The Indian Tomb of Jesus

In 1983, the German writer on esoteric subjects Holger Kersten published Jesus Lived in India, which popularized the legend that Jesus' final resting place was Srinagar in Kashmir. The claim that the tomb of Jesus is the Roza Bal shrine was first asserted in 1899 by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the founder of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. 

Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was a religious leader and apologist. He argued that Jesus survived the crucifixion, traveled to India, married, had children, and died a natural death at the age of 120, eventually being buried in the Roza Bal shrine under the name Yuz Asaf (or Youza Asouph). 

In 1976, the Spanish philosopher and scholar of comparative religion Andreas Faber-Kaiser published Jesus Died in Kashmir, presenting what he considered historical and physical evidence to support this claim. Somewhere in this amalgam of legends, we learn that Jesus was returning to the place where he’d spent the hidden years of early childhood until he became a prophet in Galilee, learning the wisdom of pre-Islamic sufis. The storytellers must account for the six-century gap between the execution of Jesus and the founding of Islam. But I quibble. The first wave of newly minted Western seekers had just discovered India and seemed swayed by the notion that Jesus had also been influenced by Indian magic. A shrine with an inscription and a name was, of course, conclusive evidence.

I’d read at least an abbreviated account of the connection between Jesus and India. On my second trip to Srinagar, I asked my host, Gul Mohammed, the son of a Kashmiri merchant I’d met in MacLeod Ganj, if he could arrange for a local guide to take me to the tomb of Jesus. A few days before, there had been an incident in the ongoing tension between the majority Hindu government of India and the Muslim majority population of Kashmir, and I’d been told that a white face might not be welcomed in the Old City. Of course, Mo knew an older, well-connected, respected, and savvy Sunni driver who could get us in and out safely. 

But first, didn’t we want to visit the world's oldest wooden mosque? This is Khanqah Shah-i-Hamadan, 14th century. Made entirely of wood, it is unusual and stunning. We got out of the car, but we were not allowed to enter. The guards, however, were extremely courteous and friendly. They left their positions at the main gate, came up to us, introduced themselves, and showed us as much as they could through the windows. They had been the target of extremists, so their instructions were only to admit Muslims who were intending to pray.

Our next stop was Jama Masjid. Situated at Nowhatta in the Old City, the Mosque was commissioned by Sultan Sikandar in 1394 CE and completed in 1402 CE. As we drove in, just past the main gate, looking for a parking space, a few women began to gather around our car and pound on the bonnet. More women began to run over towards us. Our driver-guide apologized, backed up quickly, and told us we would have to skip it. He then told us that we’d been spotted; we could continue an abbreviated tour, driving slowly but not getting out of the car. 

Probably 15 minutes later, we drove up to a very ordinary building, about the size of a Western two-car garage. The roof was tin and needed a coat of paint. The sign said that the opening hours were restricted to Wednesdays between noon and 3 PM. It appeared to be the shrine of a minor saint, not a major figure like Jesus, who appears in the Quran. 

The belief that the tomb belongs to Jesus is a central belief for the Ahmadiyya Muslim community but is rejected by mainstream Christian and Muslim scholars, as well as the local Sunni Muslim caretakers of the shrine, who maintain it is the grave of a local Sufi saint. Modern scholarship generally dismisses the theory as legend or myth with no historical basis. 

Photo credit: Indrajit Das/Wikimedia Commons

According to local Kashmiri traditions, Yuz Asaf was a saint or prophet who came from a foreign land. A few historical interpretations link "Yuz Asaf" to an Arabic or Urdu variant of Josaphat, which is also associated with the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, an Islamized and Christianized version of the life of the Buddha.

Photo credit: Indrajit Das/Wikimedia Commons

Yes, this is the small shrine that we were taken to when I asked to see the tomb of Jesus. You can see there is more than a little dispute over whether this is his actual burial place. You know that the mullahs want to settle a dispute quickly and definitively when there’s a large sign with a long quote about Jesus from the Quran.

There it is, just as we saw it on our trip into the Old City. It was on a closed day, so we couldn’t get out of the car even under more favorable circumstances.  It is not common for white skinned Westerners to be wandering around this part of Srinagar unless you’re a scholar of esotericism trying to prove a point.

The grave of Yuz Asaph. Photo credit: Indrajit Das/Wikimedia Commons

Standing in the need of prayer. After our adventure in the Old City, we were welcomed inside at Hazratbal. It is a huge Mosque, not located in the old city, but on the eastern shore of Dal Lake. We took off our shoes, faced Mecca, and prayed.

Ty and I sing at a Latin high mass

My leaving the formal Catholic fold was a long, slow process, with hours of prayer, personal introspection, and my share of suffering. However, I can pinpoint the moment I knew I was done to an exact day and hour.

For most of the time I lived in San Francisco, I was a member of the Museum of Modern Art. On November 4, 2003, their special exhibition of Marc Chagall’s work was closing. It was a fabulous exhibition; I had already seen it twice, maybe even three times. On that last Sunday morning, the Museum was going to open to members from 6 AM, before the huge crowd expected at 9:30. I had a plus-one ticket. I asked Ty Cashman, a friend and former Jesuit. Ty and I worked with the same Zen teacher; we’d done several seven-day meditation retreats together; he was super-educated with a PhD in philosophy from Columbia; he’d been a student of Gregory Bateson; he taught a class on Spiritual Exercises at a small private university on the Presidio. 

We met at 6 AM at Mission and 3rd Street and spent a full three and a half hours with the 153 paintings and other works by Chagall, carefully displayed over two floors of the wonderful building. We spent most of the morning just contemplating. It was not the first time we’d shared the early hours of the day in silent meditation. A few comments here and there, but mostly just deep appreciation for the astounding images of a poor Jew from the shtetl who’d transcended any sectarian feel in his work. Seamlessly incorporating the imagery, even iconography of his adopted country, he’d carved out a spiritual, almost magical world that had actually contributed to healing France after the brutality of Nazi occupation. I can describe it as a spiritual experience.

 

At 9:30, as we left, I thought that we’d go to breakfast and say goodbye, but Ty said, “We just have enough time to get to the 10 AM Mass at Saint Patrick’s. Let’s go.” I was surprised, but said sure, and we quickly crossed the Park to the high Latin Mass at the predominantly Filipino parish. Right from "Introibo ad altare Dei," Ty and I were leading the whole left side of a large congregation through familiar tunes. His seminary had been in the Midwest, mine in New England, but our Jesuit choir training was shared. The chubby Monsignor noticed us with a broad smile. The emotional participation at mass in a Filipino church is exuberant compared to their Irish co-religionists. Singing our hearts out, Ty and I shared that high. 

It came time to receive communion, and we approached the altar. It was something that I don’t usually do. I still believed in the sacrament of Penance, and I had not been to confession, but it felt appropriate. Standing before a rather stern-looking woman, the minister of Holy Communion, she said, “The body of Christ,” and I responded spontaneously, “Praise Lord Jesus Christ.”  She stopped, looked at me angrily, and said, “The proper response is 'Amen.’” She wasn’t going to allow any ecstatic response in her line. I followed instructions and said Amen, but in that instant, something changed. It felt irrevocable. I didn’t know it at the time, but it would be years before I again set foot in a Roman Catholic Church to receive the Eucharist. 

Was that too extreme? Of course. I could always find a church that was less insistent on the correct formulation. The narrative of Jesus is carefully, thoughtfully, reverently transmitted through words and ritual practices that have been handed down to us over the centuries. I’d been a real part of that transmission; I’d even been to Saint Patrick’s before, when I stood as the ninong for the granddaughter of one of my workers. Over many years of study and prayer, I’d added my own personal, even mystical understanding of those teachings. Now standing humbly at the table of the Lord, I was met with a burst of anger and told that my response was not acceptable, or it felt that way. Of course, there are a thousand mitigating circumstances; there was no right and wrong, but in that moment, the spell had been broken. 

I allowed this experience of the Eucharist to devolve  into a series of sharp exchanges with many former Jesuit friends about whether one had to have his or her feet firmly in the neoplationist camp before one could talk about the “Real Presence.” And I wasn’t buying it.

And why? And what next? 

Do I even want to talk about this moment? I mentioned that both Ty and I had done the seemingly endless hours of Zazen retreats, just sitting from dawn to dusk in a completely still room, usually with a handful of others or, when the leader had a reputation for insight, integrity, or depth (there are a few of those left), crowds. The work in these Zen retreats was the koans. Detractors talk about impossible riddles designed to throw a wrench into the ordinary, expected inner works; proponents speak of craftily designed word games that might provide a startling insight. I’ve had both experiences and many others over the more than 30 years I’ve been working with a teacher on the koans. You are allowed to switch the subject and the predicate. There are few rules in a logical or discursive sense. 

The feature of the retreats I want to point to here, besides the concentration and silence, is the meetings with your teacher to discuss the koan and your meditation. 

These meetings give Zen its distinctive flavour. You might present an answer to the koan; with a bit of luck and hard work, the teacher will ask a few follow-up or checking questions. Or you might be sent back to the dojo with a hint about where to focus. The length of the meeting can be seconds or hours. I will not add any fiction or wish fulfilment to the pile of idiocy about koan work, other than to say that after many years, I have a clear feeling that I am part of a vibrant conversation about awakening that Buddhists have been having for hundreds of years. And that conversation has been carefully, thoughtfully, reverently transmitted through words and ritual practices that have been handed down to us. The content is different, but the mechanism of transmission shares a lot with the Jesus narratives. 

But what is different was more important for me. My koan responses that felt right, where the opening went deep; they were part of a meditation practice; they were spontaneous, without a lot of thinking about what I should say or what would be clever; they came from a place that I can only describe as intimate. A far cry from “The proper response is ‘Amen.’” 

I’m getting older, and maybe some of my rough edges are beginning to soften. Now and then I’ve thought about that rather stern woman. I have no idea why she responded the way she did, and it’s none of my business. But I owe her a debt of gratitude. I began to meditate on the Real Presence as a koan rather than rigid dogma from the Council of Trent 500 years ago, a mystery I could enter with a sense of wonder and intimacy. 

“Praise Lord Jesus Christ.”

Marc Chagall, The Good Samaritan (1963–64). Collection of the Rockefeller Archive Center. Photo: © Mick Hale.

Of Course Marriage Makes a Difference for Gays!

Originally posted Sunday, July 24, 2011

To celebrate the first day that same sex couples can marry in New York, I am going to republish a piece I did when we were fighting against Prop 8 here in California. Next year, San Francisco! It's a red-letter day!

Among my Canadian gay friends, 100% are in stable, loving relationships; among my States-side gay friends, I used to be able to say somewhere in the range of 4-5% were married, but now, sadly, that figure is more like 2% as I recently heard of the divorce of some dear friends after 25 years as a couple.

As soon as marriage becomes a real possibility, apparently gay men—at least in greater numbers than one might have supposed—have simply said, "Of course. There is no reason to deny us any of the fundamental rights given to most other men and women."

Instead, here in "the land of the free," burdened—perhaps I should say cursed by the myth of humankind’s fallen state, we are left to throw stones at one another for being more or less sinful, for being hypocrites, for having an “essentially disoriented” nature. Living as an underclass, we are susceptible to all the ills of having to make do, to prove ourselves, to justify our loves and our emotions.

Thanks to my friends Bruno and Josetxu from Spain for the great photograph. They will soon be married in a civil ceremony in that Catholic country, and have, obviously, created their own blessing for their relationship from On-High. We can and will create our own blessings. Please join me in sending this couple our best wishes. May the Blessings of All the Universe shower on them!

Gratias á Lulu, Esta Noche y Monica Naranjo

In 2010, I began to exchange emails with several men about Latin music and gay Madrid. I’d hoped to learn a lot about Latin music, and my new correspondents were great resources. But there is one Latina star I already admire enormously

When I took visiting friends out for a night on the town in San Francisco, I tended to end the festivities at Esta Noche on 16th St.

This Latin gay club had been in that once-seedy neighborhood for more than 20 years. Now it’s gone. It closed its doors in 2014. The neighborhood became hip, and the new neighbors are not the kind to patronize Latin drag shows, but Esta Noche was welcoming and lively.

But I’ve seen more than a few very memorable moments at Esta Noche during my San Francisco days: it was there that my Canadian friend Ken MacDonald was kissed in the bathroom by the most handsome man within miles—a high compliment—this is San Francisco after all. It was there—at the bar, not the bathroom—that Miguel Pou taught me to distinguish between the popular music of Spain, Mexico, Central America, plus Colombia and Argentina, and a few other countries in the Southern Hemisphere. I can pick up that distinctive Brazilian samba-like beat, and of course, the lyrics are in a different language, though that is not easy to distinguish when you know only a few words in Spanish and Portuguese, fiesta, siesta, libertad, y “Et tu mama tambien”—just because I saw the movie and loved it.

But it was “Lulu” who introduced me to Monica Naranjo. Lulu was definitely not a gorgeous drag queen (by design), but she was one hell of a performer and knew her divas. During her show, I heard this voice that felt like a combination of Madonna, Bette Midler, and Janis Joplin, with a touch of Maria Callas. “Who’s that?” I asked the bartender. “Monica,” he said, “THE star of gay Madrid.” I have since learned that she is much more than that. Monica moved to Miami, so I won’t be able to hear her live, though I still plan a Madrid expedition as soon as I’ve socked away enough dinero.

OK, OK, here is her iconic Sobrevivire. Sometimes her staging and orchestration is a bit cheesy, but listen to the quality and strength of that voice! Music unleashes the animal!

I am planning that trip to Spain and hope to hear some great music. Monica is still performing. Hope to find some other great Spanish divas!

I’m on the lookout! Suggestions?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xErS7G3-tCQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYvqf2ws_cU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1Oc3oZv_QA