The idea for Ethel Katz Finds Her Guru came to me in 2005 while attending a retreat with the popular spiritual teacher, Adyashanti. I had been enjoying Adya’s teachings for a few years and had taken the leap to fly across the country to “sit” with him for five days, following his prescription of frequent meditation and investigative self-inquiry. As a veteran seeker of thirty years, I fell happily into the retreat routine, enjoying the opportunity for prolonged silent reflection. But towards the end of retreat a funny thing happened — a question kept circulating in my mind: what would it be like if my mother were here? What would she think; what would she do?
At first I ignored these thoughts, as is the instruction for extraneous thinking while on a silent meditation retreat. But ignoring was particularly futile in this case because both to my annoyance and delight, my mind was popping out ideas like a tennis ball machine.
I hadn’t brought along my writing notebook. Though I sometimes jotted down insights, prolonged creative writing wasn’t advised. The only paper I had with me was a tiny yellow dime store notepad scrawled with a few inspirations gleaned from Adya’s talks. Every few minutes I pulled the pad out of a pouch that I carried to and from the meditation hall and hurriedly recorded the random scenes forming in my mind, using the smallest script I could manage so I could fit everything in. A vague guilt punctuated each entry; there was precious little left of retreat and I truly wanted to continue to culture the meditative focus I had nurtured over the days. But I also couldn’t deny the excitement bubbling inside: a novel was forming before my eyes.
It was curious to me that the writing was expressing as fiction since memoir had always been the form that fulfilled my creative urges. A story clearly needed to be told and this time life was choosing to tell it through this funny little tale. On the long flight home I reveled in writing to my heart’s content and drafted the first chapter on the back of my printed itinerary. Ethel was born and as months rolled on, chapter after chapter would flow almost effortlessly onto the page during a weekly Wednesday night writing workshop I’d been attending for years. The book description reads like this:
A sort of “Erma Bombeck meets Ram Dass,” Ethel Katz Finds Her Guru is a delightful tale of awakening from the Jewish mother’s perspective. When Ethel, a Jewish 70+ no-nonsense New Yorker becomes concerned with her daughter Debra’s incessant focus on her Sanskrit-dubbed Western teacher, she gets into her Volvo and heads to his ashram in the Catskill Mountains. Convinced she’ll uncover evidence for her worries, she instead finds herself reluctantly charmed by Anandaji’s earthy manner and intrigued by his Zen-flavored teachings. Ethel’s story takes place over five days and mirrors our own as she plays tug-of-war with the steady pull of truth. She never abandons her prudent skepticism and trademark humor, and through her innocent investigations we come to suspect that the most sublime truths may run parallel to our innate common sense. Backdrop to this theme is a deepening of acceptance between mother and daughter who in turn become each other’s gurus.
I still find it striking that it took me as long as it did to realize what I had done by writing Ethel. I was so absorbed in the creative process, it wasn’t until I was well through the first draft that I could step back and see that I’d transformed my mother into someone who, after years of bemoaning my spiritual choices, would finally accept them as valid. It shouldn’t have surprised me. I still evaded my mother’s queries when I’d opt to stay home and pray on Rosh Hashanah rather than attend services. Via Ethel’s edification of Debra’s spiritual development, I’d addressed a long-denied desire for maternal approval.
I have been a seeker since childhood when I innocently began asking the big questions. It was apparent to me at an early age that I didn’t actually know who I was or why I was here, but somehow I intuited that the answers lay within the questions and all I needed to do was ask. I’d inquire to the empty sky, implore the moon, or open my senses to the forest, and a peace would settle over me that I couldn’t explain, nor did I care to. I was happy to simply receive it and know it for the beauty it was. Rarely did I invoke the God that was offered to me at religious school. The proscribed worship in our synagogue seemed an altogether different matter from the union I’d experienced in nature and eventually those strictures muddled my earlier clarity. Late in my teenage years, my thirst for spiritual contact resurfaced and I turned to the Eastern sages.
My mother was horrified and as I continued to hop from yogi to yogi, she grew more and more flustered. Why couldn’t I find a nice rabbi who understood me? When I became deeply involved with a meditation movement founded by a renowned Indian rishi, she grew concerned enough to consult a cult detective for guidance, afraid she’d lost me for good.
But despite this ongoing friction, an ease in communication and a penchant for debate has always bonded my mother and me. We would spend hours arguing over the validity of my forays with the mystics, often into the wee hours. After writing Ethel, I can now see an important element that has marked our relationship and kept us close: mutual curiosity. Though my mother would not likely admit to her dormant spiritual stirrings, she none-the-less possesses the seeds of a seeker and has now and again indulged that latent interest through me. As much as she tried to coax me back to the safety of the mundane, her feisty skepticism is underscored with the very fuel of the spiritual aspirant.
Ethel’s plot is informed by this discreet, yet ultimately indestructible longing we all possess. In the unlikely candidate of my mother’s fictional counterpart I took it upon myself to follow that longing home, for Ethel, for Debra’s and my own catharsis, but mostly to spark awakening in that unsuspecting reader who is drawn to the book for its humor and accessibility, yet finds herself summoned into the quest for truth.
8/11/14 Barbi Schulick