More than 20 years ago, Richard Vaughan wrote Matthew a very kind and perceptive letter, asking him to reconsider whether his participation in a Buddhist cult would forever alienate him from the real world, and his real friends. Matthew reads this letter here.It’s on his mind not only because there are so many people who are now struggling with having lost friends and family members, but also because Richard—only 55, and a hero of Canadian queer literature—has been missing for a week.Show NotesN.B. writers and LGBTQ community ‘very worried‘ about missing mentor Richard VaughanThe Seven Good Reasons Why the Boys in the Band Could be a Musical or, I am the Dollar in the DolorosaQAnon Casualties
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This is a bittersweet episode to produce.
The sweet part is about how a long time ago, a friend of mine used his natural kindness and grace and wit to help me see that I was in a cult and to gently ask that I reconsider my actions.
The bitter part is that now this friend has gone missing in his hometown of Fredericton, New Brunswick.
The police haven't found him yet, and it's really hard to stay hopeful.
It's been almost a week.
His name is Richard Vaughan, and as you'll see, he's a wonderful writer.
Here in Canada, he's a kind of patron saint of queer literature.
So right now there are thousands of readers and hundreds of friends of his who aren't sleeping much, waiting for some good news.
So while I wait, I'm coping by remembering this.
One of the hardest questions I get asked by friends or family of people in cults is about how to talk with them about their experience.
This question has been floating around for decades in the cult studies world, and now with QAnon, it's gone mainstream.
Right now on the QAnon Casualties subreddit, about 30,000 people are talking about just that.
How do you have a conversation with someone who you think is being deceived, who has become dependent on a power structure you suspect is harming them?
And what if they say they've never been happier?
But you can't shake the gut feeling that there's something off.
You can't shake the feeling that they've disappeared or been cloned.
You listen to their story and it sounds like it's coming from somewhere else.
Their emotions seem big and broad but also misplaced.
And when you look at them, you have some kind of double vision, an overlap between who you knew and what they've become.
Which person do you talk to?
There's never an easy answer.
So much seems to depend upon the trust you share with a person, historically.
How well you have made them feel welcomed and heard, what the state of their resources is, how many bridges they've burned, and how much shame and guilt they carry.
In all of the stories I've heard about people extricating themselves from cults, There never seems to be any single decisive factor that pried them loose.
But often, people will say that a key exchange with someone helped them change course.
So my exchange was with my friend Richard Vaughan.
In 1999, he wrote me a letter about my immersion in the cult of Michael Roach.
This was a real letter.
Typewritten, folded, stamped.
Sent from Montreal, I think.
I was living in Vermont at the time, so he must have phoned me for my address.
The politeness and etiquette wasn't unusual for Richard.
His letter writing was famous.
He sent lots of cards, too, in a way that made me and I'm sure others feel like real slackers.
He was from another era.
I found the letter during a closet clean-out and read it again and again.
And I'll read it here with some minor edits to protect some private things.
Though I didn't really absorb them then, these words haunted me for the entire year between receiving the letter and leaving Roche.
And today I can't believe how lucky I was to have such a friend who could write them to me.
So I hope you enjoy Richard's kindness and subtlety, how he unfolds his arguments slowly with wit and pathos.
He takes time with this.
He takes me seriously and tries to imagine and validate my inner life even as he feels alienated from it and also hurt.
How he avoids the question of cultism and possible abuse for just long enough to have space in the end to back away from it with a kind of cheerful melancholy and self-reflection.
So I hope you enjoy his self-awareness, his humility, uncertainty, and bravery.
Beyond his many salient points, perhaps it was his modeling of these virtues that made the deepest impression upon me.
You'll hear an opening reference to an audio tape produced by Robert Thurman, probably teaching elementary Tibetan Buddhism.
So I'd sent it to Richard as a way of explaining what I was into, or by justifying it.
Thurman, after all, was a lot more mainstream than Roach.
Okay, so here's the letter.
April 16th, 99.
Dear Matthew, Thanks for the tape.
I've listened to it and found it both fascinating and puzzling.
Thurman seems to fluctuate between academic instruction and personal inspiration.
It's all new to me.
I have to admit, I find your increasingly devoted, if not feverish, attachment to Buddhism somewhat frightening to me.
It makes me feel simultaneously apart from your experience and intrigued.
What does it feel like to actually believe in something?
Really believe?
I admit I have never truly believed in anything.
All religions make me feel like an outsider, someone looking in on a transcendent experience, never one of the blessed?
The inducted?
The inducted?
The knowing?
So when I hear of you growing more and more a part of something that appears to loom so large in your mind and heart, I figure, well, there he goes.
In a couple of years or shorter, he'll be off to some austere place, mental or geographical, where only the fellow enlightened can reach him.
Essentially, it feels like you've already begun to pack for a figurative or real Tibet.
I will miss you greatly.
By now, you're probably reading the above as yet another instance of my relentless negativity, my self-absorption.
But, as true as that may be, I do still feel what I feel, which is that you are disappearing, or, to be more precise, changing shape.
That in itself is, of course, good and should be accepted by anyone who loves you, except that the catalyst for this change appears to me to be an all-encompassing and excluding religious practice.
I celebrate your newfound happiness and clarity, but will the vehicle for this change ultimately make me and others that love you, but who do not follow the same practices, irrelevant?
Will you begin to see non-Buddhists as unenlightened, backward, and no longer necessary for your happiness?
Finally, and this is perhaps the most contentious of my concerns, I just fundamentally distrust and worry about people, especially people I love, who see their redemption, wrong term I'm sure, as coming through a single person, a teacher, I have always been suspicious of anyone who would set him or herself up as a teacher of intangibles, of ultimately unknowable things.
I fear the possibility of cultish servility, although I hardly think of such an ancient and resonant religion as a cult.
But that does not mean that there are not charismatic people within Buddhism who are seeking followers to dominate.
I guess it all boils down to personal psychology.
As a recent victim of a massive abuse of authority and trust, I'm afraid to see my friends potentially falling under the sway of another persuasive personality.
Call it projection, accurately.
Call it melodrama, possibly.
But I ask you to please keep a small part of yourself open to questions and the tiny voices of disquiet all intelligent people carry inside them as protection against fraud.
Know that I love you and that this little diatribe has been brewing in me for a while and is not easy to write.
I admit I'm always confused, but sometimes I'm also very perceptive.
Am I losing you?
Is the world?
Please accept my love.
Kiss.
So that's the letter.
I'm not sure how to end this, except to say that, Richard, whether you're gone or still here, I love you, and you made my life better.
And for you listeners, I guess I'll update you if I hear anything.
But whatever happens, I hope this document shows how important a gesture of reaching out can be.
