Reckoning: Chapter 35: A Lion in Suburbia Summary & Analysis

After Peter dies, Magda moves in with Margaret for three months. Friends of Margaret and Peter are dying all the time, and Margaret has stopped going to the funerals. Magda, who is sitting in Peter’s recliner next to Margaret, tries to find something other than the Midsomer Murders and ads for coffins to watch on TV. Margaret says that if hell is real, there are a lot of people in it. Now that she’s no longer in denial about Peter’s death, Magda feels like she is having a spiritual crisis.

A week later, Magda visits a Buddhist center for a meeting. A red-robed monk says that it would be bad karma to be reincarnated as a lion. Magda is indignant—Peter’s star sign is Leo. In a scene from Animal Planet, an impala, whose herd’s weakest member is being corned by a lion, suddenly turns and flings itself at the predator. Do such prey-attacks-hunter actions flout the rule “thou shall not kill?” Magda fears for Peter’s soul; she hopes Buddhism will assure her that Peter is not burning in hell.

When Magda asks what a person should do in a case of “kill or be killed,” the center falls quiet. At last, the monk says that he does not know; then he says that it might be better for a person’s karma to die rather than to kill. Magda realizes that survival is not a legitimate goal in the Buddhist faith. Magda feels a powerful indignance toward anything that casts Peter in a negative light: no one had been tested the way he was. Then, she remembers how monks in Tibet and Burma withstood torture and even pitied their abusers. But what Peter’s family did was not selfish: they put themselves in danger to help the Jews. Magda wonders if there is any soul wise enough to understand what the right thing is to do.

Six months later, Magda is asked to play a grumpy, nerdy spelling bee contestant, William Morris Barfée in Spelling Bee, an adaption of a Broadway musical. Magda—now 46—enjoys the challenge of playing a male teen going through puberty; After the hugely successful opening night, Magda gets a call from the producer of a radio program, asking her to sit on a discussion panel with the Dalai Lama the next morning. Magda is thrilled; she, like many people, reveres the Dalai Lama—the “repository of hope.”

The next morning, while she has her makeup done before the panel begins, Magda is warned to address the Dalai Lama as “His Holiness.” After, Magda sits with the other panelists. Then the Dalai Lama enters, wearing a white scarf, which he places around Magda’s neck. Magda, who expected something magical to happen, reflects on the Dalai Lama’s easy life. She wonders how he would he cope if he were faced with difficult circumstances. Magda feels that the Dalai Lama is judging the darkness in her heart.

From the Dalai Lama, Magda wants “the blueprint for goodness”; she wants forgiveness for Peter—the “lion in suburbia.” Magda sees the Dalai Lama’s “magic”: coping with so many people’s problems, he is a sane person in the midst of a “mad world.” Magda wants to ask whether Peter was a good man and what the Dalai Lama would have done if he had been in Peter’s place. But per the producers’ instructions, however, Magda asks what people should teach children in order to change the world; the Dalai Lama talks of training the mind and heart to do good even in tough times. Though Magda doesn’t leave the show transformed, she believes that the Dalai Lama has planted a “seed” in her that now begins to grow.