I asked this question of Tom. Perhaps we had grown closer over the past year. Tom said, ‘I cannot answer your question today. Let’s try tomorrow.’
On the morrow, when we met with Belle Rivers again for another discussion of what education should consist, he looked amused and said, ‘Has your question been answered overnight?’
Playing along with this zen approach, I replied, ‘No religion has a monopoly on wisdom.’
At this he yawned and pretended to be bored. He said he believed, though without sure foundation, that there had been a time when the West, the little West which then called itself Christendom, had been a home of mysticism. Come the Renaissance, people forgot constant prayer, loving instead the riches and excitements of the world about them. They had given themselves up to the worldly things and even neglected to love, first others, then themselves. Now it was possible that in our reduced circumstances we might learn to love ourselves again with a renewed mysticism.
‘And love God?’ I asked.
‘God is the great cul de sac in the sky.’
‘Only to those with spiritual myopia,’ Belle said, with a trace of irritation.
I couldn’t resist teasing Tom – a tease in which there was some flattery – telling him he was the new mystic, come to guide us.
‘Don’t get that notion in your head, my dear Cang Hai, or try to put it in mine. I cannot guide since I don’t know where we are going.’
But he offered me, chuckling, a story of a holy man who finally gave up calling on Allah because Allah never spoke in return, never said to the man, ‘Here am I.’ Whereupon a prophet appeared to the holy man in a vision, hot foot from Allah. What the prophet reported Allah as saying was this: ‘Was it not I who summoned thee to my service? Was it not I who engaged thee with my name? Was not thy call of “Allah!” my “Here am I”?’
I said I was pleased that Tom had a mystical as well as a practical side, to which he answered that he clung to a fragment of mysticism, hoping to be practical. That practicality might permit our grandchildren to espouse the contentment of real mysticism.
I thought about this for a long time. It seemed to me that he denied belief in God, and yet clung to a shred of it.
Tom admitted it might be so, since we were all full of contradictions. But whether or not there was a god outside, there was a god within us; in consequence he believed in the power of solitary prayer, as a clarifier, a magnifying glass, for the mind.
‘At least, so I believe today,’ he said teasingly. ‘My dear Cang Hai, we all have two hemispheres to our brains. Can we not carry two different tunes at the same time? Do you not wish to be silent in order to listen to them?’
While we were talking in this abstract fashion, our friends were making love and more children were being conceived. Too many would threaten the precarious balance of our existence. To find Tom planning for two generations ahead made me impatient.
‘We must deal with our immediate difficulties first, not add to them. This random procreation threatens our very existence. Why do you not issue a caution against unbridled sexuality?’
‘For several good reasons, Cang Hai,’ he said. ‘The foremost of which is that any such caution would be useless. Besides, if I, a DOP, issued it, it would be widely – and maybe rightly – regarded as an edict flung across the generation gap.’
I laughed – ‘Don’t be afraid of that. You are older, you know better! Don’t you?’ – for I saw his hesitation.
‘No, to be honest I don’t know better. Sexual temptation does not necessarily fade with age. It’s merely that the ease with which one can give in to it disappears!’ He laughed. ‘You see, our generations have become too preoccupied with sexuality. You know what Barcunda said.
‘Our relationships with natural things withered and died in the streets. We no longer tend our gardens -or sleep under the stars, unless we are down-and-outs. We think stale city thoughts, removed from nature. All we have to relate to is each other. That’s unnatural; we should be responding to agencies outside ourselves. The quest for ever more sexual satisfaction runs against true contentment. Against love, joy and peace, and the ability to help others.’