(Note: a late comment made by Rooson may be read in the previous blog)

​I was having a miserable day.  For some unknown reason – perhaps a reaction to some antibiotics I had been using for a bad tooth - I was tense as a violin string.  It was like coffee without the good side.  I had set that afternoon aside to fix a bad faucet in the basement bathroom, a miserably tight spot where the works had not been changed since 1972.  I anticipated trouble, but not to the degree that I got.  It was impossible.  Everything was fused together, and even after WD40, one nut could not be loosened because we (my son, poor guy, was helping) could not fit a tool in to get proper leverage.  After much cursing, I got up off the wet, dirty floor and drove the seven mile stretch into town to get an extended ratchet tool that might do the trick.  They did not have it, of course, but at least I had remembered to measure the faucet beforehand, so that I was able to pick up a new one.  Still, what a bummer.  I got in the car, teeth clenched, prepared to do hopeless battle once again under the cobweb-matted rust under the sink.
 
I turned on the radio.  As usual, there was nothing that I liked, as even my old favorites from the 70’s had calcified into once-and-for-all oldies.  I switched to NPR and got the familiar format of young people experimenting with broadcasting, putting forth a story about some guy in a hospital.  He sounded hopelessly millennial, but, what the heck else was on?
 
In moments, I was enthralled.  The young man had been hit by a car and had been seriously injured.  He could not recall anything about the accident, only to wake in a hospital in terrible pain, unable to move.  At this point in the story, he had been in bed for several weeks, or perhaps months.  He hated every minute of his life.  He had to have a catheter to pee, and someone had to wipe his butt after defecation.  He knew that he had changed his parent’s life forever, causing perhaps a lifetime of expense and worry.  He was a helpless, useless invalid, and he wanted to die.
 
Along that time, he almost did die.  At once, his eyes moved apart from each other and his useless arms twitched uncontrollably.  His heart racing, he knew then that this was it, and he thought: “this is what I had wished for.  What a bummer.”    He passed into a black void that he knew was death, and then, out of nowhere, came a flood of memories.  All were good.  In them, he remembered the fun times, the adventures, the beauty of hiking in the Andes, of waking up in the tent with his girlfriend, of a night drinking Champaign, and then of all the people who had given him companionship.  He missed them.  He missed life.  He realized then that he had had a much better life than he had ever imagined.  Somehow in his mind, he embraced it all with love.
 
After he had been revived, he marveled at how beautiful the blue was beyond his hospital window; he felt ecstatic about the ground he rolled over as he was taken outside.  He had gotten a whole new perspective, one from the other side, and loved life regardless of his near- paralyses.
 
As the story says (to paraphrase), “You would think that this bolt from the blue would wear off with time.  It did not.”  After six more months in the hospital, the doctors were able to piece him back together.  He re-learned how to walk.  Still he loved life with his newfound passion, and he worried about the guy who had hit him.  How must he feel?
 
So he found out who he was and arranged a meeting.  When the young man entered the room, he told him that he had suffered “a kind of PTSD” since the accident.  He was a student at college and had been in a rush, and surprised by the victim’s sudden presence before his car.  His guilt had been insufferable, even though what he did was not recognized as a crime. 
 
There was some silence, and then the victim addressed him. (Paraphrase) “I’ve wanted to meet you, and to tell you Thanks.  You have changed my life so much for the better.”  There was a hug.  There may have been tears, but at this point, I was back under the sink, clanging away with tools that made it impossible to hear the small portable radio I had brought with me to continue to hear the story.
 
Imagine that: a catastrophe that was life-altering for the better.  Here I was, bitching about a sink, and there he was, probably still somewhat broken, grateful for every day, even at so young an age. 
 
I know what he knows is so – that if we could clear our vision, clear ourselves, we would throw our hands up in praise of creation.  Regardless of circumstances.  I know that life is that wonderful, that miraculous, that much of an adventure.  Still, I complain, especially now, in winter.  I gripe and moan except when that window is given me every now and then so that I might see the bright blue sky outside that is more incredible than anything from this daily grind.  
 
It is all here for us now.  How is it that it takes death or disaster for most of us to see?  What is it that holds us in this gray cocoon, never really grateful, always at a loss?  But it is there, this true world, and so is our ability to break out.   Deep inside, our “victim” shows us that we know how.  We only need courage, disaster, or that chance moment of grace to open the curtains.

​I have just finished a chapter in a motivational book this weekend by popular speaker Mathew Kelly that speaks of the development of expectations, which sets us up for our own personal judgement later in life.   While Kelly is Australian, they have the same attitude towards success as Americans, telling their children, “You can be anything you want to be if you work hard at it.”  Kelly calls this the “Big Lie” that creates self- hatred later in life for many, because that belief is simply not true: no one person can be everything, and only one can be the best at anything.  What we should instead be, he claims, is what we have been called to be – which might be ascertained by close dialogue through prayer with Spirit. 
 
Trouble is, this only solves one of our problems – that is, having unrealistic expectations.   I have read that among the things most asked about with psychics, one’s “calling” is near the top of the list.  Few know for sure what their calling is, because few can distinguish the voice of Spirit. 
 
It is not for lack of trying.  It has dawned on me recently that we often only learn of our calling long after it has been answered, or not.  When we look back on our choices in life, we are then able to spot those times when we were in the groove, and those other times when we were miserable and off-kilter. 
 
But there is another way we find what our calling is, and, as it comes from the spirit, it is not always about material things. 
 
This weekend we also watched the movie “The Founder,” starring Michael Keaton as Ray Kroc, the founder of the McDonald’s franchise.   In the beginning, we see Kroc as something of a Willy Lohman, a 50-something salesman who is only marginally successful but who desperately longs to hit the bigtime.  He sells for a company that makes gadgets for American businesses in the 1950’s.  In the beginning of the movie, the item he is pushing with embarrassing failure is a milkshake maker that can do six milkshakes at a time.  “Make them faster and the customers will come faster.  It’s a chicken-or-egg thing,” he repeats over and over again as his cold calls turn him away or slam the door in his face.  He takes a drink from his whiskey bottle here, and then there.  What we see here is an unhappy loser.
 
Then he makes a call to the home office and finds a certain “McDonald Bothers” in California want 6 – that’s right, six – milkshake makers ASAP.  He tells the secretary that this must be a mistake, and then calls the brothers.  Says one, almost too busy to talk, “you’re right, that is a mistake.  Make that eight machines.”  8 machines, when he could barely sell a few the week before – this he has to see! 
 
So he drives out from Illinois to California to find out exactly what’s going on, and there discovers the McDonald’s drive-in restaurant, crammed with people.  He gets the tour, and the story from the brothers.  Over the course of years, they had discovered that 85% of people only ordered shakes, fries and burgers at the drive-ins, so they decided to only serve those items.  To speed the process further – for people go to drive-ins for speed – they treat the restaurant like a factory, burger-flipping and French-frying and milkshake making all parred down to minimal movements that allow them to give the customers what they want in 80 seconds or less.  Along with maintaining rigid quality control and a clean, family environment, this puts them on the map.  They are outrageously successful.
 
Except for one thing.  They tried to franchise, but found that it was impossible to maintain quality control, and so had largely given up the idea.  This is where Kroc gets his genius lightbulb moment: the speed, the cleanliness, the quality, the simplicity, the gentle name and the golden arches (drawn in a design by one of the brothers) all equal gold to Kroc.  He solves the franchise quality problem by selecting the right people and goes on to conquer the world.  As the movie states at the ending credits, every day, McDonald’s feeds 1% of the world’s population.
 
That was all the fun part.  The drama, and the lesson, come from the hassles between the brothers and Kroc.  The brothers want to keep things exactly as they thought it should be.  This includes the milkshakes, which Kroc sees as sucking down all of his marginal profits.  A married woman, who later divorces to marry Kroc (as does Kroc to marry her), discovers an instant shake that is much cheaper and does not require expensive refrigeration.  He pushes it on the brothers.  The brothers are aghast – by God (and it really is about God for them), their customers are going to get the real thing or nothing at all!  Kroc is stymied, because even with the dozens of franchises he has opened, he is still nearly broke.
 
Enter a brilliant financial advisor who tells Kroc: “You’re in the wrong business.  You think restaurant, but you’re really in real estate.”  From this, Kroc starts to buy the land on which the restaurants are built, giving the buildings themselves leases.  This allows him to control his franchisees better, and also to cut out much of the McDonald bros control, for, although they own the restaurant name and concept, they now no longer own the land that the restaurants are on. 
 
Kroc has them by the potatoes.  He eventually forces the brothers to sell him all the rights, including their very name, and on he goes to become a billionaire with a new and improved wife.
 
Here is where it comes in on our life expectations.  For the McDonald bros, business is one thing, but it must never supersede a sense of obligation and morality.  If they cannot deliver quality to their customers, they simply do not deliver, regardless of the money.  For them, they want financial success, but it is their sense of morality that is more important.  As they are family, it is easy to understand how this came to be: they were raised this way.  If they had been taught that they could be anything that they put their minds to be, they were also taught that they must be informed first by a moral code.  In the movie, anyway, this code came above success.  We can say that, in a way, they were not sacrificing anything in the end, because what they sought most – what was the greater part of their calling – was responding to the temptations with that thick moral code.  In adversity – in life – they found their true calling.  It was not success or love or fame, but a sense of self-righteousness that, in spite of bitterness over the Kroc deal, they would never regret.  That was their true way.  
 
Ray Kroc had another way.  He was not an evil man.  He did not feed his customers horse or cat meat. But he valued success over all other considerations.  Although the movie paints Kroc as a slime ball, this wasn’t so cut and dry; the McDonald bros, through their conservative orthodoxy, were truly holding back the success of the franchise.  So Kroc found a way, which was a bit slimy, but still gave the Bros 2.7 million dollars, equal to at least 30 million today.  Not small potatoes.   
 
In a way, everyone went out a winner: Kroc got his empire, and the Bros got some big bucks and a snoot full of moral righteousness.   But in a way, neither got what they wanted.  According to social norms and expectations, the Bros should have been a part of the great financial empire, and Kroc should have repented and become a good guy.  But that would not have worked.  According to the movie, it was going to go one way or the other: either the Bros were going to let the franchise – and Kroc – slide, or they were going to be forced out, allowing Kroc to go on big time. 
 
The movie, as I see it, is about expectations, built in, as they are with each of us, over time through family and society and that magic we call natural inclination.  It shows us that there is destiny, but that destiny is only part of each story, because each destiny is placed against another.  Should a natural musician leave his sick mother and go to New York to make Carnegie Hall?  Should a natural homemaker go on to become an accountant because of social expectations?  Should a natural historian resign himself to work at a menial job so that his natural doctor sister can go through med school? 
 
In “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the hero is thwarted again and again from his natural path, to do the “right thing.”  In the end, we find that it was the best path for him to take.  The movie, I have read, was a bomb when it premiered in 1946, because people were sick of the sacrifice of poverty in the Depression, and of the sacrifice of WWII.   They wanted material fulfillment – and they got it, and we baby boomers got many of those benefits.  Was that for the better?
 
 It is for personal history to decide, I think, what course of action was correct.  Again, it seems that our true nature, what we really should be or do, is often not revealed until the end of our lives, or when there is great conflict in our lives, or both.  They say that at the end, one does not count dollars or awards but rather the love of family and friends.  This may well be.  But who was right in the end – the Bros, or Kroc?  Who lived a better life afterwards – the ones left with bitterness, or the one bereft of moral depth?  And who died leaving the greatest benefits for the rest of the world?  Such difficult questions give us the reason that we are told to let God be the ultimate judge.  I think we all find what that judgement is towards the end, but it must always be as a secret between lovers – that between ourselves and God.  For many of us, this might be the only time in which we truly know our calling. 
 
               

​The Mideast has long been filled with prophecy, to say the least.  The Jews were people of prophecy by definition, just as the Muslims and Christians are today.  Prophecy is a thing for the People of the Book, and it did not stop with Mohammed or Isaiah or Jesus, but spread with the religions into Europe and Asia and then into the entire world.  Prophesy is not new – nearly every culture has a way to gauge the future – but the religions of the Mideast encompass such vast populations that a strongly believed prophecy among one could very well change the course of world history. 
 
Enter Fatima.  The visions of the Virgin Mary at Fatima, initiated through three children in 1917, are well known, as are the Three Prophecies given them by her, the third finally being revealed by the Vatican about 20 years ago.  As I found last night (with some disappointment), none seem to have severe implications for our future, as their time has passed.  Apparently, even the final prophecy was a reference to the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981.  Fatima and future prophecy, then, seem done and gone - except for one fact that had passed me by like an elephant on parade: Fatima is the name for the favored daughter of Mohammed, the most revered of Muslim woman.  Why, of all places, should the greatest human symbol of Christianity besides Jesus appear in a village named for the daughter of Mohammed?

​Legend has it that as the Muslims were being expelled from the Iberian Peninsula, a task completed by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, a young nobleman fell in love with a Muslim woman named Fatima.  After her conversion to Christianity, he married her and so renamed the town for his love.  In 1952, Archbishop Fulton Sheen took this and the subsequent visions in 1917 to mean that God was offering a way for the Muslims to accept Christ, through the relationship of Christianity’s great lady (who is also held in high esteem by Muslims) and their own.  In presenting this, Monsignor Charles Page adds (along with the view of Sheen) that this event might have been as much a prophecy as a bridge – that Our Lady of Fatima might be what The Virgin of Guadalupe was for the Aztecs: a miracle of great power and symbolism which both complemented and overpowered the previous religion of the believers.   To be more specific, Our Lady of Fatima would then be both a sign and a power from heaven that will lead to the conversion to Christianity of the Muslims.
 
Let us take this in while we consider the situation in Europe today: millions of Muslims have been allowed, or have forced their way, into the EU and have remained culturally apart from native Europe.  Native Europeans have only about one child per couple, while Muslims have about five.  When the math is done, even with the present population of Muslims, Western Europe will be Muslim majority by 2100, a feat that 1400 years of military invasions by Muslims was not able accomplish.  If immigration continues, the window of majority rule will be complete decades earlier.   To make it easier for the Muslim faithful, Christianity is now practiced only by a minority of Europeans.  The stage seems ripe for a Muslim takeover in both numbers, religion, and traditional politics (as religion and politics go together in the Muslim world).  To say it succinctly, it appears that the people and culture of traditional Europe are doomed.  
 
I have written before about this, and have held out two possibilities as to why Europe has allowed this: one, that the elite feel unconsciously that Europe has reached its end, and, as Freud would tell us, are trying to fulfill a cultural death wish; or two, that the rulers believe (also subconsciously) that Europe is so powerful that the new Muslim immigrants will become like them and lead the people from their original countries into the modern world, if not the Christian one.
 
I tend to believe the first of these, but Archbishop Sheen and Monsignor Page offer another possibility that I did not consider, as it seems impossible – that of large-scale conversion of Muslims to Christianity through the power of Christ.  Given the strong element that Christian belief had in the downfall of the Soviet Union, however, perhaps this is not so impossible after all, although it certainly would call for divine intercession.  In any case, it is a delicious prospect to ponder: modern atheistic and ‘New Age’ Europe hauls in a bunch of poor Muslims for, on the practical level, cheap labor.  They do so because they pride themselves on being post-racist, post-ethnocentric, and most of all, post-religion (as well as pro-business).  Then these very same alien immigrants convert and become fervent Christians, calling back the old cultural beliefs in Europe.  You can bet that if the modern rulers of Europe thought this to be so, they would build a wall from the Carpathian Mountains to Gibraltar as fast as brick and cement and wire could be laid.     
 
Sheen’s theory seems dubious, but it also seemed impossible that Christianity would cross the world, growing like a mustard tree from the tiniest and most insignificant of seeds.  Islam had far more militant roots, but it also grew large from small beginnings.  It just might be that Fatima holds one of the greatest of historical surprises, where the cosmic power raised one woman of spirit to be superimposed on another woman of spirit, both worshipped by two distinct but related religions.  Divinity does nothing of this nature by chance – it always has something, or many things, in mind.  Archbishop Sheen’s view may have been biased, but it was probably not off-base; it appears almost certain that the power of heaven has proposed to amend the age-old animosities of two religions on the brink of another dramatic collision.  If this is so, no power on Earth could stop it.                              

​One of my brothers called the other night, and we got to talking about our crazy youths, and how we should have died many times over – especially me, according to Pat.  I did not protest, as I thought as much as any young guy that I was physically immortal and so acted, but then I remembered something he had told me decades ago that was really remarkable.  “Wait – what about you on the Wilbur Cross Parkway in the Woodbridge Tunnel.  You should have died or come close to it then, right?”
 
“Oh, yeah….” Then the story came back like something from myth or a movie trying too hard for its audience, because it couldn’t really be – except it was. 
 
Pat was driving to his university classes in our father’s new blue Honda, a car that I can’t remember at all, but we can take his word for it.  It was a winter morning with temperatures below freezing, but the sun was out and as he drove, whatever strips of snow that had been had now turned to liquid water.  Until the tunnel. 
 
It was a creepy tunnel similar to the Lincoln in NYC, probably because they were built at around the same time, @ 1940.  They used green ceramic tile for both, and for the Wilbur Cross tunnel, barely adequate – really, inadequate – lighting from single lamps along the roof.  Really, one had to have one’s lights on to see.  And the tiles leaked.  The tunnel had been blasted through a cliff of “trap rock,” a crumbly but hard rock that runs through central Connecticut and is used for gravel, which is heavily seamed, allowing the flow of surface water.  So at any one time, the tunnel was dark and almost always damp, with water dripping continually from ceiling and walls, as cave-like and dank as one can get.    
 
The snow had turned to water on the highway outside, but inside the tunnel where the sun did not shine, the leaks that dampened the floor had turned to black ice.  There was, then, a slick frozen sheet that could not be seen in the poor light and that was not expected because of the favorable conditions outside.   As Pat approached the tunnel, all appeared normal and everyone continued at regular speed.  Once inside the tunnel, though, everything changed in a millisecond.  Pat did not see the first to spin and crash against the tunnel wall, but it must have just happened, as the wreck of more than two dozen cars (he would learn that later from the newspaper account) was still in progress, cars crashing and flipping and skidding all about him.  It was pure panic and mayhem, and in that first second, Pat understood that he was either going to die or be hurt very badly and that there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.
 
Then, before panic could rise to the breaking point, a sudden peace came to him.  In that instant, he “saw” – it is impossible to describe just how – the face of our (deceased) grandfather before the windshield.  He told Pat that everything would be just fine.  Behind the apparition a light shone, and Pat intuitively knew that he must drive directly towards that light.  Seconds later, he emerged from the tunnel completely unscathed.  No one else followed him out.  He then took the first exit and dropped a dime in a pay phone to call the police.  They were shocked, as he was the first to report the incidence.  Minutes later as he calmed down in the parking lot, he heard the sirens of thirty ambulances and firetrucks (again, as later reported) as they approached a scene of war-like devastation that would top the nightly news.    
 
What a trip.  Neither of us doubted that the apparition and miracle were real.  Instead, the question that remained for us – for all our near-misses – was, why us?  In Pat’s incredibly dramatic case, he was the only one of 27 cars to enter that tunnel at that fateful time to come through untouched.  Why was he so special?  Of all those others, probably including important and useful people, why did only Pat make it through?  It is the age-old question: Why me? 
 
On our latest trip to the UP last week, my son Jeff and I listened to Mitch Albom’s famous book, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, about a common man, Eddie, who sees his life as a failure.  It is not until after death, caused by his saving of a small child at an amusement park, that he learns that his life has had incredible meaning.  The book is fiction, but the central notion is not, at least as I see it, as it tells us that we are led in life by Spirit to move us closer to union with God.  We can reject this path at times, but the movement of Spirit is all-pervasive and weaves its way around even the most obstinate of persons. 
 
What this means for Pat, and for me and everyone else, is that one is ‘saved’ or not, or gets cancer or not, according to a greater plan that most of us could not possibly see, simply because we do not have all the information.  It is not good luck that Pat was saved, then, but rather a way for Spirit to widen for him his path to God.  And it was not bad luck for the other people in those 26 cars, even though they crashed, damaged their cars, or even died.  It was, rather, Spirit’s way to bring them closer to their spiritual path.  The tunnel is the perfect metaphor, really, as in this case, one’s spiritual direction could not be denied.  We might even say that it was a way to show us that, sooner or later, we are all finally caught in the tunnel, where no one can turn from their spiritual path, whether they want to or not.
 
Of course, we might instead see life as a series of coincidences with no point.  We might instead say that Pat’s vision was only hope springing from the primal id.  We might say that the light he saw was the end of the tunnel, the one path where there were no cars, and so he could see a light.  We could go on and on denying that Spirit showed its hand, and in that, declare that there is no Spirit and there are no destinies, but why?  Why stretch so far one way when the easier way, the way Pat knew it and felt it (even though he was young at the time and not at all religious), is so much more compatible with what happened?  Not only more compatible with what happened there, but also with what happens one way or another to us all, if we think about it. We should think about it.  The evidence might show us, if we have an open mind, that we do indeed have a spiritual path, knowledge of which could and should change our entire world.     
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

​I do not fear the footsteps of soldiers on my stairs, or dread long bread lines at the store.  Gangs aren’t roaming my neighborhood and no one in the house is in need of a fix or is hallucinating monsters and vampires, knife in hand.  I’m old, but not that old, and as far as I know, not all that close to death, in human terms.  And yet there is gloom and foreboding.  The sky is a heavy gray, and wet snow is draped over rotting cornstalks in uneven stripes that betray the frozen earth beneath.   Inside, the air is dense, almost suffocating, and I need to get out – but to what?
 
None of this is unusual – it is winter’s lament – but it blocks something so in need.  Humor.  Levity.  Lightness.  But where is such sentiment under a sky that is only a tattered blanket settled uneasily to fend off the darkness of infinity?  Death is there and there, but not here – not yet.  But someday it will tear that little blanket from this world, and then what?  Does the earth fall from beneath the feet and we fall forever, hopeless in a black well of nothingness?  Or is there a final judgement, when we look into the eyes of God and he sees us as we are – small, weak, sniveling, crying out for simple pleasures like spoiled children?
 
It is funny how questions are answered; were the answers there all along and we have not noticed, or were they placed before us to answer just in time for our needs?  It doesn’t matter, I suppose, as I have found again and again the phrases, “Be not afraid,” and “Be lighthearted,” pushed before me as a teacher might help a slow student.  I am a slow student because I cannot help but be affected by what is most immediately evident, like the man who insists that the world is flat.  Look, he’ll say, with your own eyes and tell me, where is this ball you are talking about?  It is clearly a flat plate, and the sky must be like an ocean, and the world must then rest on the back of a turtle. 
 
So it is that the obvious does not always lead to the obvious.  Death is most certain, and we fear death, but do we know it?  We think we do, in the stench of rotting animals along the road and the waft of formaldehyde in the funeral parlor, but what is it really?  If we were truly practical, we would notice that the world does sit in the middle of a kind of ocean, one whose tides are all linked to profound celestial forces, so intricate and vast as to be beyond our greatest reckoning.  Yet we still see the turtle beneath us, that dark well of nothingness or the angry hand of a god, things that have nothing to do with anything but our own shortened reasoning.  There is more to life – and death – than meets the eye.  Like the planet Earth, life is not a flat plate, but a globe that somehow stays suspended and protected from a vastness that is truly terrifying. 
 
Somehow.  When we were told that the world was round, we believed it, for the wisdom of our teachers first, then from the fact that ships did not fall over the edge, then from photos from space.  When we are told now that there is more to life than death, we should believe it, because of the mystery of existence, because of the wisdom of our teachers, and because of those who have raised the dead in defiance of our simple notions.  Flat world, hard death; round world, eternal life.   The truth defies our senses, but does appeal to our logic once we are shown – once we learn how to see.
 
That is why we are advised, in the face of our overwhelming ignorance, to have a light heart.  We have been told throughout the ages that life – and death – is more than we first grasp.  We have been taught in one mythological form or another – whatever form that might help us best to understand - to not believe what the simple horizon tells us.  We have been told in all manner of stories that, like the roundness of earth and the presence of gravity and physical laws, there are other laws at work that explain life so much better than its immediate form.  And in them, we are taught not to fear, for our ship will not fall off the edge but rather continue, on and on, without end. 
 
Have lightness of heart.  The grayness is a thin cover, the season a few months’ time.  All will be revealed to those who seek someday.  It will be OK.  Make no mistake, this is not the best of possible worlds, but neither is January the best of possible months.  This, too, shall pass.  The horizon does not really end at the edge of our world, but goes on and on and on. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

​1993 was the last year that I visited the Amazon Territory – now Amazon State – of Venezuela.  I would have gone several more times if I had known what would happen to that unhappy country, but that is a regret I can live with.  Perhaps it was for the best, anyway, for the capital city of that territory, Puerto Ayacucho, was already undergoing massive expansion.  When I first went there in 1987, it had been a small town of a few thousand, inhabited by people from neighboring tribes of Indians who happened to like town life.  Nearly everyone then still had a garden in the back yard (and nearly everyone had a back yard) and nearly all fished in the adjacent Orinoco River along the numerous raudales, or rapids that made the government set up a modern town here in the first place - as it was at the farthest point where one could navigate from the mouth of the river in even a small canoe.  From there, all cargo had to be unloaded and then re-loaded on other boats for further ventures into the true wilderness – the upper Orinoco and the Ventuari and all those other tributaries that carried one into the heart of darkness.
 
I never stayed long in that town, but rather would take the bush planes into that heart of darkness, flying over the “green hell” that so many have tried and failed to penetrate, to get at my “red gold” – the less acculturated Native Americans of the interior.   By 1993, little had changed in the interior, but the government had spent a lot of money and effort re-locating thousands of its poor to Puerto Ayacucho.  This was done both to secure the territory from the drug-running revolutionaries on the Columbian side of the river, and to diminish the numbers of those most likely to riot in the population centers towards the coast.  The result was an unhappy one for the town – now city – as most of those numbers came to live in government housing with little or few means for supporting themselves.  By 1993, the town was uglier and much more dangerous.   I was told that it only got worse over the following years. 
 
Still, the heart of the territory as well as its capital was its indigenous people.   Criollos – those generally of mixed race with a government-sponsored education (the vast majority of Venezuelans to the north) – ran much of its government, but everyone else was indio.  That was why we – my fieldwork partner in anthropology and I – were there.  Which is why the reaction of a friend of ours from the interior, Benjamin, to a certain social situation was so curious.
 
We were in Puerto Ayacucho buying food and trade items and gifts before our flight into “Mapana”, a tiny town 120 miles into the tropical forest from which we would travel into the smaller, isolated Indian villages by foot or canoe.  Unlike in the recent past, the streets of Puerto Ayacucho were crowded with new people, some of them Europeans on a quest for wilderness, and we bumped along the sidewalks to check into stores or bargain with outdoor itinerants just as we would in the larger cities.  In a few days we found ourselves with our goods in Mapana, visiting some people we had met up-river who had moved into the town, before setting off upriver ourselves.   The matriarch of the bunch, a large woman who spoke her mind, was at first stand-offish to us.   That did not last long.
 
“Why did you not say hello to Benjamin when you saw him in Puerto Ayacucho?  He says it’s because he’s Indian and you did not want to be embarrassed by him in front of other Europeans.”  She stood silently then, waiting for whatever feeble defense we might offer.  
 
We were astounded and told her so.  We had not seen him and if we had, would have acknowledged him gratefully – we were there for the Indians, after all, not for the approval of “blancos.” 
 
She seemed to accept our account, but Benjamin himself was harder to convince when we saw him in the street (one of two streets) of Mapana a day later.  “Benjamin,” I said with total sincerity, “how can you think that of us?  We don’t care about that shit.  If we had seen you, we would have been happy to talk with you or whatever.  Why didn’t YOU say hello to US?” 
 
He grumbled and hemmed and, after a while relented, but he would keep a certain chip on his shoulder.  Weeks later we believed that we had figured it out as we swung in our hammocks far upriver.  Benjamin had been the inevitable victim of his education. 
 
He was one of the few true indios of the interior who had gotten a real education, one that went beyond the simple ‘three r’s.” He had gotten his license as a teacher, and was the pride of Mapana – a man who knew the secrets of the big, powerful world of the exterior.  But in his education, he had learned that Indians had been mistreated historically and were still considered less than equal.  Given his moderate economic as a school teacher, he understood his own position in the hierarchy of wealth and thought he understood exactly why he and his brothers were so poor.  It was because of white, or criollo, prejudice.  At the same time, he was taught (often by people like us) to be proud of his heritage and of the self-sufficiency of his rural relatives.   This gave him an understandable complex, where he felt both inferior and superior, based on the knowledge and wisdom not of his people, but of those very outsiders who were teaching him how bad they were.  And in that, he looked for and expected those “white” people – the whiter the worse – to think of him as a toy, a puppet, as something other than a full human.  In that, they would – of course – avoid him on the street when in the presence of other “blancos.”
 
The whole world is full of that kind of twisted knowledge now, creating a whole lot of unhappy people.  I do not have to enumerate.  My point here is to say that Benjamin was clearly wrong about us, at least as far as our social interests were concerned, but that was of no importance.  His pride had been both attacked and groomed so as to expect –and even thirst for – the rejection he thought we had given him.  It fed his anger, his insecurity, and his native pride all at once.  Not a good feeling, but one that gave the all-important sense of centrality and purpose to his self.
 
I would like to “tut-tut” over this incident and shake my head in paternalistic sorrow, but that would be delusion.   Benjamin’s complex is also our own.  On this day or hereabouts in Venezuela, those who still have some food are celebrating El Dia de los Tres Magos, or the Day of the Three Wise Men, which the Catholic Church calls the Feast of the Epiphany.  It commemorates the well-known story of the three kings from the east who followed the star, and specifically, the day when they arrived at the manger to honor Christ.  Previously, they had gone to Jerusalem to speak with King Herod, who bade them to find this new “king” and return to tell him where he was, so that he, too, could honor him.  But that night, the magos were visited in a dream by an angel who told them to avoid Herod at all costs, for Herod was jealous of Jesus as the “King of the Jews” and would have him killed.  When the wise men left Israel by a hidden route, Herod had all the male babies of Bethlehem slaughtered, so that he might remain king.  This was not the first murder that he had committed to keep his crown, for he had also killed a wife and two sons for the same reason. 
 
Herod was a very insecure man.  So was Benjamin.  So am I, and so are most of us.  We learn quickly that we are not the best at everything, and so do not get all the praise.  We would like to get all the praise.  We would like to be the one and only king.  As children we might be openly jealous of those others, but as adults we learn to cover this up with reason, ideology and excuses.  Still, it all comes down to maintaining the self as King.   The allegory of the Christ story is that Jesus did not come here to become king of the world that makes up our ego, which is what the Jews had long expected.  Rather, the shift was made towards a far deeper, eternal world where spirit rules, and where there is more than enough of everything for everyone.  All praise is for the eternal spirit, which in the end is all of us.   Here, the roots of our sibling rivalry are finally dug up, or just ignored.
 
 
To many, it sounds like pie in the sky, but that’s only a child’s idea.  The Kingdom of Heaven is already with us, as the Gospels repeatedly say.  Spirit rules even here.  We will not see it as long as we wish to remain kings of the shifting sands of our flattened world, where all power comes and goes with receding history.   Where is Herod now?  And who is Benjamin to me now but a memory, and we perhaps far less than that to him?  
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
                            

​It is Southern tradition to eat black-eyed peas and ham in a dish called Hoppin’ John’s on New Year’s Day to ensure a good new year, and my wife stands by this tradition as firmly as she loves puppies.   It was a perfect batch this year and I ate it blithely, knowing that it could not fail – not after the hideous week that closed out our last tired and tattered year of 2017.   So hideous a year that it will last in my memory like the moon landing or the rise of Amazon.com stock in the 1990’s.  Yes, call my bluff – it was not that spectacular, but you get the drift.  Awful.  Good riddance.  And for that awfulness I am grateful. 
 
It started the morning after Christmas, which had been bland and unremarkable as far as Christmas days go.  There had been no parties, no excess drinking, no wild flirtations with death in the wilderness, and Lord knows no heavy lifting.  And yet there I was on the morning of December 26 in spasms of pain simply for trying to get out of bed.  In a matter of seconds, I realized that my lower back had become completely worthless, and with the attendant pain, I realized that the lower back is attached to nearly every other part of the body.   Even a deep breath hurt, and no movement of anything that required the slightest twitch of the body core was possible without stabbing pain.  It was then that it struck me like Red Fox on his 70’s sitcom, that this just “might be the Big One!  I’m comin’ home, ‘Lizabeth!”   That this just might be the beginning of real old age, when one becomes absolutely dependent on the kindness of family, friends, and paid professionals to function AT ALL.  As a matter of fact, within minutes of crawling like a sidewinder out of bed, it became obvious that, like so many old people, even going to the bathroom presented large and embarrassing problems.  
 
Two days later, I was even more convinced, as nothing had gotten better at all.  It was frightening, as I could already feel that sympathy for my situation was becoming forced.  In years of raising chickens, I found that the flock gave exactly one day for one of their own to get over a bad injury or illness.  If it was not better within that time, they would peck it to death, which is, I suppose, a form of mercy for chickens, but not so much for humans.  And yet, there they were, my own brood already murmuring ominous clucking noises over my near-complete disability and dependence.  The pecking, I feared, was soon to begin in one way or another.
 
Fortunately, we have a neighbor who is a gifted chiropractor, and after a very painful bought on the clinical table Wednesday evening, I began to be able to move again - not enough to avoid a stampeding buffalo herd, or to fend off an attack of wolves, but enough to keep me from some kind of merciful end at the hands of my loving family.  That night, I breathed fairly easily for the first time in two days.
 
Until the next morning, when I woke with an incredible flow from the mucus membranes.  I laughed at the unlikely misfortune of having two rare events happen in just a few days – rare, because my back hadn’t been bad like this in 40 years, and I rarely got anything worse than the sniffles – but I let this concern drop off like so many tissue papers.  A cold: big deal.  At least I could handle bathroom activities without too much pain now.  But I was wrong.  By the following day, I realized that this was the Mother of All Colds – that if we could drop this on our enemies, we would conquer the world.   Pounding headache, pain and misery everywhere, and, worse, I had already outworn my 24 hours of sympathy with the chickens.   I was left to limp around like a forgotten soldier, avoided by the sane and healthy, huddled into my misery of uncleanliness like a leper from biblical times. 

​Thus it went for two or so days more, until New Year’s Eve, when company came over none-the-less, and I succumbed to a number of choice beverages and liquors until all pain was gone.  Surprisingly, the toxic mix had been too much for the cold viruses, as next day all I had left were some sniffles and a bothersome, but temporary, hangover.   My back was still sore, but at least it moved.   The worst was over.  I should have been happy then, but there was a sadness in the loss of my isolation and misery.  Even before my miraculous recovery, it had come to me that this stretch of several days filled with misery and loneliness had been a surprising blessing.
 
This happened on the afternoon of Year’s Eve as I lay back in the easy chair – the only posture I could take that eased my back and allowed me to stop blowing my nose – when I was trying to get back to reading a silly sci-fi trilogy.  It was then that I realized that I would normally not be seated in that chair in the afternoon, and I would most certainly not be reading a trashy sci-fi novel.  Daytime, after all, is for work of some kind, and reading is for learning.   I was only there, useless and un-engaged, because I was a basket case, and it was only because I was a basket case that I had no – absolutely no – expectations for myself, not even one of simple exercise.  It was then that the truth filled me – that I was in a cold, dark space, a cave or burrow meant for nothing but healing, and that this was needed.   
 
I had been there before.  It had been a long time, and one not missed, but it, too, had had its value.  As one person put it, extreme misery is not personally worth it, but it is worth something.  But minor misery, the type I experienced recently, could truly be worth it.   In that dark cave of healing, one is quiet, without bluster, without vanity or ego.  One is simply being, almost in hibernation, but not, for one thinks.  What one thinks isn’t clever, or even useful.  It is as basic as a child’s, with no more cogitation than a cheap sci-fi novel read intermittently.  It allows a different self to come through, one that is neither happy nor sad nor expectant.   Yes, as basic as a child’s, but less so, in that nothing of the normal world either delights or terrifies.  This is how and where we truly heal.
 
The universe, too, takes a pause now and then.  What good is a day of sleet and freezing rain?  What good, for that matter, is the vast emptiness that is almost the totality of outer space?  It is necessary to have this emptiness, this nothingness, this pause, for without it, everything would burn out, from crammed solar systems to crammed lives.  For most of us, we are only in this space when ill.  It is the price we pay for thinking our personal worlds mean more than they do.  Even if it is not worth the price personally, however – even if the illness or the trauma is too great to bear - the universe knows that it must be.  And that is why the deepest among us have long said that mercy is behind and beneath it all, for sickness and suffering is required for the health of the soul.   For such a creation to lack pity – and mercy – would be to make of it a flock of instinct-driven chickens who could not create a tear, never mind a universe.