Carrying the Lamp of Love & Looking into the Shadows
by
Mitch Hall
On Friday evening, April 2, 2010, I attended an event entitled “Carrying the Lamp of Love.” It was a fund-raising program to benefit the East Bay Meditation Center (EBMC) in Oakland, California. Two renowned writers were the featured speakers. They were the novelist, poet, and activist Alice Walker and the Buddhist insight meditation teacher Jack Kornfield. Walker, as we learned, has been a practicing Buddhist for several years and has been a student and friend of Kornfield. The evening was a rich, moving, often beautiful exploration of the theme through guided meditations, poetry readings, story telling, an interview of the speakers conducted by an EBMC meditation teacher, and a question-and-answer period mediated by index cards selected from among those written by audience members during the intermission. The large auditorium was sold out for the event. Mutual admiration was expressed by the two speakers for each other. It was a love feast. However, Ms. Walker sounded, at least to my ear, a couple of discordant notes, and this led me to search further. I will first describe what had discomfited me and then will cite what I found deeply disquieting.
Ms. Walker told a story about a life experience of hers. Shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., she was commissioned to travel to interview, at her home, Dr. King’s bereaved widow, Coretta Scott King. In college, Ms. Walker had heard that Dr. King was a good dancer, so she asked the grieving widow if that was so. Mrs. King was distressed by the question and, according to Ms. Walker, found it “frivolous.” At that point in the narrative, I wondered if Alice Walker would reflect on how she had been lacking in appropriate sensitivity for a traumatized woman who had just lost forever her husband and the father of their children. However, Alice Walker went in a different direction with her discourse. She asserted to the audience, who appeared mostly enthralled with her charisma and assured delivery, that she still thought it was a good question. Several audience members laughed, as if in agreement. I was taken aback by the manifest lack of empathy for Mrs. King’s feelings at a time when the shock of the irreversible loss was reverberating through the depths of her soul.
Later in the program, Alice Walker read skillfully one of her carefully crafted poems that engaged my feelings and imagination deeply while disturbing me equally deeply for what struck me as a megalomaniacal refrain. The poem was addressed to victims of political violence everywhere, victims of torture, mass executions, genocide, war, rape, and more. Ms. Walker put haunting images of some of the worst horrors of this world ably into words. It seemed that the poem was an expression of compassion, one of the prime virtues in Buddhism. However, Ms. Walker’s frequently repeated refrain was distressingly egocentric. She asked the victims to remember and recite in their minds, at the moment before being murdered, that “Alice loves me.” It seemed as if she was casting herself into the role of the mother goddess incarnate. Certainly, theistic believers may call upon their faith in the eternal love of the divine in their last moments, but why on earth would it bring them comfort to think that Alice, a woman who does not know them, loves them? This refrain cast a shadow over the brighter moments of this event about "Carrying the Lamp of Love."
I pondered what this could mean and remembered that recently I had heard a portion of a radio interview of Alice Walker’s only child, an adult daughter named Rebecca who is also a published writer. I remembered that not all was well in their relationship and that the famed Alice Walker had neglected, shunned, and ultimately disowned her daughter. I decided to see if I could find anything about this on the Internet and discovered an article, written by Rebecca Walker and published in the UK a year ago, that rang with heart-rending sincerity. It can be found at the following URL: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1021293/How-mothers-fanatical-feminist-views-tore-apart-daughter-The-Color-Purple-author.html#ixzz0kCM8nWMP
I believe that this is worthwhile reading. It raises many questions about incongruity between the public persona of a charismatic, avowedly spiritual and humanitarian writer of great fame and her behavior toward her only child and her grandson whom she has chosen not to meet.
Moreover, Alice Walker is widely quoted as having written the following in Possessing the Secret of Joy: “What is the fundamental question one must ask of the world? I would think and posit many things, but the answer was always the same: Why is the child crying?” One wonders, especially after reading Rebecca Walker’s account, about the apparent disconnection between Alice Walker’s remarkable ability to speak and write so eloquently about ethical, spiritual, and social questions, on the one hand, and her dismissive attitude and rejection of her own child and grandchild, on the other hand. Why, indeed, are those children, her own progeny, crying? Fortunately, Rebecca Walker is a courageous, talented writer. She has told her story and thereby answered that question poignantly.
I wish to close these reflections with a query about one aspect of the origin story of Buddhism that has long perplexed me and that perhaps relates to the issue opened up here. It has been told for two-and-a-half millennia that Prince Siddhartha Gautama left his wife and young child to wander and seek the enlightenment that led him to be honored as the Buddha, the awakened one, and to leave a legacy of meditative practice and philosophy that has much of value to offer. Yet, I wonder about that abandoned wife and child, who, according to legend, eventually became his disciples. I wonder why was that child, Siddhartha Gautama’s son, crying? I do not know if that child’s story has ever been told. Perhaps Rebecca Walker’s story, mutatis mutandis, can give us a hint.
Note: In my essay, Buddha’s Son, I explore further the issue of the Buddhist story.