Late in the fall of 2024 I had the pleasure of leading a Jesuit Media Lab seminar on the work of the American writer George Saunders, using the lens of Saunders as a Catholic writer. Over the six weeks of the course, we had wonderful and insightful discussions about a number of different Saunders short stories, but we also spent one week looking at spiritual themes in his nonfiction writing. Through the vagaries of scheduling this nonfiction-focused week overlapped with the presidential election. As one might expect, there were dramatically fewer discussion posts that week, but we did find some meaningful connections between the themes of his essays and our contemporary political and cultural moment, and I find myself mulling them over again as we move toward Inauguration Day.
Saunders is, at times, an overtly political writer. A number of his stories deal explicitly with themes of tyranny, fascism and how citizens should respond to extremism. In his nonfiction, he has written probing essays attempting to understand our current political divides and where we go from here. But I had not chosen any overtly political essays to discuss during election week, in part because when designing the schedule I wasn’t even aware it was going to intersect with the election, but also because the course was focused primarily on spiritual, not political, themes — but of course the two are not easily separated.
The two pieces we discussed that week were “Hypocrites,” a brief memoir about a moment of disillusionment in his Catholic upbringing, and “The Incredible Buddha Boy,” a 2006 GQ essay about Saunders’s trip to Nepal to investigate rumors of a teenage Buddhist who had apparently been meditating in the woods, for seven months, without food or water. It is the “Buddha Boy” essay that has been on my mind for the past couple of weeks.
When he first hears about this meditating child, Saunders is skeptical that such a thing is even possible; ultimately, he feels compelled to go and see for himself. Throughout the essay he continually contrasts his own wants, needs and desires with what the Buddha Boy represents, namely a renunciation or, or mastery over, these desires; Saunders addresses the reader and asks us to focus on this dichotomy as well: “Close your eyes, refuse to move, and watch what your mind does. What it does is become discontent with that-which-is.” In other words, when otherwise unoccupied, our minds become fixated on desires, and we believe happiness comes from satisfying these desires. But of course, more desires always come — no happiness arrived at this way can last.
For Saunders, the boy calls to mind the limits of the body — and perhaps the ability to transcend these limits. When Saunders is allowed to come close to the place where the boy is meditating, motionless, he writes, “I have a sudden feeling of gratitude/ reverence/ terror. What a privilege. Oh God, I have somehow underestimated the gravity of this place and moment.”
Late in the night, as he observes the boy in the darkness, he sees a stream of “vivid red and blue lights (like flares) … emanating from the boy’s forehead,” and he hears what he describes as the boy’s amplified heartbeat resounding throughout the enclosure. Soon after, he thinks the noise was most likely just a drum from a nearby village and the lights were probably just coming from a distant campfire, a literal trick of the light. “I am almost positive,” he claims, though the “almost” here is doing a lot of narrative work, particularly since these mysterious lights reappear later that night, when he acknowledges, “The line between miracle and hallucination is all but gone.”
The night drags on, and Saunders takes us through it, hour by hour, detailing his desires — for warmth, food, a bathroom, privacy — continually inviting us to contrast this with the boy, sitting completely still, without food or blankets, meditating. He wonders, “Is he suffering in there as much as I’m suffering out here? … / If so, then what he’s doing is a monumental, insane feat of willpower. / If not, it’s something even stranger.” And it is these tensions — between miracle and trick of the light, between willpower and transcendence — that Saunders leaves unresolved, acknowledging that even witnessing something that defies rational explanation is not always enough to bring surety. Although we crave clarity and certainty, they are illusory.
Find out what makes you kinder, what opens you up and brings out the most loving, generous and unafraid version of you — and go after those things as if nothing else matters.
George Saunders
This vision of the sacred is one we can find throughout Saunders’s body of work — grace and mystery are present, even if both writer and reader are not fully sure what to make of them. His worldview has clearly been shaped by his Catholic upbringing, but he is not interested in advocating for any particular religious perspective; what he wants, which is wonderfully summarized in a Saunders quote that Pope Francis includes in his new autobiography “Hope,” is for people to “find out what makes you kinder, what opens you up and brings out the most loving, generous and unafraid version of you — and go after those things as if nothing else matters.”
One key part of this quote, which plays a key role in the Buddha Boy essay as well, is the idea of being unafraid. This is a theme we paid particular attention to during our election week discussion of the piece. Early in the essay, Saunders writes: “A human being is someone who, having lived awhile, becomes terrified and, having become terrified, deeply craves an end to fear.” Later in the essay, he returns to fear, and how it can come to control us:
“At the end of my life, I know I won’t be wishing I’d held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the people around me. So what is stopping me from stepping outside my habitual crap?
My mind, my limited mind.
…
Because we feel ourselves first and foremost as physical beings, the physical comes to dominate us: Beloved uncles die, parents are displaced, cousins go to war, children suffer misfortune, love becomes a trap. The deeper in you go, the more it hurts to get out. Disaster (sickness, death, loss) is guaranteed and in fact is already en route, and when it comes, it hurts and may even destroy us.
We fight this by making ourselves less vulnerable, mastering the physical, becoming richer, making bigger safety nets, safer cars, better medicines.
But it’s nowhere near enough.”
This is both a spiritual and a political insight. We crave security and an end to pain and suffering, and we might do morally questionable things to achieve these goals, but we can never actually make it happen. Buddhism preaches a form of detachment as the way past this trap, and there are strains of Catholic mysticism that do something similar. But this is not really Saunders’s message. In his work, particularly his fiction, love and commitment to the vulnerable other is a recurring, central idea. Rather than detachment, the solution he offers is an acceptance of suffering and pain as a part of living. Acknowledge the fear, but do not be ruled by it. Instead, be governed by generosity and love. So, whatever these next four years have in store for all of us, reading Saunders reminds me to do just this — to recognize and reject the illusions of certainty and of invulnerability, and to instead seek out mystery and embrace empathy, sacrifice and love.