December, 2005 Edition
Hi everyone –
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Rumor
has it that the hottest item Santa’s seeing on lists this year is a MP3 player. I can’t say I wouldn’t agree – I’m become a slave to my little pink iPod, which keeps me sane while I travel around the country on book tour. I have come to the conclusion that you can tell as much about a person from what’s on their iPod as you can from rifling through their medicine cabinet in the bathroom. For example, I was sitting on a plane (again) next to a teenage boy who was listening – I assumed I’d see the Black Eyed Peas pop up in the viewfinder, or the Vines – but he was listening to James Taylor, and as we started talking, I found out that he was a honors student sent to a youth government conference in Washington DC. On my iPod, you’d find a lot of Aimee Mann, Wilco, Jack Johnson, and my son playing Mozart on the piano. But – in the spirit of keeping up with the times – you can now have ME on your iPod. Starting now, and then for the next few months, I’ll be offering short podcasts you can download (or listen to on my website) about a variety of topics. And unlike iTunes and Napster…I’m
free! :-) For those of you who need gifts for the technologically impaired, I’m happy to report that This is a season of faith – but somehow, faith’s never quite as black and white as people seem to think it is. That’s really the overarching subject of the book I’m researching now. As many of you know, I spent some time this past month in Arizona, on death row. It’s a very strange place – in all the years I’ve been doing research, I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a cloud of secrecy like the one I found there. I was literally on a plane when my visit was being nearly cancelled – I had to arrive at the facility and talk my way into it, because they decided if I was a writer, I must be “media”. I was able to charm the authorities into giving me a tour of their death row – which is more serene than you’d think, because the inmates are locked into their individual cells 23 hours a day. Then I begged to be taken to the execution chamber – the Death House, as it used to be called in Arizona. Imagine more grumbling (Who are you again? And why are you writing a book?) and more pleading (It’s FICTION!) and finally I got into the facility. It was while I was examining their gas chamber (Arizona uses both gas and lethal injection) that the warden approached me to ask me again who I was, and why I was writing a book about this. She definitely had her guard up – and wasn’t budging an inch. We started talking about the last execution in Arizona; and at some point she mentioned she was a practicing Catholic. “If you’re Catholic,” I said, “do you think the death penalty is a good thing?” She stared at me for a long moment, and then said, “I used to.” From that moment on, the wall between us came down, and she was willing to tell me everything I wanted and needed to know – including scenes you’ll see in this book in 2008, a backstage look at how an execution happens. The most jarring moments in my research trip? Speaking to a condemned man – who was convicted of murdering someone by shooting battery acid into his veins – yet who also called me Ma’am and explained that he doesn’t swear, because it’s disrespectful. And talking to the warden in the death house, when I was having trouble juggling notebooks and papers, and leaned against the closest surface to take notes more easily…only to realize I was sprawled across the lethal injection gurney.
The counterpart of the research I’ve done on death row involves holing up in my office wading through the gospels for research…not just the ones that made it into the Bible, but the ones that didn’t, for a variety of reasons. There is a line in the Gospel of Thomas – a gospel found in 1945 in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, that you are probably unfamiliar with…because it isn’t in the Bible. Like the other 51 texts found at Nag Hammadi, they contain a lot of sayings you can find in the Bible…and a lot you won’t. These are referred to as the Gnostic gospels – part and parcel of a religious movement that was denounced as heresy by Orthodox Christianity in the middle of the second century. Gnosis means knowledge in Greek – and the basis for their beliefs is that if you want to know God, you have to know yourself. Or in other words, there’s a little bit of divinity in all of us, coded and hidden…and it’s up to each of us to figure out how to get it out. The Gnostics felt that religion was something that by definition had to be personal – and that if you simply believed what others told you to believe or said the right words during a church service or got baptized, it wasn’t enough to reach spiritual fulfillment. Above all else, the Gnostics said, ask questions. Don’t believe everything you’re told; don’t assume that just because someone says “This is the way it should be done” that he or she is right. There are a lot of reasons – political and religious – why Orthodox Christianity rejected the Gnostic movement…but in a way, the baby was thrown out with the bathwater. Not only were these gospels lost for thousands of years…but so was some of the open-mindedness about faith in general. “If you bring forth what is within you,” Jesus says, in the Gospel of Thomas, “what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” Sounds like a riddle, right? But it’s actually pretty simple: The potential to free yourself – or ruin yourself – is entirely up to you. And just maybe instead of focusing on the destination, we ought to look at the journey.
Whatever you believe; and however you celebrate – I hope it’s full of family and friends and chocolate, and all the other things that make us stop for a moment and appreciate how lucky we are to be here.
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© 2005 Jodi Picoult
Hanover, New Hampshire
www.jodipicoult.com