THE SINGULAR PILGRIM
By Rosemary Mahoney
Houghton Mifflin, $25, 404 pp
THE BIG BANG, THE BUDDHA, AND THE BABY BOOM
By Wes "Scoop" Nisker
Harper SanFrancisco, $24.95, 204 pp
Reviewed by NANCY PARADIS
What is faith? What feeds spiritual hunger? What propels so many on a path of seeking? The search for answers to these questions is the topic in two very different books, Singular Pilgrim by Rosemary Mahoney, and The Big Bang, the Buddha, and the Baby Boom by Wes "Scoop" Nisker.
In 1999, Mahoney was "inspired to explore several religious pilgrimages that interested (her) and to write about (her) experiences, the people (she) met, and the meaning of these journeys undertaken in the name of an unknowable, unseeable God." Over a two-year period, she attended the Anglican pilgrimage to the Marian shrine at Walsingham, England; visited the shrine at Lourdes; walked the medieval, approximately 475-mile pilgrimage trail across northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela; spent two weeks in Varanesi, India's holy city; visited several pilgrimage sites in the Holy Land; and participated in the penitential Irish pilgrimage at St. Patrick's Purgatory on Station Island.
If we had only her accounts of the people she meets and the places she visits, we would be fortunate. Mahoney, whose previous books include The Early Arrival of Dreams and Whoredom in Kimmage, is a gifted storyteller. Not only does she bring life to the people she meets on her journey, her descriptions of the holy sites she visits prove that a picture is not always worth a thousand words. Everywhere she travels, Mahoney turns her eye for detail into accounts that paint vivid pictures in the mind, the sense of actually being there. Interwoven through the narrative is the history of each pilgrimage site and the beliefs of the faithful, gleaned partly from books, partly from fellow pilgrims or others she meets on the way.
Interwoven throughout her stories is Mahoney's search for that faith, the underlying beliefs that propel seekers of all religions. Mahoney's journey was prompted in part by awe she had felt on an earlier occasion of witnessing pilgrims crawling and slithering up a hill to a church on the Greek island of Tinos. Shortly thereafter, she found an old college notebook in which she had written: "I'm too forgetful to pray and I fool with religion as though it's some kind of game to be resumed when I have the urge." She was surprised and disconcerted to realize that, 20 years later, nothing had changed. A subsequent rereading of the New Testament prompted a call to ask her devout Catholic mother what she would think if her daughter gave away all her material possessions and went walking across the country to spread the word of Jesus Christ. "I would think that finally one of my children had got it right," was the response.
If the awareness that she had to finally deal with the "maddening, sometimes nauseating struggle" of examining spirituality gave rise to her journey to sacred sites around the world, the book she wrote was not the one she intended. "I set out to discover one thing and discovered something else." What she found, ultimately, is that some questions have no answer, that faith sometimes lies simply in the doing.
After three punishing days at St. Patrick's Purgatory, walking barefoot, deprived of sleep and food while completing a total of 891 Our Fathers, 1,404 Hail Marys and 243 Creeds, not counting those recited during four Masses, she was asked what she thought of the experience. "It was hard," she said. "It was amazing. It was a place where you could be strange and extreme and obsessive on behalf of your faith - or in atonement for your sins - in the company of others similarly driven. It was not just a pilgrimage to a place, it was a psychic sauna filled with the steam from your own person. . . . My problems weren't solved, I was still alone, but for the first time in a long time I felt peaceful."
While The Singular Pilgrim is ultimately an individual and intimate exploration of the nature of spirituality and faith, The Big Bang, the Buddha, and the Baby Boom is part sociology, part psychology, part philosophy, part glorious romp through the pop-culture history of the defining movements spawned by the baby boomer generation. As a journalist and alternative radio newscaster in San Francisco, Wes "Scoop" Nisker had an up front and personal view of the social, political, sexual and scientific revolutions that were changing the landscape for what he terms the "confused" generation.
"We were born into an age in which the old stories are too old to have any meaning and the new ones still too new. We grew up in a society in which God was being doubted, truth itself was being disproved, and salvation kept changing its brand name."
From Kerouac and the beatniks to the acid-tripping, pot-smoking days of the peace-loving hippies, from the antiwar to the environmental movements, from eco-spirituality to men's spirituality, from global travel - primarily India - with its resulting import of Eastern thought and meditation, to the occasional wackiness of the New Age movement, and with a summation of today's political climate, the author of Crazy Wisdom and Buddha Nature chronicles the reactions of a generation to events outside their control and the search of some for a new brand of spirituality or enlightenment.
"Consider that recent generations have been taught to understand that physical reality is not what it appears to be. . . . Consider that recent generations came into a world in which astronomers were discovering billions of galaxies full of untold billions of suns, casting great doubt upon our importance in the universe, shrinking us to nearly nothing." To add to the sense of confusion and personal chaos, says Nisker, consider also that the boomers were the children of affluence, raised without rigid rules, whose mantra became, "We want the world and we want it now."
For Nisker, who grew up as the only Jewish kid in a small Nebraska town and thus came by the shared boomer sense of alienation, of being an outsider, legitimately, the road to making sense of a world spun out-of-control by technology and the advances of science led to Buddhism. "For me, as for others of my generation, the teachings of the Buddha spoke directly to my personal confusion. Many of us lived with a perpetual identity crisis, and Buddhist meditation practices promised to get us to the bottom of the issue of 'self' or, even better, well beyond it."
Readers who are expecting a serious discussion of Buddhism and an age may be disappointed, but as a wry and humorous look at the "generation lost in space," The Big Bang, the Buddha and the Baby Boom can only delight, offering flashbacks for those who were a part of it and a breezy and insightful view of it for those who weren't.