Palpable and Mute

In 2004-2005, I journeyed back to Viet Nam for my first extended stay (10 months) in my birth country. One excitement of traveling abroad was the challenge of negotiating the differences of languages, cultures, and geographies. I read, speak, and write Vietnamese (though not as fluently as English), but while in-country, there were many encounters throughout those ten months in which I found myself at a loss for words, Vietnamese or English. One such encounter continues to replay in my head with vivid details, generating ever-expanding questions.

I can’t recall exactly when it happened, but it was around Vietnamese New Year, and it was a late night. A family friend had been driving me around Chinatown in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) on a motorbike while I wielded my tourist video camera trying to capture the night life. We were looking for dragon heads – those colorful, intricately crafted dragon heads made of fabric and paint that were used in dances for the Tet festivals in the new year. We didn’t see any, but we did happen across a Buddhist temple in one of the older sectors of town.

I remember standing outside the temple’s wide double-doors and seeing round, red paper lanterns brightly lit and strung across the yard and temple posts. I smelled incense, the fragrance from unseen joss sticks stuck into pots in front of some statue of Buddha, or maybe of Quang Yin. Before I could step foot inside, my friend -- who was a good, kind man born and raised in a strictly conservative, highly evangelical church -- admonished me for wanting to go inside. “God does not reside there,” he said. He quoted several Bible verses and re-emphasized that I should not step into a place where God does not.

That night, I might have said anything in response. My understanding of religious pluralism, my theological background, and my own religious hybridity would have allowed me to say something even as basic as “Jesus is in my heart so I can go anywhere without fear of trespassing on unholy space”. But I didn’t. “How can we tell definitively that God is not there?” I asked my friend.

Peter Phan, the pre-eminent theologian and the only Vietnamese Catholic scholar currently under censorship by the Vatican, and currently the Ellacuria Chair of Catholic Social Thought at Georgetown University, once said while speaking at CDSP’s Epiphany West Conference that though we most surely cannot say where God is not, we can most likely say where God is.

Perhaps God is where two or more are gathered? Or perhaps “down to the mire” as in the Georgia Sea Island Shout Song (185)? Or perhaps where God is might be in that space in the summer mountains, where Yu Xuanji has gone to the “house of the Immortals” (56). For Gabriela Mistral, that space is in the valley “dancing / in a chorus under the sun” (214). For Sumangalamata, that space is “[no] more tied to the kitchen, / stained amid the stained pots” but it is found “in the shade of [her] own tree” (18). Perhaps God is not in a geographical location at all. There is no question of who or where Lord Shiva is. Mahadeviyakka says in one poem, “the White Jasmine Lord is myself” (84). It is also entirely possible, too, that we cannot say where God is. There is no need for words, or rather, no capability for words or mind or awareness. “I became You, Lord, and forgot You” (83), she confesses.

I have entered into many temples before, and since, that evening. But I have not thought about those temples as much as I have reflected on that one temple in that particular night in Viet Nam. I’ve thought about where we see God and where God resides. I’ve thought about the act of stepping into a sanctuary of a faith tradition different from my own. About our human need to draw boundaries defining what is and what is not holy. The need to name and rename as much as we can in order to lessen the mystery of what we do not know.

It wasn’t until a year ago that I could find the words to describe that incident. The poem emerged out of a complex web of words and memories, an attempt to articulate my sense of where God is, who God is, as well as an attempt to express what I did not, could not, say in that night. The poem currently in revision recalls the images surrounding that evening: the cool air, the bright red lanterns, the joss stick incense, and the wooden temple doors – open temple doors. For me, the poetic form gives me just enough empty space on the page to acknowledge the silence which accompanies that kind of deep grappling. The poem is a vehicle through which I express my lived theology, my lack, my yearning, my faith.

The poem continues to be revised not simply because of word-smithing, but because it touches upon negotiations much deeper, much more complicated than I am prepared to speak. That is my ars poetica – slightly frayed, failed, “palpable and mute”.


(Pages quoted from Women in Praise of the Sacred, ed. Jane Hirschfield)

* These segments were taken from some notes I had written in preparation for teaching my online poetry class for CALL, Holy/Wholly Poetry: Articulating the Sacred in Poetic Form.