Reverence

I have felt overcome with reverence almost every time I’ve entered one of Buffalo’s grand cathedrals. So long as they stand, they overflow with the quality of rapturous gratitude. They are monuments of sustained and earnestly expressed thanks, ecstatic in grandeur. For a cathedral to exist hundreds of people turned their eyes skyward in thanks and wonder and then reached for it. They stacked stones as high as they could and when they reached the limits of engineering and the columns could carry no more, they shielded her with a roof and crafted gifts of worship, sacrifice, thanks, and offering in transcendental artistic glory, from the floor to just below the sky.

It is almost certainly representative of the nature of conflict that the men and women who dare to articulate their rapture through art and architecture coexist with those who pervert the spirit of worship to exploit and degrade. My affinity for anything related to the church halts staggeringly after the works of her artists and my ire lurches forward at the offices of her authorities.

I harbor no illusions that the offices of Buddhism are not also, and often, engines of exploitation. Though I’d have no idea to what proportion in comparison to western religions. From my cultural vantage the Abrahamic faith institutions seem especially adept at (if not wholly designed for) a callous objectification of persons and a disregard for moral decency.

What is evident about Buddhism from the halls of their cathedrals, their Temples of Gratitude, is no less ecstasy and reverence than any Catholic cathedral I’ve ever seen, but a great deal more joy, color, whimsy, and peace. Also, absent the holy spaces of Thailand’s Buddhist temples is the sense of despair, fear, brutality and morbidity that accompanies the iconography of Catholicism and her subsidiaries.

Upon entering I bothered a monk to ask if there were places at the temple I should not go, or things I should not photograph, and where to leave incense I brought. He was younger than me, but looked at me like he knew me, and took time to consider his responses in the English expressions available to him. I felt welcomed. I walked the grounds slowly, standing close to the sculptures and studying their features. What was the person who made this thing trying to say about the nature of god? What quality of that expression was worth preserving, defending, restoring and exalting for centuries?

I sat in the temple among its artifacts of rapture, the shapes and colors of passionate attempts to convey what is incomprehensible, grounded by the features of the insistent present: an objectively beautiful day. Soft sun through open windows, a breeze, the percussive sweeping of split reeds on the sidewalk, chimes struck in walking prayer, the red carpet, a playful ceiling, birds, ancient wood, and everywhere the smell of incense (maybe even mine).

I don’t belong here, but I don’t belong here any more or less than I belong anywhere else. I didn’t belong in Buffalo either. To belong nowhere is, in some ways, freedom to be anywhere. For 20 minutes or so, in the space between breaths, in the examined, focused present, alone in a spare change Cathedral of Buddhism in central Bangkok, I was in the company of god and I belonged there.