WISHIN' AND HOPIN' AND THINKIN' AND PRAYIN'

On the trail of good fortune

A looming squared-off arch over the road breaks the monotony of the two-lane blacktop cutting through a rutted ochre desert. To our right in the distance are the irregular ribbons of the Mongolian steppes. Our driver slows and pulls into a dirt parking lot where a makeshift cone of big rocks rises five feet to a 15-foot center pole carved like a giant’s walking stick. Dozens of tattered blue silk scarves, tied to the pole randomly, wave gently in the wind against a high, wide and cloudless, cobalt sky.

First my driver, and then my guide walk solemnly in the worn, sandy dirt clockwise around this piled-up shrine, which I learn is called an ovoo. Its origins and uses straddle the narrow dark space between shamanism and Buddhism. After three times around, my guide Gotow stops and explains it to me.

“I’m a Buddhist,” Gotow says. “So this is not just an ovoo, but also a stele. The blue scarves are Buddhist, while in other ways it’s worshiping the old Gods.” He means the shamanic practices that preceded Buddhism’s entry into Mongolia in the 13^th Century, the time of the Khans.

I ask whether this roadside shrine is a particularly holy place.

“No, it’s the district line. Whenever you are entering a new district or city, you stop and circle the ovoo. It’s for safety. You’ll have a safe drive through the next district. But see that?” He points to a child-sized crutch tossed onto the rocks along with now-faded photos and trinkets. “You can also use it for other kinds of luck.”

Magical thinking with its rituals, prayers, totems, and hopes is never far away from civilized humankind.

I’ll tell you a secret. Every time I make a wish on my birthday cake it’s the same. I wouldn’t even fit on the pony anymore, but it’s just easier to hope for something I don’t ever expect to get.

Here’s another secret: Hope deserves to be questioned as a governing principle for life. And a third secret: The Catholic theologians aren’t actually talking about hope when they promote faith, hope, and charity. They’re pushing trust, and calling it hope, just like they’re pushing the supernatural and calling it faith, and pushing love while demeaning it as charity.

Asked which of his fellow pilots failed to withstand the tortures and deprivations of a North Vietnamese prison camp, the late U.S. Sen. John McCain said, “the optimists.” Hope and despair are twins; each equally denies acceptance of reality, our primary chance for catharsis.

Is hope necessary? Helpful? Coherent? I’m just asking here.

When a friend is sick, my words are “I hope you get well soon” and I really mean it. Like everything else, wearing hope lightly is quite different from relying on it in the pinch.

Mostly what people hope for is better luck, better stuff, a better life, better this and better that. As a weak second, people hope for a cure for their suffering, or someone else’s. And third, they hope to remove despair. And has hope ever helped?

By annually hoping for a pony, I’m reminding myself that hope is not likely to bring me what is already coming to me. When kids learn prayer, they quite naturally understand it as a paranormal power that overrides the laws of physics and mom and dad’s bank account. Growing up, they’re disappointed to learn that true prayer doesn’t work that way, but they secretly wish that it might anyway. Some people keep praying for ponies and better luck as tangible objects throughout their lives.

This is not an essay about prayer, so I’m going to skip over the adult version of prayer, which might be a contemplative way to settle in with God and true nature and come to peace with the bad and good that veer into our everyday lives. If God’s already got it, I hardly need to ask for it.

Lhasa, Tibet is a political capital and a religious center. But mainly it’s a pilgrimage site, like Mecca or Jerusalem. Every day, Tibetans pour in from the countryside to spend the hours it takes to circumambulate huge portions of the city on set walking routes along well-worn streets and alleys, culminating in a visit to one of the two major Buddhist temples. They stop for tea or momos or yak stew, enjoying the day like a vacation, and they duck into small temples to leave gifts of oil, milk, or money in hopes of good fortune.

Last year I spent a month visiting temples in Mongolia, China, Tibet, and Nepal. Most were Buddhist, a couple Taoist, and a number Hindu. As a Western adopter of Eastern practices, my understanding of these religions was informed by metaphysics and philosophy more than theology and ritual. My teachers were books – the Early Discourses of Buddha, the Tao Te Ching, the Upanishads and the Mahabharata, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, I Am That, Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, many others, a scatter course through millennia of Eastern thought. These are books that argue with each other about how to reconcile self and other, about the nature of relating, the nature of truth, the way out of familiar life and into realms of freedom. Their language is abstract and their metaphors complex. Hard stuff.

I’m sure I could have had philosophical conversations with the monks in saffron robes chanting long, esoteric sutras in the center of the temples I visited.

But I talked to the everyday, well-educated and pious attendees of the temples who usually step in briefly, sit on a bench near the door, and take their turn waiting for the monk off to the side of the chanters whose job is to receive indulgences in turn for offering prayers for the people.

Something I had vaguely heard before seemed true: The crystalline abstractions in Eastern thought are mostly lost on the hometown believers, for whom their religion might as well be a shamanic fortune-telling system.

As we approached Everest Base Camp, the bus stopped for a Kodak moment from which we could see our flank of the gleaming mountain climb up from a long, narrow valley in front of us. A teenage girl selling prayer flags flirted with our tour guide, a movie-star handsome man from a family of herders in Eastern Tibet. I’m not a prayer flag kind of guy, but they were a source of income for the girl’s family. After I bought two, our guide, a lifelong Buddhist, turned and said with laughing contempt, “Look, they have pictures on them. They’re not supposed to. They should only have specific prayers that have a purpose.” He and I shrugged. The pictures, it turned out, were of horses and occupied very little space; the rest was covered with Tibetan script.

Prayers, like Gods, have purposes in the world of hope. Our guide could recite dozens of prayers, tell me the raison d’etre of every Buddha I saw, could recite at least one related tale (often involving bloody body parts), and helped me figure how many yuan were the minimum appropriate for seeking the Buddha’s favor. I could experience Tibetan Buddhism like his compatriots, as a place for alms giving and prayer for better luck.

As human beings, most of our efforts go into improving our lot, or our luck. People live mostly in disappointment, out of which they hope to carve more happiness. If the stars align.

The earliest religions were upfront about their purpose. In Asia the pre-Buddhist, pre-Hindu deities are often referred to as household or kitchen Gods, and their appeal is so universal that these spirits syncretically leak into every sophisticated religious system. The ghosts of our ancestors stick around to this day. They provide simple, quid-pro-quo reasons why bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad. And these older religions all offer simple rituals – stopping at an ovoo, hanging a talisman to ward off evil – that buttress hope for better luck. Prayers and gifts are bestowed on the rain God or the wealth God or the medical God or the fertility God and on and on: everyday idols for quotidian concerns.

Nepal goes a step further, endowing a few living prepubescent girls with magic charms that resonate with the principle that we are all divine inside.

With permission I entered a small living room, ordinary in all respects except for a little girl in a bright red robe, sitting cross-legged on a sofa, her hair in a bun tied with red cloth, Cleopatra makeup around her eyes. Her mother and grandmother keep busy to the side, watching the so-called living goddess while going about their everyday chores. I bow and present the girl with some paper money, which she promptly tosses into a bucket to her side. She stares at me without expression and then resumes playing with her yellow Slinky. I stay on my knees in prayer for a respectable number of seconds.

To my guide, a devout Hindu in her late 40s, this was serious business. She considered it an honor to be allowed into the living room. It was of no concern to her that the girl was an avatar for a Buddhist God. It worked all the same.

“Many people have been healed by her,” my guide said. “She’s very good at helping women conceive children.” I was told that the girl led mostly a normal life, and could remain a living goddess until she bled, either from a scratch or from puberty.

Sometimes I think that hope is the opposite of trust, and so is despair. Hope assumes that I have gauged my situation accurately, and the status quo deserves to be called “disappointing.” Whenever I have hope, I am projecting myself into a future that needs to be better than the present. Hope is a handy sidekick to self-improvement and intention-setting.

“I hope things will go well for me.” And if they don’t? What will I be, crushed or mildly disappointed? When my hope is fulfilled will I finally be happy in the way I desire right now?

How can I enjoy the present if I’m continually future-casting, and think my best ways of being are somewhere far off?

Being present, I’m afraid, might require an abandonment of hope. It’s not a coincidence that many people find God first in the dark night of the soul, where they’ve fallen down the well into hopelessness and helplessness. One thing about hopelessness, it grounds you in the present.

Being present isn’t a persistently charming place of silence and ease, or a miracle worker or a panacea for all forms of suffering, right now. But it’s the only surefire respite from the nagging future, the place where dreams might be fulfilled and are more likely to be dashed.

Being present tends to be accurate, relatively normal, and quite at ease while it’s moving me through the activities of life. It allows me to have my preferences, but not to take them very seriously. I’m not damaged when I’m present; I scarcely exist.

The problem is that being present is not at all easy. The same way that a grueling job takes a long time to pay off compared to gambling, being present takes a long time to pay off compared to hoping.

What if there’s a difference between wanting something and expecting to get it? Wanting is like being curious; I bring it close without necessarily putting it on or keeping it. A baby is curious about a red protuberance with no name, and pulls the ball to their mouth and senses it with their tongue. Older, they learn to keep the ball in their clutches and complain if an adult swoops down to take it away.

What would it be like to have preferences and interests, but little concern about not getting them or keeping them? That’s what presence is like. I can momentarily want an ice cream cone, drive to the shop, and when I discover it’s closed I don’t care. Or I can get Covid, follow the instructions, and not think about rebound from Paxlovid or the possibility that I could be hospitalized. I take it as it comes, pay a little attention to outcomes, but don’t expect things to turn out the way I plan. Ever. I don’t expect to win the lottery, and also I don’t expect to become homeless.

A couple of weeks ago Annie and I found ourselves wandering around the Carmel Mission. The founder of nine missions on the California coast was Junipero Serra, a Franciscan. You may admire him for his compassion or revile him for bringing disease and forced assimilation to the Indians he subjugated. His cell is kept furnished much as he had it, with a simple cot, a small table and chair, two hooks on the walls for his friar’s robe and rope belt, a trunk, and a wall sconce for a candle. A light blanket covers the cot, but we’re told he slept on top of it, preferring to be open to the ambient temperature no matter the cold.

Leaving Serra’s cell, the visitor walks a few steps down the restored 18^th Century corridor through a low, latticed gate into a modern gift shop. Mixed among the Virgin Mary statues, crosses, rosaries, and trinkets are hundreds of printed prayers and prayer cards. I wonder how many of those prayer cards are employed to improve circumstances and longevity well beyond the now-canonized monk’s lifestyle? It takes a lot to sate modern man’s expectations, despite living twice as long and with far more in the ways of riches than this friar and his subjects.

It's a little puzzling to discover that satisfaction trumps excitement, contentment beats betterment. Living in the present is quite satisfying. Knocking a better future out of the way, for an hour or two, allows me to be my truest self – curious, accepting, and in love with the world as is. This isn’t a luxury. It’s available to me whether I’m broke or flush, a cast-off or famous, weak or powerful. But it’s hard to find. No one tells me to let go of hope, to quit projecting myself into a better future.

When I gave up hope to be a world-famous author, my writing improved and I became more prolific. Being immersed in writing exhibited itself as a current pleasure, not a means to an end. I could still make a living at it, while mostly ignoring the marketplace where the consequences of my writing would be judged. When hope for acclaim returns, I sink in my own estimation and seek out Annie for help. “Don’t you hate it when that happens?” she asks, while pouring me tea.

It's funny how most people will tell you that being a realist is grim. For some reason, they believe that underneath it all, the world is cruel and uninteresting. That isn’t my experience. But whether the underbelly is good, bad, or indifferent, it’s pretty much the same with or without a pony. Now I’ve really stepped in it. By revealing to you my secret wish, so they say, it can never come true.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

-- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, East Coker