Life of Pi

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
August 18, 2013

In this book, a young Indian boy is shipwrecked, and ends up in a small lifeboat with a tiger. What might the tiger be in his life? What might it be in ours?

Life of Pi is a rich story, gorged with beauty, horrific suffering, philosophical pondering, compelling mysteries, intellectual challenge. The story, told to the writer by the adult Pi in his home in Canada, is about a sixteen year old boy named after a public swimming pool in France, Piscine Molitor Patel. Tormented by classmates who call him “pissing,” he takes the nickname Pi, “And so, in that Greek letter that looks like a shack with a corrugated tin roof, in that elusive, irrational number with which scientists try to understand the universe, I found refuge.”

Pi is a religious Hindu boy, but while the family is on vacation in the hill country, he is drawn to a Christian chapel. The priest is there, and they have conversations. Pi is outraged at how un god-like Jesus is, from his doubts to his hunger to his suffering to actually consenting to die. When he asks the priest why a god would do that, the priest answers “love.” After three days of talking, Pi asks to be a Christian, and the priest says “you already are, in your heart.”

A year later, in his hometown, he meets a Muslim baker, a Sufi mystic who speaks, enraptured, about “The Beloved.” Pi begins to study the Koran with him and becomes a Muslim. On his next birthday he tells his parents he wants a Muslim prayer rug and he wants to be baptized as a Christian. Both of them are modem Indians, secular and sensible. They get him a prayer rug but they don’t like it. On a walk one day, the whole family is confronted by the Sufi teacher, a Christian priest and the Hindu pandit.

“Your son has gone Muslim” he says.

“He is a good Christian boy,” the priest says. “We hope to have him in our choir soon.”

“You are mistaken. He’s a good Muslim boy. He comes without fail to Friday prayers, and his knowledge of the Holy Qu’ran is coming along nicely.” They have a vigorous debate there in the street in front of Pi’s horrified parents. This, he says, was his introduction to interfaith dialogue.

“He must choose,” they conclude.

“But I just want to love God,” Pi says. He tells a story about Lord Krishna dancing with the milkmaids; he makes himself so abundant that he can dance with each of them at the same time. As soon as one imagines she is his only partner, though, he vanishes. His parents allow him to be all three.

One of his school teachers, Mr. Kumar, is an atheist. Pi recognizes him with respect and calls him a brother believer. “Like me,” he says, “they go as far as reason will carry them — and then they leap. ” The agnostics are the ones he cannot relate to. “Doubt is useful or a while …. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a mode of transportation. “

Pi describes his preferred stance in the world as “an intellect confounded, and yet a trusting sense of presence and of ultimate purpose. Why look at life with a “dry, yeastless factuality. – God is the better story.” Why not love God? It’s a better story.

Pi’s family owns a zoo. He grows up with a pride oflions for his alarm clock, with peacocks, tigers and monkeys all around. He learns how dangerous their wildness is, how much animals are creatures of habit and routine, territory, and hierarchy. This knowledge is life-saving later on.

They decide to sell the zoo to a Canadian company, pack up all the animals and take a Japanese freighter toward Canada. One night in the middle of the Pacific, the ship sinks in a storm. Fast. Pi is on a life boat. On it with him are a zebra, who has broken its leg leaping onto the boat, an orangutan, a hyena and an adult Bengal tiger named Richard Parker who climbs into the boat from the sea during the storm. Over the next several chapters the hyena eats the zebra and the orangutan. The tiger kills the hyena.

Pi needs to get rid of the tiger, but how? Maybe he could just not feed the tiger, and just outlive him? No. A hungry tiger would be worse to have in the boat with you. Pi spends the night in a panic, his body shaking. “Fear is life’s only true opponent.” He says,” Only fear can defeat life.”

p.134 “You might think I lost all hope at that point. I did. As a result I perked up and felt much better. We see that in sports all the time, don’t we? The tennis challenger starts strong but soon loses confidence in his playing. The champion racks up the games. But in the final set, when the challenger has nothing left to lose, he becomes relaxed again, insouciant, daring. Suddenly he’s playing like the devil and the champion must work hard to get those last points. So it was with me.”

The next morning it comes to him. He must tame the tiger. That’s the only plan that will work. “It was not a question of him or me, but him and me.”

“But there’s more to it. I will come clean. I will tell you a secret. Part of me was glad about Richard Parker. A part of me did not want Richard Parker to die at all, because if he died I would be left alone with despair, a foe even more formidable than a tiger. “

Establishing Alpha-Omega relationships with major lifeboat pests, “he says, “is not covered in the life boat survival manual. “

Pi sets about training the tiger, marking territory, using the tiger’s weak sea legs to make him seasick while Pi blows on a whistle, making the tiger associate feeling weak and sick with Pi’s mighty roaring. Pi feeds Richard Parker and gathers fresh water for him. They go blind together from the lack of good food. Nearly dead, they wash up on the shore of Mexico together, whereupon the tiger bounds off into the jungle without a backward glance, leaving Pi to Mexican medical personnel and officials from the Japanese shipping line.

He tells two officials from the shipping line the amazing stories of his seven months in the boat. They say it’s hard to believe that he was in the boat with a full grown tiger for seven months and lived.

We’re just being reasonable,” they say.

Pi replies, “So am I! I applied my reason at every moment. Reason is excellent for getting food, clothing and shelter. Reason is the very best tool kit. Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.”

The Japanese shipping officials insist Pi tell them “what really happened.” He insists that they just want another story. As soon as you put the experience of a life into language it becomes a story. Do they just want a story without animals?

Yes, without animals, they say.

He tells a horrific story where his mother, a brutish chef, a Taiwanese sailor and he are in the life boat. After a few days the chef kills the sailor, then Pi’s mother. Pi kills the chef and is alone in the boat.

After telling both stories, he asks the Japanese officials of the shipping company which was the better story. The one with the animals, they answered. Pi said “Thank you. And so it goes with God.”

They draw the parallels. If the zebra is the sailor, the awful chef is the hyena, the orangutan must be Pi’s mother. Then Pi himself is the tiger.

I think life is at times like being shipwrecked. We drift along for a time, powerless.

There is a tiger in the boat. Maybe it’s our wild side, our need to mess things up, our fear, our addiction. Maybe the tiger in the boat is loneliness, the sense of being invisible. Maybe anger is what threatens to destroy you, yet if you kill it, you also kill a piece of yourself that keeps you alive.

So you drift, and from the story of Pi we see someone drifting, filled with a sense of belonging to the Divine, released by letting go and believing he will be okay, having the will to live until he dies, feeling that will be okay too.

How is this a story of Unitarian Universalist spirituality? We are spiritually free to be Muslim, Christian and Hindu, even though others may say we have to choose. Weare free to be atheists or to tell our own story of what it is that we worship. Anyone who puts an experience with Mystery into words – really, any experience into words— is telling a story. Why not choose the best story for you? The one that holds the most layers of truth? Your idea of God may be of a powerful being who holds the whole universe in her hand, or of a suffering loving being who understands what it is to be human, who even holds the experience of real death in his heart. Your idea may be of one flame from which all other candles are lit. Your idea may be of a force of love or truth or justice that flows through the world, or for you, the earth itself is alive and that is what makes your soul blossom like a rose and gives you the power to tame the tiger.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776