God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery

God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
by Danusha Goska
Shanti Arts, 2018; 274 pp., $20.95

In 2005, Danusha Goska travelled to Berryville, Virginia, to spend time in retreat at Holy Cross Abbey, looking for silence to help her find guidance from God. God Through Binoculars is a memoir drawn from this experience. It is not confined to her retreat, nor to her experience of the monastery itself. Instead, it is a memoir of sometimes brutal honesty that explores the complex world of Goska’s life, of nature, and of the historical, social, and political complexities of the twenty-first century world.

This book is one woman’s exploration of her faith, told through her life experiences. It is a moving, harrowing, sometimes funny, always thoughtful memoir. Though the book is structured around the visit to the monastery, Goska takes us through an exploration of her own life, the world of nature, her faith, and the vagaries of a world that can be both beautiful beyond belief and deeply cruel. Her gaze encompasses her own life and the struggles she has had and still has with intractable poverty (she works as an adjunct professor, a system of “casual labor” in American universities that is starting to blight academic higher education here in the UK), with her health, with the issues she faced growing up as the youngest child in an abusive, troubled immigrant family. All this is interspersed with her observations from her own wide travels and her appreciation and understanding of the natural world.

Goska is a questioning woman. She observes, she forms opinions, and these she is not afraid to express. She condemns the damage she feels has been done by political correctness with its division of the world into artificial groups of the disadvantaged and the advantaged, the blameful and the blameless. Her views of world religions can be excoriating, even though she is a Christian and a woman of deep religious faith. This is not a book for people who want easy answers, for Goska has none to supply.

God Through Binoculars is not a memoir that follows the usual pattern of reminiscence and reflection. The book is structured like memory itself, layer on layer, link by link. For example, as she walks through the grounds of the monastery for the first time, the sight of a thistle leads to noli me tangere, to Mary Magdalene at the resurrection, to the Viking invasions of Scotland, to Polish brides, to the Polish word for thistle—a tongue-fracturing dziewięćsił—to the significance of the number nine. She talks about and also demonstrates the integral webs of meaning we used to inhabit and, in Goska’s view, have rejected in current times.

This is one of the book’s great strengths. As Goska explores her own life and her relationship with the faith she values but constantly questions, these integral webs take her and the reader through explorations into, for example, our relationships with the animal world—Goska is a keen and very knowledgeable bird-watcher. At one point, she explores human attitudes toward the hyena that range from Disney to the Gnostics to the Dome of the Rock.

The experience of religion and religious faith are central to the book. This is another area to which Goska turns her analytical eye. “How can you, how dare you,” she asks, “write an entire book about God’s love, act as if that is the starting point, the sine qua non, if you don’t even demonstrate that there is such a thing?” This is not the easy evasion too many discussions of faith resort to, the requirement of faith in order to believe. She demands more than that, and her retreat is, in part, to find it.

She observes the world with an artist’s eye. Her descriptions of the agricultural and the natural world paint images in the reader’s mind: Turkey vultures are “scraps of flapping Jurassic laundry.” A rice paddy is “the deep green shade of steamed broccoli.” The urban landscapes that she is also familiar with are drawn equally vividly with her word-pen: “Chinatown buses occasionally burst into flames, spin out of control, or have their tops sheared off by overpasses, but you cannot beat their prices.”

Ultimately, the core of this book is the concept of religious faith and belief and the struggles this encompasses. This is not a “seven rules for successful belief” kind of memoir, no Eat, Pray, Love. Religions are not exempt from Goska’s sharp and sometimes acerbic analyses. The monks are fallible men, and Goska queries the value of long-term isolation and enclosure as a route to spiritual enlightenment. Her own poverty allows her to query the nature of the Christian poverty practiced at the monastery—the relative luxury of the accommodation compared with her own living space and the matching sets of glassware, dishes, and cutlery found in the dining room do not strike her as true poverty. Goska’s standards are exacting.

For the reader, this book is a delight. Boredom is not an issue. Keeping up with Goska sometimes might be, but her writing is so clear and lucid that this reader found herself following where Goska led, not knowing what to expect round the next corner, but knowing it would offer new and sometimes challenging insights into her world. It is a very readable book.

Provocative, challenging, compassionate, acerbic, and sometimes shocking, God Through Binoculars is one of the most rewarding books I have read in recent years and deserves wide recognition.