Author Joyce Carol Oates and Alex Shoumatoff attend a memorial service for Russell Banks July 15 at Keene Congregational Church. (Provided photo — Martha Allen)

KEENE VALLEY — A service in memory of novelist and poet Russell Banks filled the Keene Valley Congregational Church on Saturday. He had requested a Buddhist memorial, and the service was officiated by Monastics Yukon Grody and Hokyu Aronson, from Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, New York, a hamlet in the Catskill Park. The monks preferred to be called simply Yukon and Hokyu.

Throughout the service, three qualities of Russell Banks kept coming up: His compassion for the human condition, for people both inside and outside his personal sphere, his curiosity and quest for knowledge and his courage to explore and face truths about himself.

Grody, “the senior monk,” explained that Buddhism is about impermanence, about a constant state of becoming.

“I was fortunate enough to spend time with Russell and (his wife) Chase,” Grody said. “Russell loved to question what is true.

“He was quite a curmudgeon, and liked to give me some trouble about my monkness,” he went on, drawing laughter from the crowd.

Russell Banks (Provided photo)

“Russell had the courage to hold himself to account,” Aronson picked up. “Unlike fantasies, secrets don’t lie.” Russell Banks worked to understand his own secrets: “He spent his life exploring the very substance of character.”

His regrets, Hokyu proposed, were not for some expectation of heavenly reward, but “for personal resolution, for honesty for its own sake, preparing for the inevitability of his own death.”

As he turned the service over to family members, saying — “The memorial service this afternoon is about how he was known most personally” — he said that the universe is made up of five elements: earth, water, fire, air, and space. In Buddhism, each element represents both a force of nature and a quality of mind. Here, the candle represents fire; incense, impermanence and air, and water from the Ausable River the fluid nature of life.

“Space,” he said, “is represented by the people gathered to celebrate Russell, Some here from both near and far.”

First to deliver a family eulogy was Alex Hendrie, husband of Russell’s daughter Caerthan Banks.

“Russell Earl Banks has a very long rap sheet,” he began. You may know him under various aliases.” With this, he rattled off a long list of names, nicknames and titles, each in its turn eliciting sounds of recognition from here and there throughout the nave of the church. During the course of his reminiscences he referred to Russell Banks as, among other things, “an all-around righteous dude,” “the coolest dude to ever walk the planet,” and simply “a good human being.”

Eliza Twichell, sister to Russell’s wife, Chase, spoke of Russell being “as much a student as a teacher,” curious and compassionate. She said that there was reason for referring to him as “Russell University.”

Danis Banks, a daughter, implied much the same thing when she called her father “a mansplainer,” but said it was OK because he was “a dadsplainer, a pretty reliable omniscient explainer.” Danis said that his writing helped preserve that person in his childhood snapshots; he was in important ways the same at 2 as at 82. On the other hand, writing helped him develop and grow.

“Another bummer from Banks,” he’d say about his novels, Danis remembered.

Grandson Bedelu Banks Hendrie gave a brief and moving eulogy.

Niece Molly Briggs spoke of the support Russell gave her mother, his sister, during a difficult time, and spoke of his “quest for social justice.”

Sarah Banks Hartshorne said that her grandfather Russell Banks was ‘larger than life.” When someone told her that everyone thought their father or grandfather was larger than life, she partially concurred. “Yes,” she said, “but I’m right.” She recalled as a child hiking along a precipitous, rocky or otherwise challenging path with her grandfather, who became increasingly stressed. Finally he told Sarah, “I’m anxious because I love you!” Since her daughter’s birth she said she has understood this better and better.

Daughter Caerthan Banks read aloud the W. H. Auden poem “Funeral Blues.”

Lea Banks, daughter, read a poem she wrote for her father.

After the service, people “from near and far,” as Hokyu said, clustered to talk about Russell Banks and what he meant to them. Martha Lee Owen put it well: “We are going to miss Russell. He was a remarkably and genuine person.”