“He Not Only Changed My Life — He Saved It”
An interview with STEVE KANJI RUHL
Rev. Steve Kanji Ruhl, M.Div., is a core faculty member in the Spiritual Guidance program at The Rowe Center, where he is on staff as the marketing coordinator. He is an ordained Zen Buddhist minister and a lay dharma teacher in the Zen tradition, meditation instructor at Deerfield Academy, and a Buddhist Adviser at Yale University. He received his Master of Divinity degree in 2008 from Harvard University, where he focused on Buddhist ministry and co-chaired the Harvard Buddhist community. An award-winning poet and journalist, he also is a contributing author to The Arts of Compassionate Care: Pioneering Voices in Buddhist Chaplaincy and Pastoral Work.
THE ROWE CENTER: Has there been a teacher who’s had a lasting impact on your life?
STEVE KANJI RUHL: My loving parents, of course. But I want to discuss here another teacher who changed my life: Bruce Bechdel, who was my Humanities teacher in a small, desolate, working-class rural high school in the Appalachian Mountain region of Pennsylvania in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. I was Bruce’s star pupil; he was my mentor and my friend. Astoundingly, Bruce is also the main character in the smash Broadway hit Fun Home, which won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2015. The actor portraying Bruce won Best Actor. I’m still stunned by this.
R.C.: That is amazing. How did this teacher change your life?
S.K.R.: In that hillbilly backwater of Mill Hall, Pennsylvania, population 1600, a rundown hamlet in a region of pickup trucks and guns and deer hunting and Confederate flags, Bruce gave me Chartres Cathedral and Giotto and Ingmar Bergman films; he gave me James Joyce and T.S. Eliot and James Baldwin and Virginia Woolf. He gave me intellectual worlds I’d never imagined. He gave me a role model for cosmopolitan flair and sophistication. He gave me nurturing and encouragement. He gave me sanctuary — I was a defiant hippie kid with long hair far below my shoulders, outspokenly opposed to the Vietnam War, practically the only person like that in a little town that was violently conservative. Older football players ambushed me in the halls and right-wing neighbors gave me death threats. It felt traumatic. Bruce and I spent each lunch period together in his homeroom, talking. He was brilliant and funny and charming and warm. He looked out for me. We had a wonderful, close rapport. He used to shout in Humanities class, “One thousand A’s for Ruhl!” His wife Helen, also featured in Fun Home, was my English teacher and my friend. They invited me to their house. But Bruce — he not only changed my life, He saved it.
R.C.: Can you say more about how he did that, and about how he transformed you?
S.K.R.: I think the more interesting question refers to how he transformed himself. Bruce was from that area, too. He lived in Beech Creek, a tough, mean village even smaller than Mill Hall, wedged into the hills up in Bald Eagle Valley among hardscrabble farms and hunting cabins. His family had been there for generations. He taught in our high school, which was at the edge of a cornfield, and where the first day of buck season and doe season were official school holidays, like Thanksgiving and Christmas. Other teachers were dour and gray. They hit us with paddles. And then there was Bruce: jaunty, debonair in his turtlenecks, with his tousled Kennedy hair. His classroom was a carnival of Shakespeare, Jimi Hendrix posters, The New York Times — and he and Helen actually drove there frequently, to Manhattan, to Oz. Nobody did that. He went skiing. Nobody did that. He ate yogurt, for God’s sake — back in those days, where did he even find it? How did he become that person?
R.C.: Such a teacher must have been highly valued in a place like that.
S.K.R.: It was complicated. The students adored him. He got backwoods farm kids, and those whose parents were factory workers at the paper mill — kids destined to work there themselves someday — to look at Michelangelo, to read Antigone, to think about it and talk about it. They loved him. But the other teachers, and especially the football coaches, resented his popularity and ridiculed him. He didn’t fit Mill Hall’s standard of manhood. His house was a Victorian that he was restoring himself, with period antiques — they mocked that, too. And Bruce had the courage to face them every day. To drastically and without compromise be himself. It was heroic. A willful act of self-creation — in a way, like the young Jay Gatsby; another book that Bruce taught us. I think Bruce’s example bolstered my own fearlessness and offered proof that I, too, could assert myself and be different. Bruce and I were both renegades. We found refuge in each other.
R.C.: It sounds like a very powerful relationship when you were a young person. Have you stayed in contact with this teacher?
S.K.R.:Bruce was killed in 1980 at the age of 44. He stepped in front of an oncoming truck. It may very well have been suicide. His daughter Alison Bechdel, the author of Fun Home, thinks it was. Maybe it all became too much for him. Living a heroic life is lonely. It comes at enormous cost. Also, Bruce was a closeted gay man — in Mill Hall parlance, a “homo,” a “fag.” That also comes at enormous cost. After I graduated from high school at 18 and was no longer his student, Bruce did try to seduce me once, in a shy, gentlemanly way. That’s not my sexual orientation, and although his overture felt awkward we got past the incident with no problem. He was so good to me, so giving, in countless ways. Years later, when I was in grad school at Harvard, I wished that Bruce could have lived so see how far I’d come. I grew up in a place where almost no one went to college. I was the first in my family to go. Bruce created that possibility for me.
R.C.: You’re on the faculty of Rowe’s Spiritual Guidance program. Did your friendship with this teacher influence your spiritual development in any way?
S.K.R.: Bruce was a curious mix of modish Sixties liberal and traditional Roman Catholic. I think he meant the Catholicism sincerely, in the way T.S. Eliot was sincerely Anglican — using Christian tradition to shore up the ruins of a crumbling twentieth-century Western civilization. I have Bruce’s copy of Eliot’s Collected Poems, which Helen gave me as a gift after Bruce was killed, and you should see how he annotated the “Four Quartets,” with extensive marginalia on Christian symbolism and so on. Helen was Catholic, too. Once in 11th grade English I argued that people use religion as a crutch, and Helen was offended and pushed back, which was good for me — to get pushback from someone I respected. I was a strong and independent kid, and arrogant, and I didn’t respect very many people — especially teachers — so her defense of religion surprised me and made me think. At the same time, I was giddy with the Beatles and their meditating in India, and with Asian spirituality, and intrigued by that. In terms of spirituality, Helen challenged me, and Bruce gave me refuge, as always. He encouraged me to explore.
R.C.: Does his influence shape how you participate as a teacher yourself in the Spiritual Guidance program at Rowe?
S.K.R.: Absolutely. It has to do with mentorship. In fact, this is central to all the teaching I do — at Yale, with the Buddhist sangha there, as well as at Rowe. I try to mentor people the way Bruce mentored me. He taught with both rigor and sensitivity. He challenged me but was discerning and had a deft, light touch. He was committed to me. In Fun Home he’s depicted mostly as the director of a funeral parlor in Beech Creek, which actually was a moonlighting job that he did to supplement his high school salary; the truth is that Bruce Bechdel was, foremost, a gifted, extraordinary teacher, and I want the crowds who flock to see him portrayed on the Broadway stage, or who are familiar with him only through newspaper and magazine articles about Fun Home, to know this. His mentorship was a practice of skillful guidance. In Buddhist terms, it has to do with helping people to realize the innate wisdom and compassion within each of us. Bruce gave me access to the riches of my own truest self, before I even knew what that was. What a dazzling gift. I’m grateful to him, always. Thank you, Bruce. One thousand A’s for you.
Steve Kanji Ruhl will co-teach, with director Chelsea Wakefield and others, in the next Spiritual Guidance program residential intensive, April 29-May 3.
