The book's plot itself is the story of a young man from Pakistan who finds himself in America before and after the attacks on September 11, and chronicles how his life is transformed by American reactions.
The other part of the book chronicles his relationship with a woman who is depressed following the loss of her boyfriend, and how she slowly loses her grip on the present as she chases after the past.
Both storylines are interesting because they provide non-Western insights into the thoughts and ideas that pervade much of American culture - how to deal with mental illness and our understanding of fundamentalism.
Starting with the easier of the topics first - mental illness. There's a line from the book that comes after Changez (the main character) finds out that his girlfriend has checked herself into a mental institution:
...hers was an illness of the spirit, and I had been raised in an environment too thoroughly permeated with a tradition of shared rituals of mysticism to accept that conditions of the spirit could not be influenced by the care, affection, and desire of others. (140-141)
What strikes me about this sentence is the idea about "shared rituals of mysticism" and how they can and should relate to conditions of the spirit. That rituals have power, and mysticism provides connection to something greater than oneself seem to be important components about how humans work that we've lost in the West.
We are so focused on our individualism and belief that we can solve our own problems (producerism) have so permeated our culture, that instead of becoming independent and interdependent, helping one another and being able to live in real relationships with one another we have become isolated. Our focus inward prevents us from being shaped by the real people we come across in our daily lives.
Instead, our lives are shaped by books we read, the leaders of political parties we'll never meet, and the storybook plots of many movies. We use these people and ideas to build walls that isolate us and prevent us from actually being transformed by other living breathing humans we meet.
And, these walls also isolate us and prevent us from being transformed by the mystical - by God.
The key to "shared rituals of mysticism" is that these rituals destroy the walls that we have built around us. These rituals allow God to break into what is happening in our lives and transform the story that we are writing behind the walls - opening us up to something new.
And because these rituals are shared, other people come in with God through these walls. They burst in to remind us that regardless of what we want to believe, we are not alone, that we are not isolated. And that they are capable and want to care for us, and want us to be transformed.
Typically, however, instead of allowing God burst through the walls during the "shared rituals of mysticism" we reinforce the walls by participating in the "individual rituals of secularism."
For Changez in the book, these rituals are the fundamentals of capitalism - to make sure that the profit is greater than the cost. For much of the book, these rituals create walls that protect him from the pain of true connection and true pain and true love. Much like our own rituals create the same barriers in our lives, regardless of what we pursue.
The fundamentals of capitalism that Changez pursues brought to my attention just how pervasive and easy fundamentalism actually is. Typically, we think of religious fundamentalism, and how "crazy" their rhetoric sounds to our "refined sensibilities," yet it's deeper than that.
I think that humans have an innate desire for things to be simple and understandable. And we will pursue simple answers because we think that they must be the most correct. Occam's Razor (when presented with multiple solutions, the simplest one is correct) is the principle by which we live most of our lives. We will avoid complicating things unless we absolutely have to, which means that we will seldom question the status quo because that makes things messy.
It's why we've allowed slavery for many years. It's why we allowed women to be kept from having an equal voice for so long. It's why racism still permeates much of our culture, even though we would never admit it. It's why LGBT rights have to be fought for. Changing these things required questioning the status quo. It requires complications. It requires tearing down the walls that we have built to keep others out.
And ironically, many of these belief stem out of a "religious fundamentalism" to some degree. Some unquestioning belief that these are the way things should be. And whether it's the God of Abraham or Jesus Christ or money, we tend to keep things simple. We want our God to keep things neat and orderly.
Which is more than a bit ironic because God doesn't exactly do neat and orderly. God invites us time and time again to "get our hands dirty" to make a mess of things, so that we might truly understand one another and God more clearly. Anytime we become devoted to one particular idea or fundamental, we build another wall to keep ourselves isolated and protected.
We need "shared rituals of mysticism" to help us overcome and get through these walls. We need to allow God to break into our lives and transform our stories. We need other people to be just as vulnerable as we are, so that we might find healing in each other. And maybe, we need to start participating in "shared rituals of mysticism" with those of different faiths and backgrounds, to keep us from becoming fundamentalists to whatever idea seems to be good at the time.
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