“As shafts of sunlight broke across a huge rock some fifty by twenty feet, I rounded an outcropping to find four monks carving and hacking apart the body of a brother monk who had died two days before,” writes Chris Rainier in his book Keepers of the Spirit: Stories of Nature and Humankind (Beyond Words Publishing). “They seemed incredibly nonchalant, chatting as if they were breaking up firewood.” Watching a traditional sky burial on a Tibetan mountain, Rainier “stood silently immobilized” as a piece of the dismembered corpse was hurled skyward for circling vultures. He was “attracted by this eerie procedure yet deeply terrified by the finality of the act. Celebrating the self becomes an absolutely useless exercise.”
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Rainier will give a free slide lecture about his travels as a photojournalist, titled “The Global Village: From Indigenous Cultures to Ethnic Strife,” at 5:30 PM Monday, April 3, in the theater of the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington. An exhibit of his black-and-white photos is on display through May 7. Call 346-3278 for more.
