents in their quasi-naval uniforms and their--my judgment--rather pallid, sickly, alienated appearance.

Alex Gibney's HBO documentary, "Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief," relieved me of none of my skepticism about this organization.  I'm astonished--outraged would be the better word--that the Internal Revenue Service allowed itself to be browbeaten into granting the status of a religion to something that seems to me no more than a third-rate work of sci-fi parlayed into a tax dodge by its pulp fiction author.  What's deeply troubling is that otherwise intelligent people are persuaded to submit to a controlling entity that claims to offer liberation even as it dictates the progress of their lives, their relationships, their families, their finances--and punishes transgressions with isolation, humiliation and excommunication.

I'm not one to scoff at all religion.  At its best, it encourages skepticism, doubt, and questions.  Belief is a struggle, as I see it, never a submission.  It's a door that opens up to possibility, not one that slams shut in your face when you try to walk through it.  Scientology is an extreme case, and far from anything I would identify as a religion.  But too many religious practices, these days, are restrictive, intolerant of questions, authoritarian, overbearing and exclusive--the very opposite of everything they claim to be.

What's troubling is that we humans, in an age of uncertainty, seem so ready to submit to their certitudes.  No matter that its subject is Scientology, Gibney's film has more broadly something of value to teach us about ourselves.  One important lesson of the Buddha is that we not guide our lives and actions according to some preordained "belief," but rather that we need to think for ourselves, to test ideas out for their worthiness and usefulness, and follow only those principles that make sense and lead us further down the path to freedom and happiness.  I'll go for that.

MEANWHILE...

... back at the Cafe Zinc.  Lunch time.  Ellie and I share an egg salad sandwich.  At the next table--have I told this story before?  I have not, but it sounds familiar--two women of respectable age, one of them with a distinctly British accent.  Irresistible!  Of course we embark on a conversation.  She's an even older immigrant than I, having left the old country with her GI husband in 1956.  (I crossed the pond in 1962, and have returned since only for visits.)  We enjoyed a friendly chat, with the growing sense that we were like-minded folk and could share our views...

It was Ellie who started telling the story of our Russian friends, from a couple of days ago.  His rage.  His hatred of Obama.  Then our new friend said, "Well, of course I agree with what he said."  That there's no difference between Obama and Osama?  Well, she wouldn't go quite that far.  But is it not obvious that Obama hates Jews?  And hates white people?  Did she really believe that?  Of course.  Isn't it obvious?  Not to me.  What makes her think he hates Jews and white people?  It's what he says.  He makes no effort to disguise it.  Hmm.  I find it hard to believe that she hears such things in what Obama says.  Does she listen to him?  No, she's too disgusted to even listen to him.  She did listen to him at first, but not recently.  But he's an enemy of Israel...

And so on.  We should not be surprised.  We are, after all, in Orange County, California, one of the most conservative in the country.  Even so, this is Laguna Beach, a small enclave of liberal thinking, and it comes as a shock to hear people talking in this way.  I was writing just yesterday about unreason.   So I sat there trying to make some sense of it all while she went on, and failing miserably.

Then I came home and found Chimmy's comment on my earlier entry, inviting me to take a look at the story of her friend Glennon's encounter.  "There is hope," she wrote.  (Or he--I have no way of knowing whether Chimmy is a he or a she.  Fun-loving, though, I'm guessing.)  So I followed the link and found myself reading this entry in a blog called Momastery.  I beg you to read it, start to finish, because Glennon provides the perfect model of a successful communication between left and right.  Where I simply goggled in disbelief, Glennon engaged.  Admittedly she had a little more time to do so, since she was on an airplane flight and her interlocutor was the angry man in the seat adjacent to hers.  But, as she tells the story, she managed to find the compassion to listen and get past the rhetoric to the basically good man behind it.  It's a marvelous story, and she tells it beautifully, without haste, allowing it to unfold and reveal an important truth without self-righteousness or rancor.

So I say bravo Glennon.  I aspire to your empathy and compassionate humanity.  I have yet to discover more about your charitable organization, Monkee See, Monkey Do, but I plan to do so.  And I have already added your website to my blogroll, and I trust that this entry may inspire a few others to check in.  And thanks to Chimmy for alerting me.  As she noted, with the evidence of such intelligence and good-heartedness, there is hope.