On Dalai Grandmothers

Last night I had a good long sleep, with many dreams, and today I find myself questioning my purpose here. Not why blog at all? but What does it mean to call yourself The Dalai Grandma? Or, what is this blog about?

It vastly amused me that my daughter made up this name for me, and I chose it for the blog on impulse one evening. But beyond the humor of it, I wonder what it means. I am chronically uncomfortable with the fact that it implies some special knowledge, some Buddhist attainment. Me, a role model?

There are many men who are lamas, meaning Teachers, in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and a few women these days, but no sect headed by a highest and most precious Grandmother. No religious sect that values most highly home and home-making, the ongoing tender love for children and grandchildren, the care of the sick and dying - women's work, the ordinary feminine. In our own rapacious masculine culture all the old are undervalued, old women more so, because women are valued for their apparent sexual desirability. All this deserves many more words, and they have been written. I have no idea how to change this value system. Maybe I'm a little unusual in being chronically aware of it.

Dalai Lama means, in Tibetan, "ocean teacher," meaning one whose spiritual understanding is limitless and deep. What would Dalai Grandma mean? A grandmother is not usually seen as a teacher, but as one who loves, values, and accepts. We think of laps, aprons, homemade cookies, smiles. I've read that most "successful" members of minority groups (including women) were strongly supported by a grandmother who believed in them.

There is the phrase that appears in the Zen tradition, and perhaps elsewhere, "Grandmother's heart." This seems to me to sum up what a grandmother ideally has to offer: an oceanic heart, an encompassing love. Many women can tell you how we felt awakened by the birth of a grandchild. Even writing that sentence, I feel that altogether new Love stirring in me. And from the moment I knew my daughter was pregnant, I also loved babies and children in a new way. Wherever I was I related instantly to babies, and to women with children. I felt connection to the great web of life down through time.

From a religious standpoint I guess we should aspire to open our hearts to everyone in that way, but that does sound abstract to me. What I do see in my own life is the need, the desire to have an open, nurturing heart here, for those around me - not just my daughter and grandson and son-in-law, not just Tom's parents, but my neighbors and friends. I see that my practice has come to include thinking of the people in my life and asking, What does she need right now? or, What could I do to ease this person a bit?

There is a masculine way that is intellectual, demanding, oriented toward building towers and, unfortunately, flying planes into them. It has given us what comfort and safety we have in civilization. But a feminine way is badly needed, a way of love and respect for all others, and for the life of this planet. This way is exemplified for us in Mother Teresa, who said, "We can do no great things, only small things with great love."

And for me, it is exemplified by the Jesus I was introduced to as a child, with his flowing brown hair, tenderly holding a lamb in his arms. Something a grandmother would do.

The Reality of Jesus

As far as I know, this Jesus is by Rembrandt. Not quite as Semitic as I think he may have been, but real. I note the smudges on the forehead, perhaps Rembrandt decided showing a crown of thorns was a bad idea, and painted over it.

This painting is a fact, a thing. An art historian could probably tell me whether my supposition is true; paintings are examined by x-ray techniques sometimes.

Was Jesus "a fact"? Did he actually exist? Recently I was conversed with by a radical atheist, who brought forth several "facts" that proved to him that Jesus was not "a historical figure."

Do I care? Not at all. And it does seem to me that people argue passionately about the damndest things.

If I "am" anything, I am a Unitarian Universalist, and subscribe to the principle of approaching all religions and world-views with respect, and asking what value they have. Perhaps there is no intrinsic value to ideas, so I ask what value a conceptual framework has for me.

The idea of Jesus was a window for me when I was five, and my mother dragged me (literally, furious that I had slipped in mud and fallen down) to a Sunday School. Baptist, maybe. On the wall in that room was Jesus the Shepherd, holding in his arm a little lamb. The idea: that there was someone who cared and protected us. As a child in an abusive family, oh how I wanted to think that somewhere, someone would hold me in their arms. The concept of God was too misty for me; the idea of a handsome, rather feminine young man in robes, I could relate to that. (In the late forties I never saw a man with long, wavy hair.)

I think it was that Sunday School that taught me the 23rd psalm, the one that begins "The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want." I was to use that some fifty years later to combat the terror I felt during radiation treatment for breast cancer.

No historical figure is real. The past is no longer real, except as the consequences of past actions unfold in our lives. What is strikingly real is the need of some people to argue vehemently and irrelevantly against some particular religion. The people I run into who call themselves atheists are in fact anti-Christian; the theism they are specifically against is the Christian concept of God, as they understand it. What is real is their contempt for everyone, it seems, who does not agree with them one hundred percent.

I know dreadful things have been done in the name of Christianity, and of other religions, like Democracy. And I know, further, that all dreadful things done under any banner are based on contempt for someone who does not think like us: The Other. What I liked about the Jesus I met when I was a child was his message of universal love.