Choosing My Religion

I call this series “Just Vignettes” because that’s what they are, just short snapshots of things that have happened to me or have been told to me. I can vouch the stories you read here are mostly true.

Once you join the Navy, among the stacks of paper to fill out is one that asks you to declare your religion. This question would sometimes come up and cause many in conversation to ponder why the government wants or needs to know our religious preferences. Like many of my cohorts, I ticked the “decline to state” box, figuring that might be the safest selection to avoid trouble in the future. By not fully answering the inquiry, we also got to exercise our American obligation to espouse impassioned opinions about something we knew next to nothing about.

About ten years into my career, the topic of religion was revisited. Someone new to our discussion decided this was an appropriate time to relay the story of her friend. This friend, who I did not know, was stricken with some condition unknown to us but apparently serious enough to be admitted to the Naval Hospital in Norfolk, Virginia. Her specific ailment is not essential to the story, but it was of a nature that caused her to lose consciousness. At one point, her physicians apparently feared her life was slipping away.

When she regained consciousness in her hospital bed, she turned her head to see where she was. Through the blur of squinted eyes, she saw two men with shaved heads dressed in saffron robes performing strange rituals at her bedside. This apparition caused her utmost confusion as she began to wake out of her daze. She soon realized they were Buddhist priests performing their version of their last rites over her soon-to-be expired body.

She remembered she had listed her religion on the paperwork as Buddhist. She might have figured that by saying she was a Buddhist, she might avoid being asked to be a lay minister. She knew nothing of the religion; she only declared it hers because she felt obliged to choose something.

A feeling of embarrassment and shame washed over her as she wondered how much trouble the hospital staff had gone through to find two Buddhist priests at short notice in Norfolk, Virginia. All that effort to have two priests drive down to the hospital to administer last rites to a false practitioner of their religion. This anonymous woman survived and fully recovered, which allowed her to tell others her tale of woe.

Listening to this story got me thinking. Soon afterward, I marched to the personnel office and changed my chosen religion to Sufi -Whirling Dervish.

When my doctors think I am halfway through death’s door, I don’t want to see a group of long faces looking upon me with pity and maybe one or two shaking their heads to show the rest that there is no hope for me. I don’t want to hear beeping machines sound alarms as attending nurses rush to silence them. I don’t want to smell methanol and vinyl in my dying moments.

No, I want to smell exotic fragrances: camphor, cardamon, cloves, and sumac. I want to see shafts of sunlight from the hospital windows make particles of dust scintillate and illuminate patches on the tile floor. I want to see Whirling Dervishes in their long white robes and elongated fez hats, spinning with their heads cocked at a slight angle to the exotic music of drums, horns, flutes, and plucked string instruments. Dancing in a mesmerized state, the dancers would hold out their arms with elbows slightly bent as if to catch blessings from heaven.

Through this vision, I might obtain peace in my last moments on earth, or at least I would learn my doctors are not optimistic about my recovery.