Composing a Further Life

tune my thinking back to that time, I was puzzled to understand why this was new. Then I realized that it had to do with a shift away from looking at race as primarily an American issue to an emerging awareness of a multiracial world. It was only after Dr. King spoke out against the war in Vietnam that African Americans began to think in terms of all people of color and to claim an identification between black Americans and Africans and Southeast Asians. Racism came to be discussed as a global problem and racial justice directly connected with the end of the colonial empires and the economic differences between north and south. All that came into focus in New York City because of the presence of the United Nations.
    In 1975, Jim’s third year in New York, there were two events as the cathedral connected with a Japanese Shinto sect called Oomoto, one of them as part of a weeklong celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the United Nations in collaboration with the Temple of Understanding, an interfaith group founded in 1960.
    “A Dutch dentist and artist named Frederick Franck, who had spent several years in Africa working with Albert Schweitzer, had become interested in this Japanese community. It was a kind of almost unitarian but deistic Shinto sect that had become a sort of center for maintaining the ancient traditions of Japanese arts and crafts. It was also related to a radical critique of the Japanese government building up the military in the twenties, so in the thirties Onisaburo Deguchi, the head of it, and all of the leadership were jailed. They revived after the war, and in the last two years of his life, after getting out of prison, Onisaburo, who was an extraordinary potter and calligrapher, made two thousand tea bowls. They look like Bonnard paintings, vivid colors, very beautiful.
    “Frederick Franck heard about this revival, went to Japan, and wrote a book about them. The work was shown in four museums on the continent and ended up at the Victoria and Albert in London. It was a big deal, and Frederick Franck was in the midst of it. Well, at the show in London, the Oomoto group said, ‘We would like very much to have it shown in the United States,’ and Frederick Franck said, ‘Well, I know someone in New York who has a big place and I think he’s very interested in the arts, he’d be interested in this.’ And I, of course, said, ‘Yes, that would be lovely.’ The exhibition was to begin with their ritual of purification, and they asked if they could do it at the high altar, so they had, at the high altar of the cathedral, this Shinto offering of fruits and vegetables and whatnot.”
    Jim was already running into some opposition at his “big place.” “There were mutterings,” he said, “ ‘This is pagan, this is terrible.’ ” Then came the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the United Nations. I was living in Iran at that time, but I had heard about the event because my mother, Margaret Mead, preached on the opening night.
    “Oomoto was invited to come back for that,” Jim continued. “So they do a thing, and we had Pir Vilayat Khan, the Sufi Muslim leader and musician who died in 2004, a very wonderful spiritual guy, doing his Cosmic Mass, which takes off from Père Teilhard de Chardin’s notion. That was two Oomoto Shinto things in the cathedral in that year, one in March and another one in October, and there’s a picture in
The New York Times
of your mother and me and one of the Shinto leaders, and that gets people talking about
what
is going on in the cathedral. So at the December meeting of the trustees, where we were accused of all sorts of things, there was an attempt to get me fired, but the trustees didn’t buy it.
    “Then the Oomoto people come back again, and say how much they appreciated being able to have their service at the cathedral because all of the shows of Onisaburo’s art in Europe had been in secular museums, ‘but we’re a religious community,’ they say, ‘and this is a religious community, and you allowed us to have the Shinto service at a Christian altar.’ Then the guy stands up, and he reaches into his kimono sleeve and says, ‘We will be most honored if you next year would come to Japan and celebrate the Christian rituals in our Shinto shrine. Here are two tickets.’ So in January of ’seventy-seven, Pamela and I go to Japan, and then we go to India, where we’d never been before.
    “There was a real fusion of moments of