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Sonya Petroff finds Balinese Hinduism is 'comforting and scary'

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Sonya Petroff finds Balinese Hinduism is 'comforting and scary'

 

http://www.al.com/religion/huntsvilletimes/index.ssf?/base/living/1218791779149690.xml&coll=1&thispage=2

Friday, August 15, 2008 Times Faith & Values Editor

kay.campbell@htimes.com

 

By KAY CAMPBELL

She's been studying comparative religions for three years at college, so Huntsville's Sonya Petroff, 21, had a solid, scholarly respect for belief systems different from her own American Catholic upbringing.

But one night in May, she accidentally disrespected a ritual mask of Bondres, the Balinese spokesman for the spirits. That mistake socked her with a visceral experience of realities.

 

"It's a powerful mask," said Petroff recently, as she recounted her spring semester study of the religion and arts in Bali, an island about three times the size of Madison County in Indonesia.

The night came after Petroff had worked hours every day for three weeks to carve the traditional mask in a class on religious arts.

She used wood that had been ritually cut and prepared. She used traditional hand tools to scrape at the wood she had to wedge between her feet in a pose as much utilitarian as it was a kind of extreme yoga pose. She learned the background for the ceremonies surrounding the mask's design and even the order her work was to be done in. Carefully, she applied the 20 layers of special paint and glued on bits of specially prepared mongoose fur for eyebrows and mustache.

Bondres in the corner

When she returned to the room she'd rented from a Balinese family, she put the completed mask, a red-faced, snaggle-toothed grin with furry eyebrows, onto a desk next to a row of water bottles. She went to bed, forgetting that while her own head pointed toward the sacred volcano, Agung, as does the head of every bed on Bali, she hadn't considered just where she'd placed Bondres.

She awoke early the next morning doubled over with stomach trouble. The water bottles next to the mask were all knocked over.

"Every mask is powerful and must be treated with respect," Petroff said. "I had put the mask in the most profane corner of my room. I moved it to a more sacred corner (toward the mountain, not the sea). It was a psychological comfort, and it made me feel better."

 

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The animism that informs Balinese Hinduism gives that kind of comfort, she said, but also surrounds a person with danger. Everything has a spirit. The rituals of believers, and there are rituals for nearly everything, become involved in keeping those spirits in balance and harmony. Masked ceremonies can seem the only outward expression of rage, anger and other disruptive emotions for people who prize self-control so much that one of the rites of adolescent passage is a ritual tooth-filing to even the points of human canine teeth.

"The religion is both comforting and scary," she said. "It's comforting, because there is a ready explanation for any issue."

It's not a matter of good versus evil, a theme Petroff sees in Western religion, but more good in balance with evil, control with chaos, creation with destruction, she said. A bit of graffiti she spotted seemed to sum it up: "I believe in evil with love!"

 

"In Bali, Evil is necessary, as is Good," she said. "The goal is not right and wrong, but balance."

Petroff, who attends the Quaker-founded Guilford College in North Carolina, chose a religion major for college because of how the subject intersects with the human experience.

"It's about how people make sense of their place in the world," Petroff said. "It's history, psychology, religion, literature, anthropology all meshed."

A professor urged her to consider the island when she designed her semester of independent study. Mary Scales, another Huntsville resident who studies at Guilford, also spent the spring semester in Bali, studying criminality.

"I was considering Ireland (for a semester abroad), but my professor pushed me to go to a place where I didn't know the language or customs," Petroff said recently as she talked of her experiences at her home on Monte Sano. "Bali was totally out of my comfort zone. It's amazing how reality can work differently place to place."

Lessons for the West

It has been easy for some Western visitors to dismiss these beliefs as primitive or superstitious, but Petroff sees many lessons the Balinese have to teach us.

Illnesses are treated with a combination of modern medicine and ancient ritual, a recognition of the balance between science and faith that Western medicine seems only in the last few years to be rediscovering.

The Balinese connection to the web of family - each family home becomes a shrine to ancestors - and land means the Balinese feel an obligation to each other and to their island. The means to happiness is defined as a right relationship with God, other people and also with the environment, a doctrine called Tri Hita Karan.

The high value placed on harmony means that the Balinese have developed an international reputation for cheerfulness and hospitality, though sometimes at the cost, Petroff fears, of personal expression. The use of masks in religious ceremonies came to symbolize, for her, the say that most Balinese live their daily lives, too.

She remembers walking past a house where men carried a boy into a car and sped away. A woman stood at the door, she said, looking after the car in shock, holding a hat in her hand. Some accident had obviously just happened. But when Petroff asked her what had happened, the woman seemed to snap out of her reverie. She smiled and assured her nothing was wrong. Some of the hiddenness comes, Petroff said, from the belief that it's important to assure the omnipresent spirits that everything is fine.

"Emotionally, it is a very hidden place," Petroff said. "I only saw the happy side."

But the West could likely use a dose of self-control and a higher sense of responsibility for external harmony. And that sense of a surrounding energy web of relationship with things seen and unseen will stay with Petroff a long time.

"They recognize the living essence around them," she said.

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