Page 3 of 3 Only after I got back from China and was trying to figure out what I hadn't found did I realize what I had expected to find. "Piety" is one of the problem words for me. Originally meaning "dutifulness," it was applied to religion to describe the regular attendees at temple, church, or mosque. Because of the well-known excesses of some of those attendees, the word turned negative, meaning not just "dutifully religious" but "conspicuously religious." Pridefully religious. So unless you are doing satire, or unless you are one of those who pride themselves on their conspicuous religiosity and see it as a badge of honor, "piety" is not something one thinks about a lot. Well. You may think about it, but you're mighty careful in talking about it. Yet, after returning from China, I realized that what I'd missed there was any evidence of an ancient, unsullied piety (in the mostly lost, positive sense of the word) that had helped me so much in the Hsin Hsin Ming. For one who is repulsed by the very thought of "piety" in the newer, negative sense, that realization was difficult to accept. But rifling through my memories of China, I had no doubt about it. Not only have the people there joined the capitalist cavalcade wholeheartedly, they have also (learning fast!) preserved many of the old temples and other religious sites, seeing them as the good tourist profit centers that they are, but empty of the visionary spirit that had originally given them life. But there was a more difficult realization to come, this one much closer to home. Roaming the American cityscape after my return, I had to see that for all our negative-meaning piety (churches everywhere, mammon-driven hate-filled preachers noisily filling the radio and TV spectrum), for all that, there is in America a pervasive, well- (if weakly) intentioned positive-meaning piety here. Not all the churchgoers, temple attendees, and mosque genuflectors are bad-pious. They're not all shouters and screamers and finger-pointers and denouncers and terrorists. Some of them are truly (pardon the expression) pious. Devout, quiet seekers, not unlike one errant American who had wandered continents looking for his own unheralded and gentle place of worship. Now, when I move about America, I no longer get my intellectual nose quite so bent out of shape when I see one of the ubiquitous places of worship. Yes, I (still) disagree with many of the tenets and with most of the outward and visible signs of those tenets. But I now know that on the quiet path one finds many hushed, timorous, and--yes--pious pilgrims whose silence can be respected, appreciated, and joined with in the harmony of humble questing. END
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