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Monthly Archives: January 2015

The Pursuit of Happiness

24 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by michael schinker in Buddhist, Happiness

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Today I am writing about Peyangki, a typical carefree nine-year-old boy full of wonder, with a heart for discovery and adventure. He is quite atypical, however, in the sense that he lives on the other side of my world, in a completely different kind of world. I’ll nickname him Pey.

I got a glimpse into the life of Pey and his unique environment one evening last November. Channel surfing, I happened to click on the start of an episode of Independent Lens. Airing weekly on Monday nights on our local PBS channel, the Emmy Award-winning series introduces new documentary films made by independent filmmakers. That particular evening featured a film called Happiness, a 2014 piece written, directed and produced by French-Finnish filmmaker Thomas Balmès. With the Himalayas as a breathtaking backdrop, a dreamy musical score and an amiable main character you immediately want to run up to and hug, I figured this was going to be a cinematic gem. I was hooked to the screen in 30 seconds, and wasn’t disappointed.

Balmés introduces Pey in his remote home village of Laya, in the kingdom of Bhutan, about as far away from the twenty-first century as one can get. The country itself is about the size of Switzerland, tucked away between Tibet and India. The natives are as rugged and weather-beaten as their surroundings. Black-haired, almond-eyed with dark, dusky umber colored skin like well-worn saddle leather, they could probably blend in easily with rustic peasants in the Andes. The longer they age it seems, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish a male from a female face. Pey’s mother is probably 30 years younger than she looks. But the children are all bright and beautiful.

Bhutan’s geography expresses grandeur on a grand scale, with some of the world’s tallest peaks, the bluest skies, and a bleak, almost surreal landscape that can be surprisingly hostile despite its magical, tour book destination appearance. But it’s not Shangri-La. This is Pey’s backyard. It’s primitive, unchanged for hundred of years and the last place in the area to get electricity.

Pey’s father died of a heart attack recently after encountering a bear in the forest, so he lives with his mother and a couple of siblings. With too many mouths to feed, she feels he would be better off at the local Buddhist monastery. She drops him off barefoot and all wrapped up in brown and orange robes into the care of the monks, and rather unceremoniously says, “Good luck.” He just stands there, lost and lonely, separated from family and school chums, but handles it without a tear.

Soon utility workers are setting poles and pulling cable up and down the mountainsides. With electricity comes civilization’s crowning achievement: television. The village is ready to embrace this boon of modernity with open arms, even if it means selling a yak to get enough cash to purchase a set. Pey’s uncle asks him to go along to Thimphu, Bhutan’s largest city, on a mission to buy a second TV. The first one fell off a horse and broke. It takes them three days to walk to the nearest road, with the yak, to an automobile. Pey is exuberant with his first ride, but gets carsick all the way.

While in Thimphu, Pey gets a first-hand, down-and-dirty look at the new world. Cafés, stores, bars, nightclubs, and restaurants. Lights and noise. Browsing tourists and busy locals cramming the roads and sidewalks along with crimson-robed monks, aloof to the business of commercialism. He tries to locate his older sister, who is allegedly “working in an office” with computers, but the managers have never heard of any girl named Choki in that department. Finally she is discovered as a “dancer” at one of the clubs, and tells him she will probably never go back home. The journey is successful otherwise. The TV is bought and brought to the village without damage or incident, and Pey has seen curiosities that range from live fish in an aquarium to store window mannequins to a crippled man dead drunk in the gutter.

Pey on roofThis film is a work of art, and therefore responses to it will be subjective. Some intellectually minded observers may see Happiness in the classic genre of progress spoiling the innate innocence of the noble savage. But what about the title itself? Maybe it’s a commentary on the nature of being satisfied, or seeking that lofty spiritual goal of fulfillment in Nirvana. After all, The Buddha says, “Happiness doesn’t depend on what you have or who you are. It solely relies on what you think.” Ironically the lama at Pey’s monastery at one point asks him, “So do you expect TV to make you happy?” Pey’s answer is an enthusiastic “Yes.” So does that mean if he thinks it will make him happy that it will make him happy?

The final scene in the film shows Pey with a few older family members in a darkened room, a tight crop on their faces illuminated by the flickering movement on their new TV screen. They are watching – of all possibilities – a WWE professional wrestling program. The audio is in English, the announcer describing every move made in the ring. They are mesmerized.

I looked at those blank yet crudely beautiful faces – so far away from Starbucks, GAP and fast food drive-throughs – so far removed from what we usually consider important or significant or the kind of lifestyle that we champion as making a worthwhile contribution to modern society. You know, people making a real difference. Staring at my TV I couldn’t help but ask myself, actually out loud, “Does it really matter whether these people live or die?” I know. It sounds cruelly judgmental. Intellectually and culturally superior.

But that is not my point. It’s deeper than that. It’s the question of the hour, of all mankind, for all time. Do we prejudicially esteem achievers and artists and thinkers so much more than the child with dirty hands and a bad haircut subsisting almost by himself on the roof of the world? Personally, I maintain that every life without a doubt has immeasurable value, no matter what. I think that’s the way God sees it. And Pey, in his sublime simplicity, does make a difference, even in the big scheme of things. His life spoke to me, because here I am writing about it. He’s an awesome kid who touched my heart and I won’t soon forget.

I thought prison was bad enough.

19 Monday Jan 2015

Posted by michael schinker in Life and death

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Last week, on January 14 a prison transport vehicle carrying 15 people skidded off a Texas highway overpass and plunged into the path of a moving freight train. After the collision, the bus was dragged for about 200 yards along the tracks before coming to a complete stop. Officials concluded that icy roads were to blame for the crash. Two correctional officers and eight inmates died from injuries suffered in the accident.

One of the victims, 29 year-old inmate Tyler Townsend had called his mother in Benbrook the night before. “I said, ‘Let’s pray for a safe journey. Call me Sunday night,’ ” Petra Townsend recalled. “He said, ‘OK.’ ”  “I said, ‘I love you.’ He told me he loved me too, and that was it.”

She admitted that her son chose his own journey outside of the law early on, using drugs as a teenager. He went to prison twice before, for drugs and other crimes, including car theft, but managed to graduate from an alternative school, and even tried college. “I always believed he was going to change that path,” his mother told reporters. She felt that Tyler believed it, too. Sentenced to three years, Tyler was denied an early release on Dec. 28, and was scheduled to come back home next January.

A deeply religious woman, Mrs. Townsend said her son had recently been baptized in prison. She said her faith does not have room for laying blame for her son’s death. “That’s part of a plan we can’t understand. This is God’s business. This is God,” she repeated. “No, no, no. Don’t question.”

I am fairly certain that none of the men involved in this tragedy woke up that morning and expected to end up later that day in a box. Talk about bad timing – the weather, an icy overpass, the train schedule. But when it comes to death, what would be good timing? Maybe if you are 98 and languishing in a nursing home with a worn out shell of a body and a mind that long ago faded away into faint shadows of the past?

I’m going to file this story in a folder I call “My Last Breath is . . . When?” It’s a collection of news items that address the utter frailty of life, and our reluctance to admit or expect just how quickly it can change or even cease. I may post a few of those reports as time goes on. For now, considering my own inevitable fate I must reluctantly acquiesce, concurring with the admonition from James 4:14: “Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.”

The World Is A Vampire

07 Wednesday Jan 2015

Posted by michael schinker in Jesus Christ, Smashing Pumpkins, vampires

≈ 2 Comments

My title statement is the first line from The Smashing Pumpkins’ 1997 Grammy Award winning song, Bullet With Butterfly Wings, lead vocalist/songwriter Billy Corgan’s raging rant against the unfairness of life and the futility of even trying to win the battle. Never a big fan of the group, I had forgotten about the song until last week. I was watching Whale Wars, an Animal Planet two-hour long documentary chronicling the efforts of Operation Zero Tolerance, a nature nurturing campaign opposing Japanese commercialized whale poachers, led by a group known as Sea Shepherd Australia. Each program segment opens with Corgan’s disturbing appraisal.

The metaphor is not difficult to translate. Of course the song is not a complaint about the beautiful world we enjoy full of golden sunsets, cute puppies and ice cream sundaes. The dark psyche exposed throughout the rest of the song has been interpreted by its critics as either a protest of modern society’s morals and ethics or lack thereof by an artistically interpretive genius, or a deliberately overdone tongue-in-cheek ruse played on his fans in the guise of and for the sole sake of aggressively alternative rock. Has Corgan really confronted the lifeblood sucking, all-consuming Vampire, face to neck, either personally in his own troubled childhood or in the grownup rat race world of greed driven by big business? Does hatred of that same Vampire motivate a Sea Shepard devotee to risk life and limb on a hostile Antarctic sea to save whales in peril of being slaughtered for the financial gain of only a few?

Regardless of what inspired Corgan’s anger and angst-filled lyrics, it makes me wonder what kind of world do I see myself living in? I am also thinking about what Jesus said to Nicodemus, recorded in John 3:16, the verse even nonbelievers are familiar with. He said, “God so loved the world . . .” Although the conversation was undoubtedly in a regional dialect of Aramaic, the written scriptural Greek word we read in John’s gospel for “world” is kosmon, the same root from which the Russian language derives the term kosmonaut, a combination of two words meaning “universe” and “sailor.” In English we use an anglicized form of “cosmos” to mean the planets, stars and everything out there that isn’t earthly.

Kosmos, however, can present a variety of interpretations. According to Thayer, it can describe a harmonious arrangement or order; the stars, the heavenly hosts; the world, the universe; the inhabitants of the earth; the ungodly multitude, the whole mass of men alienated from God; or world affairs, the aggregate of earthly attentions or concerns; or a general collection of particulars of any kind. So what sort of world then did God love enough to consider it worth redeeming, worthy of His Son’s sacrifice to reconcile it back to the way it was fashioned originally? Does it include The Vampire?

Maybe the real question should focus more on what God’s unique kind of love means, rather than on that which is loved. Regardless, after a repetitive litany describing his powerless plight as a “rat in a cage” and an obtuse reference or two to Jesus, Corgan sadly confesses in the end, “I still believe that I cannot be saved.” C’mon, Billy, at some point we’ve all fought with some kind of vampire or another. Stop agonizing and trust someone who knows all about what you’re going through; the one who said, “Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world.” It wasn’t Buddha. It’s Jesus. (John 16:33)

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