EV: So I must say I loved Sun House. One of the most meaningful books, fiction or nonfiction, that I’ve read in years. Really, really moved me. And I wanted to start by asking you about the genesis of the book. And in the book the main narrator, who is nicknamed the Holy Goat, he describes kind of the impetus behind the book, but it’s also stated very emphatically at the beginning of your acknowledgments, where you write, “Though I’d seen countless op-eds calling for a change in consciousness if humanity is to survive, I’d seen zero op-ed descriptions of what this consciousness looks, feels, tastes, sounds, and lives like as it addresses inescapable biological and spiritual realities with the love, truthfulness, and justice they demand.” I mean, that’s a very powerful and creative mandate to begin a book with, to aim to create something that brings this consciousness to life.
DJD: I found something in The Cloud of Unknowing, where it’s recommended as a spiritual practice to take just one word, or one term, like say a two-syllable name of God, or the word “love,” or the word “God,” or the word “mercy,” and attach it to your heart so that it never goes away. And anything that happens to you, rather than try to fight it with your reason or your panicked emotions, just fall back on your word that you have glued to your heart… If you do that, it gives you something that you can do in the face of being traumatized by watching the PBS News every night. It is a desperate little simplicity... Never let your intellect mess around with your word. You want to keep it pure, because God can be taken and held by love, not by thought. (Meister) Eckhart said repeatedly that the thought of God disappears as fast as the thought, or the series of thoughts. That’s why I’m not thrilled by theology... A lot of people have noticed in Sun House is a kind of benign anti-theology… Choose the word you’re attracted to so that you don’t make the mistake of analyzing the interplay between the seeker and the Beloved. You just go straight to love, whether you’re feeling it or not at that moment, by clinging to that word that you have sewn to your heart.
EV: So the early influences of your own experiences and your friends really colored the creation of these characters wanting to find meaning and respond to the crisis that we’re in. I mean, I felt that. It felt remarkably personal at times; that made me wonder, you know, all these different characters, are they really an amalgamation of your own experiences and journeys over the years?
DJD: Well, you know, I love Montana… in a physical way that’s very outdoorsy. You know, backpacking, fly fishing, just spending time standing in rivers, birding—there are so many wonderful hikes available right outside this studio around Missoula… So I wanted to combine the landscape that comes out in this secretive mountain culture, the Lûmi people (and) create a mystique… I like to imagine Thomas Merton would enjoy reading Sun House. And I know that’s an ambitious thought, but Thomas Merton, I felt so close to him when I fell in love with Meister Eckhart when I was nineteen in a food stamp store… Reading his sermon, “God Laughs and Plays,” I just looked around at the almost intentional grubbiness of this governmental place where they made people beg for food, and it struck me as comical. I stopped getting food stamps and found a dented can store, warehouse, in Portland, and if the can didn’t explode, I ate the chicken noodle soup or whatever it was and learned how to be incredibly thrifty.
And I also became self-employed, because I wanted to live— Jim Harrison said, “Somebody needs to stay outside.” And for me that meant, as it did for Jim, stay outside the academy, stay outside the university system, stay outside any kind of church—and that still leaves a lot. And my friendships have been in that outside world. It’s more likely that I’ll be close to a fisheries biologist than any kind of a preacher. I have a few friends who are clerics, but… the ones who are tend to be mystics.
EV: Earlier in response to kind of the impetus behind writing the book, you spoke about the Beguines and how central they are to influencing a potential way to live based on their beguinages, these communities they formed. And the characters, especially Jervis and TJ and Risa, were very influenced by the Beguines and they talk about them in their journeys and quote them extensively. But to me, I was curious when I was reading this, and it seemed to become clear as the story went on, that this seems to be like part of a larger thread you were exploring about the importance of challenging the patriarchy in how it influenced spiritual and religious traditions in a way that really silenced women in a very profound way. And, you know, your character, Risa, she gives up her study of Vedic writing, poetry, culture, because she comes across the writings which deride women from that tradition, and she feels she can’t go on. And this seems important because it’s a thread that emerges throughout the book.
DJD: Raising two daughters… I had a Mayan double matrimonial hammock hanging from the main beam in my study, and my daughters were invited to come get in it whenever they wanted to… (I’d say) “Interrupt my work, and come tell me whatever you’re thinking, or sing a song, or bring a friend.” They often took me up on that… Watching two women who are really wonderful—now at thirty-one and thirty-three—watching them form… added this level of anger to the degrading ways that (women) have been treated, particularly by the Catholic Church… It’s perverse… It was an anti-perverse joy to me to create… Jervis’s street religion, “Dumpster Catholicism,” the thesis of which is that if you look at the Catholic Church mainstream and what’s come out of Rome and the Vatican, the spiritual riches that the church has dumpstered, so to speak, rejected, are much greater than [what] they’ve kept in… There will always be great figures in the Catholic Church. And they have so many cool buildings built with other cultures’ riches, but it all has that taint… Some Catholic readers who have been genuinely excited about (Sun House), not just like it’s a book of fiction, but like, “Wow, I really like that idea of all the great things that are outside the church.”
EV: Forming a new branch of Catholicism based on what’s been thrown away.
DJD: Yeah. Yes!
EV: Embracing and valuing the divine feminine is something that is part of the characters’ individual journeys and also part of what you’re sharing in the book. And there is a passage, an exchange between Risa and the character, Lorilee, where they are talking about emptiness. And during this exchange, Risa refers to emptiness as “she,” and Lorilee asks why. And Risa says, “I could be wrong, but I connect śūnyatā’s”—which is the Buddhist term for the void—“I connect śūnyatā’s purity to the divine feminine once known as Sophia. It irks me that a sexist Roman men’s club stripped Sophia of her femaleness and gave her the … name ‘the Holy Ghost.’ Misnaming her doesn’t change her.” That was one of the most potent passages for me in the book. Talk to me about this and this larger thread of recognizing the divine feminine that you’re weaving here within the stories.
DJD: Lao Tzu (says of) the mysterious female, which he also calls the Valley Spirit—says that she was before anything was… The reason I love the femininity that was taken away from Sophia, or the Gahan-ka’isht as the Lûmi people call her, or Jnaneshwar, a wonderful Hindu tradition mystic and saint and poet… is this link between the divine feminine and the divine… where he’s talking about [how] without his consort Sophia, or whatever word you want to use, the Lord cannot even appear if creativity doesn’t give him the ability to manifest in this world of cosmic illusion, which is our reality… Even though we use the word “illusion,” we need utmost respect for the word at the same time we have to realize, with the great mystics, that when that game is over, the end point is a great Allness. It’s all the love there is, all the power and bliss there is.
DJD: I once heard a master of sorts give a kind of spiritual interpretation to Cole Porter’s hit song, “Begin the Beguine,” and he turned the lyrics into a mystical track. And I was fascinated by that… When you turn to the mystics, there’s an experience of unity that crosses religious lines. If you just leave the dogmas of each major wisdom tradition, the religious dogmas, and turn to the mystical experience … you can feel the unity to the point where I sometimes think Zen master Dōgen and Meister Eckhart might have been the same person who just switched sides of the Earth on the next incarnation. And it’s just endlessly fascinating. It has the quality that mythology has for us, or reading Catherine of Siena, or hearing Mother Teresa say just simple but iconic statements like, “When I finally see Jesus, I’ll tell him I loved him in the dark.” Or “May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.” That’s what the mystics are trying to do. She was a very practical woman, but she really— those statements would fit right into something John of the Cross might say.
DJD: Certain landscapes seem to enhance certain wisdom texts, like reading Lao Tzu in a temperate rainforest is just a great read: there’s so much kind of moisture and water imagery and the valley spirit and all these things in Lao Tzu. In the High Desert of Eastern Oregon, I might have Merton’s book on the Desert Fathers with me, or… the Desert Fathers themselves, particularly Saint Isaac of Syria, who’s referenced several times in Sun House.
EV: Grady is a guy who, you know, worked for a software company and spent his summers trying to find meaning away from an urban existence of toil in the office, which many people can relate to. And there’s a love of mountains that is imparted through his story, which I think was really important. Mountains have often been a symbol for truth, especially in Buddhist and Zen traditions, and that is referenced here, and Grady does speak about that. But there also is just this love of what is held within these spaces, which are hard to access, that gives you access to something beyond the self that you impart through his story… When you were young… you had this experience living at a higher altitude and being with mountains. But I’m curious to know more about the importance of mountains for you and in this book.
DJD: My brother John… took six months to die… When I was sitting outside his room… because I couldn’t bear to be with him anymore… this Seventh-Day Adventist seminarian, fresh out of seminary, came parading down the hallway with a Bible under his arm. And I stood up to be respectful… (Then) he grabbed my shoulders very hard and got right in my face and said, “Faith can move mountains. If you pray for your brother hard enough with a pure enough heart, you can save his life.” And my brother was already abandoned by his doctors, had staph infection, and was going to die within a matter of hours… What the seminarian did with his, you know, plastic explosive vest of faith was just make me feel incredible guilt that my brother died because I wasn’t pure enough of heart and my faith had not saved his life.
So when I later read the Mountains and Waters Sutra of Dōgen, and he says, “Mountains walk…” I started reading about plate tectonics, and how could you deny that mountains walk when you find seashells on top of the summit of really high mountains? And then I found out that just in my lifetime the Grand Tetons have walked eight feet higher. So in some funny way, that seminarian whose kind of faith infuriated me…became a kind of teacher… You don’t even need faith for mountains to move. You can ride them a few inches when you stay a hundred days in the Wallowas when you’re nineteen… So that was more than just a rich symbol; it felt experiential, so easy to imagine... It’s pretty miraculous, to see something that lived on the ocean floor… at eight thousand feet.
EV: There’s a story that’s shared by Lorilee towards the end of the book, during a community meditation and prayer meeting, that I love. And I didn’t know this story before I read it in the book. And it’s a story from when the news anchor Dan Rather interviewed Mother Teresa. And in the interview, Dan Rather asks Mother Teresa, “What do you say to God when you pray?” And Mother Teresa says, “I don’t say anything. I just listen.” And Dan Rather says, “Well, what does Jesus tell you?” And Mother Teresa responds by saying, “Oh, he doesn’t say anything either. He just listens.” And I love that. And I was so moved by it, because listening as a form of prayer is not something that is spoken about enough, I feel. And it is something that is part of each of your characters’ journeys in their own way. So I wonder if you could speak to… why you felt to include it, not just, you know, implicitly, but also so directly towards the end of the book.
DJD: I’d been on that novel for so many years that I wanted the run of closing chapters to be really powerful… Two chapters that knocked me out: The one where Lorilee gives her last performance at the benefit concert and sings that song that she composed where she mentions the Beguines and some women saints… “When sorrow tries to crush my heart, I reach through time to touch your feet.” And then what she says about, sings about, breasts. That’s a huge spoiler, so I’m going to stop myself right there. But I really felt that chapter. I really loved the moment when her son, Mu, comes out on stage, and you see the wonderful young man for whom she sacrificed. I won’t even say what she sacrificed… Too much of a spoiler…
Then… the last chapter of Sun House, “Sky Door.” That’s my favorite thing I’ve ever written. So to the end I was trying to find ways to portray the harmony that they had found to the degree that they had found it without coming up with anything magical realistic to lessen Risa’s sorrow as she’s losing her friend.
EV: Beyond the use of language, there seems to be this, I don’t know, this call that you’re making. And maybe I’m just reading into the book, but going back to the original impetus you have in the book to create a form of what this consciousness might look like and how it can be a response to what we’re dealing with in a way of healing, that we can’t just have ecological solutions that aren’t embedded in our deepest selves, and that the emphasis of the contemplative journey is that that journey leads you back to the soul, and through the soul one has a connection with the divine in all their forms; and that we can’t have a healing unless the soul is involved, and we can’t have a collective healing unless the individual is involved, and the individual has to be involved on a level of the soul. I mean, this is what I’m feeling is present in the stories here, which, again, I was so moved by. But perhaps I’m reading into it.
DJD: What you’re describing is what I was trying to do. Our vocabularies are a little different. And I’m extremely fond of any occasion where I can insert humor, and don’t mind being outrageous now and then… But generally, you’re describing the way I was approaching this novel.
EV: Well, maybe one last question for you, David, and hopefully it’s not too much of a spoiler, which is the meaning and story behind the title of the book Sun House, which is revealed towards the very end.
DJD: It comes out of that love that I was talking about between the male aspect of the divine and the female aspect of the divine, each needing each other to create each other… The Sun is sacrificing… four hundred million tons of itself. Is it per second or per minute? I think it’s per second… That is really a gigantic conflagration that’s going on to give us life… So it ties back into the Lûmi idea that the Sun wasn’t able to experience the… beauty of the huge sacrifice that he is making. And just imagining him in a relationship with the infinite creativity that is Sophia, of course she, as his consort in creation, would want to give him the glory, even though he would probably have preferred to give it to her. Yeah, so that’s some of my thoughts as I was landing finally on the title, the last two words of that chapter: Sun. House.