Spontaneous spiritual author sets LR event
When spiritual fiction author Roland Merullo addresses the audience Thursday at Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, instead of notes or an outline in hand he will have only a topic in mind — his 2007 novel Breakfast With Buddha.
“I’ve given hundreds of speeches, and the two that I look back on with regret are the two that I wrote down and read,” said Merullo, the author of more than 20 novels including Golfing With God and his latest novel, The Delight of Being Ordinary, in which the Pope and the Dalai Lama cast aside their religious robes on the spur of the moment and take a road trip through Italy as everyday men.
Merullo’s appearance, from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. Thursday, is the first installment of Saint Mark’s event series “The Wittenberg Foundation Presents,” which the church will host annually each April.
Breakfast With Buddha is the story of Otto Ringling — a publishing executive and Protestant living in New York with a wife and family — who at the last minute is persuaded by his “flaky” sister Cecilia to take her guru, Volya Rinpoche, with him on a road trip to North Dakota to settle their parents’ estate.
As the two make their way westward, Rinpoche, a Mongolian monk in maroon robes, speaks cryptically and inadvertently, and encourages Ringling to step outside his intellectual and spiritual comfort zones.
Merullo said the idea for Breakfast With Buddha began with a request from his publisher Algonquin for “another quirky spiritual book.”
“You know, I’ve always thought North Dakota would be somehow spiritually evocative for me,” Merullo recalled telling his editor. “I think I could drive to North Dakota and write a book about it.
“I’ve been to 45 states, and [I’d] never been to North Dakota,” Merullo said. “[Publisher Algonquin] was not exactly enthusiastic about the idea and I was really winging it, but that’s how it started.”
In a free-form style similar to that of his public talks, he wrote the bestseller — which still sells a thousand copies a week and has sold more than half a million copies since it was published in 2007 — without an outline or set plan.
“I just tend to do things by intuition, not by planning,” Merullo said. “I just start a book and let my intuition take me where it takes me. And if it takes me down the wrong road, I’ll correct that in a later draft.”
Merullo’s own spiritual journey is a winding path. Raised just outside of Boston in a “very devout Roman Catholic” family, Merullo said his family and the people he knew were immersed in their religion “and very much lived out their faith,” but when he got to high school and then more so in college the church didn’t answer certain questions he had.
With the discovery after college of Catholic monk and mystic Thomas Merton, spiritual instructor Ram Dass and a variety of spiritual literature, Merullo said he had found other ways of explaining life, citing authors such as Walt Whitman as falling into the category of those he would consider spiritual — those who don’t “speak for any one religion but seem to be addressing the big questions of life.”
These days, his daily meditation practice begins with a Catholic prayer and a Hail Mary, and then a Protestant “Our Father,” before