Today, a new essay, "By Chance, a Cold Dread," under "Essays" in the website.  FK

Recently, I have been corresponding with a European anthropologist (I still can't believe the internet) concerning hitchhiking, what might seem an insignificant thing.  And it is, from a casual perspective, but it can tell us a lot.  The rush to the roads in the late 60's and early 70's was due to many things, including a large youth population and a new interstate road system, and that tells us something about demographics and modernity, but there was much more.  Some on the road were runaways, some were road hobos, but many, if not most, were like myself: idealistic students looking for some place, some way to a better world that would be found by fate, or the Will of God working through the chance of a hooked thumb. It was both a naive and sacred movement, caused by hope in the wake of the disintegration of the the old American way that had been pieced together out of immigration, depression, war, and cold war.  It was, as the anthropologists say, a liminal time for many young people, an aperture in the normal collective conscious that allowed for new thinking.  Much of the new thinking tended towards utopia.  A very little of it fell on fertile ground, but most died with maturity, with a return to a different, but just as mundane, consciousness.  

We, the dreamers, had thought of it then as the end of the old and the beginning of a new age, named by some astrologists the Aquarian Age.  It may still be at work, more slowly now, but because of its slowness, it is hard to say.  However, after reading some new chapters in Gary Lachman's The Secret Teachers, we can say definitively that such millennial periods in modern history are nothing new.  According to the author, the late 1700's and early 1800's was such an era, populated, he said, with such an array of mystical thinking that it put the 1960's to shame. Swedenborg, Mesmer, Rousseau, Blake and Coleridge were just a few of the more notable stars that arrayed the esoteric sky at that time, which had grand practical implications.  The French Revolution was not, as common history tells us, simply a precursor to Marx and a socialist society. It was instructed instead by a belief that the cosmic balance between the micro world of man and matter and the cosmic "all" had been upset. Man was, in the thinking of that time, a possible god, a microcosm with infinite potential that had been buried by dogma and laziness.  Throw off the shackles of the ruling elite, and Man would rise to celestial heights, creating a new paradise on earth.

This was made possible by a combination of the belief in the efficacy of Man that was reborn in the Renaissance, a revival of ancient esoteric beliefs (Pythagorian, Neoplatonism, Hermeticism) and rapidly changing times due to technological development.  It was at this time that Blake and Coleridge rebelled against the "atomization" of knowledge that was permitting the Industrial Revolution, something that also made possible their very heretical (according to Medieval standards) ideas to grow and thrive. In the wake of mechanization, they were able to appreciate the holistic view; and in the wake of the retreat of the power of the church, they were able to read and write about things formerly forbidden.

Such it was, then - to every action was a reaction, and that time period had, perhaps, the greatest impetus towards change of any other in the post-medieval era.  It was then that Newton made of the universe a mechanical clock; and it was then that science began in earnest to change technology and the way people had lived for centuries.           

And so, it seems, that our era holds nothing new - but of course, it does.  The stage is still set as it was in the early 1800's: science has further atomized our thinking, and the technology it has wrought is further changing our lives, and quickly.  But the villains and heroes have changed their masks.  Socially, mechanical capitalism (the new aristocracy) is being pursued by mechanical democratic socialists (materialists), who are are being pursued, unwittingly, by those of a holistic bent (spiritualists), who are in search of the same micro-macro union of those of centuries before.  The front, however, is no longer set in the cities of the poor, but in the eco-systems of the world.  We see the disconnect between the micro and macro worlds not so much in the misery of the working class, but in the tottering eco-systems of the world.  It does not matter if this vision is scientifically correct or not: rather, it is a spiritual movement with its roots in the ground of European revolutions, and further, in the esoteric beliefs of the ancients.  Much has changed, then, but the inner battle between the sacred and profane worlds continues.  

In the late 18th century, many of the illuminati believed that a new era was in the making - and it was, that of the modern mechanically (now digitally) based world - but their belief was that a New Age, a much better one, in harmony with the cosmos, was in the offing.  It did not happen.  In the 1960's and 70's, many of us believed the same - and still do - simply recall the broo-ha-ha over the Mayan calendar a few years ago.  In the past, this spiritual unbalance was bringing the world to the point of social collapse, just as today we believe that our 'atomistic' thinking is bringing us to environmental catastrophe.  Both were and are true, to a point. But the former did not lead to a union of the micro and macro worlds, just as, to date, our current dangers have not. History tells us that, apparently, nothing will; that our dangerous and disparate mentality is as stubborn and as illusive as gravity. Yet everything of this world ends.  Something has to give.  Is it just "when", or will the world struggle on as it is, with wars and rises and falls, punctuated only by individual breakthroughs?  Will there ever truly, as Marx once said of his utopia, be an end to history? FK           

Corruption - we hear it said of government all the time, and it appears in them ALL to greater or lesser degrees.  Exactly how much a national society can bear is hard to calculate, but there are limits.  Venezuela has hit the bottom, for instance; Zimbabwe and North Korea are in the running, as well as a lot of the "Stans" that tumbled out of the Soviet Union.  In a recent news story, an official in Afghanistan admitted that his country is corrupt from top to bottom - including himself.  Certainly a country has hit bottom when corruption is necessary for survival, because everyone else does it.  

In my essay on Costa Rica ("Costa Vieja"), I remarked that all of the Latin American countries I have lived in (there are 3, not including the brief trip to Costa Rica), the general population is very aware of corruption at most levels.  Right to our south, Mexico stands at the crossroads - a nation of great natural resources and, now, a functioning democracy that is plagued by corruption from the presidency through the police through the military.  As with Venezuela in the 1990's, it still functions because there are enough people who believe in honest behavior - but that can easily fail, and all nations, including the USA, should beware.

I was reminded of this last night when we watched the movie, "The Tailor of Panama," with Pierce Brosnan as a corrupt M-6 British spy, and Geoffrey Rush as the honest expat tailor in 1999 Panama, the year Panama officially took charge of the Canal. Rush has a secret he keeps from his wife, an American who works directly under the Panama president.  Brosnan exploits this to get info from Rush, who dresses the rich and powerful of Panama City, including the president.  As Brosnan, an egotist who gets what he wants, blackmails Rush, Rush feeds him imaginary information to get what he wants - money to keep his wife's farm, and money for his friends who were once tortured in their opposition to the uber-corrupt Manuel Noriega, the pineapple-faced dictator of Panama who was funneling cocaine through Panama and Cuba to the US, and who was summarily removed by a US invasion.  Rush is a good guy, willing to sacrifice all for his honest friends (just two) and family, but in his dealings with Brosnan, he is dragged through the streets and brothels of the city, where everyone, it seems, is corrupt.  It ends in another US invasion involving money, lies, and theft, leaving only Rush, one friend, and his family intact.  Everyone else has been exposed for what they are - corrupt. And, although his life comes back together, the national society at large continues to live in cynicism, poverty, and abuse.

In this blog, I try to find the metaphysical or spiritual in everything, but here it is straightforward: as in Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, we see that moral corruption leads to misery and, finally, to collapse, not just of empires but of individuals. We need no vengeful gods to punish us for moral transgressions, but rather punish ourselves through corruption, much like Hindu karma.  It is an absolute moral law that requires no prophet on the mount, and yet, for many, it is still hard to see.  Why not cheat the government if it is cheating you, and everyone else is doing it?  Why not steal, when you are being stolen from?  But, like the characters in "The Sopranos, " corruption breeds corruption: mistrust, back-stabbing, petty jealousy, hatred, and not only a lack of love, but the loss of the ability to love. It leaves good times to intoxication and sex which lead to poor health and/or ennui, a need for bigger and bigger highs that further hurt others and the individual himself.  

All this is no secret; it was, after all, one of the US founders who declared that without a moral society, a free democracy would never work.  This remains true, and reminds us that, with or without a belief in the transcendent, every one of us is responsible for the other's well- being; if we are not, we will not find it with ourselves, at least not for long.  This underlies the foundation of every great religion, of which Jesus said, "love the other as the self.'  If not, Hell may not await one after death, but it will come to one or one's descendants sooner rather than later. It is a fact that is so simple, known by most, but so easily forgotten when one domino falls, and then the other, and then all of them in the last panicked, corruption-filled attempt at survival.  FK                              

 It's good to be back to the old homestead after an adventure in the Great White North.  Thomas Edison said of his genius: 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration.  "Adventure" has a similar dichotomy: 90% slogging perspiration, 10% terror.  Perhaps the word "terror" is a bit overdone, but that was our trip.  

I am leaving that for another essay, however.  After unpacking our gear last night, I hobbled upstairs to the study and once again delved into the large book, The Secret Teachers by Gary Lachman, and read once again of a pivotal turning point in the West's perspective.  It is the famous ascent of Mt Ventoux in France by Petrarch, one of the great poets of the 14th and 15th centuries. Today, climbing a mountain it hardly worth any notice at all, nor should it be.  A few years back, I had just started out climbing one of the "Whites" in New Hampshire, and had to pass a group of Hasidic Jews - or so it seemed, although I suppose they could have been an off-sect of Hutterites - who were decked out in the traditional suits and hats and dresses, and worse, leather walking shoes.  The group included several children, and some of the women carried old-fashioned picnic baskets. Hours latter, I sat on the top of the mountain enjoying the view and eating my sandwich and apple. Just as I was beginning to leave, the traditional group started filing onto the scoured rock peak, looking only slightly worse for ware.    

Such it is nowadays, but back in Petrarch's time, no one climbed mountains without a very good reason.  Petrarch, however, was doing it for the view.  Petrarch, on his way to the top, passed a shepherd who told him that he had tried it once in his youth, had failed, and would never do it again. He was sternly warned, even beseached.  But on he went, and he was rewarded with a glorious panorama at the top.  

And that, the panorama, was the "change" that the classical scholars site, for in the past, people did not view things from afar; rather, they lived in their environment as an integral part of it.  In the old paintings, there is little perspective - rather, the size of things was determined by their importance. All were part and parcel of their surroundings.  But in the Renaissance, "good" paintings were produced with realistic depth.  This was not due to greater skill, but with the change of perspective of the painters. They were now seeing things as viewers, as outsiders; they now would look "out" at a view, much as Petrarch had done.  A great change towards objectivity had taken place.  And with it, of course, came the scientific perspective, that of the outside observer of parts, that we have today.

In Germany, says Lachman, they coined a word that corresponds to outside perspective, sehnsucht, meaning "sweet yearning." My first experience of that came when I was four, when I would walk to the top of a hill where my older brother and sister got the bus to school. As they drove off, I would look longingly at the small, rolling mountains to the West and think, there is heaven! Already, I had sehnsucht; already I felt this separation which, the scholars tell us, did not exist before the Renaissance.  The longing is for participatory union, for the ecstasy of belonging fully to life - and to whatever may surround life in its greatest fulfillment.  

With age, this sweet yearning has grown deeper, as if all our years have us climb not only to greater wisdom, but to greater separation and loneliness.  And this is true.  Even my son at the age of 21 still has intense, unguarded moments with friends that he finds essential.  At my age, such intercourse is highly stylized, polite enough to not provoke controversy.  Words are carefully, wisely, kept.  Although loneliness came to me at the age of four, I can still recall the absolute honesty and chumminess of me and my classmates through most of grammar school, and, like my son, the tribal-like closeness of friends into our early 20's.  

No more.  I have gained perspective and social delicacy, but at the price of sehnsucht.   That this might have begun with a lone poet in France 600 years ago seems a stretch; but experience has shown that such objectivity does increase with age, and it does lead to longing. And longing leads to the Search.  So while curiosity kills the cat, it might also bring a greater wisdom - and perhaps a greater union.  Here, we once again confront the Great Road, and its many forks.  Yearning, sweet yearning, then, might be one of our more important directional signs. It is, perhaps, everyone's calling.  FK          
                  

Today, a new essay, "Costa Vieja," under Essays in the website. FK 

y, way back in 1970, when I was in high school and filled with all sorts of dreams of anarchy and paradise on earth, there was a movie that was made into a short-lived sit-com called Logan's Run.  In the sci-fi world where it took place, people lived in a vast bubble protected from the elements and all the pain of bee stings and sun burns and everything else.  Life was ideal, because no one suffered - at all, because at the age of 30, a ceremony was held where they were lifted up to heaven in a shaft of light.  Except it wasn't quite so.  In fact, they were simply killed while high on whatever.  Logan found out about this, and with his girlfriend, looking remarkably like a wealthy flower child, he escaped from the bubble.  There they found a world that hurt, and a world that had been destroyed by a long-ago nuclear war. They made it to what was left of Washington, DC, where they met an old man for the first time.  They were entranced.  Here was this dingy old fellow with a white beard who puttered about the remnants of the national library, his failing memory and shuffling gate so amusing to them.  Old age wasn't so bad!  And so they returned, led a revolt, and exploded the bubble.

Into the real world they went, then, the same world that had erupted into global violence before.  And the same world where old age is not a quaint novelty, but a very real and, eventually, uncomfortable stage of life.  People my age, no longer young, look with dread at the ancients, now our parents, who become senile, ugly, incompetent and incontinent and then, by the miracle of modern medicine, are kept alive in these horrible states sometimes for years.  We look at each other and think darkly - not us!  Better to die!  But I have seen the will to live.  Even the ancient have it, with all their suffering and pills, until the last, faintest glow of energy finally dissipates.  It is only then that they acquiesce to the big mystery.  And so, I know, it will remain for most of us.  Could Logan's domed world have a glimmer of compassion to it?

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, which simultaneously commiserates the last days of Jesus and the reality of death in life.  In the Catholic Church, a cross of ashes is put on the foreheads of parishioners as the priest says, to each, "from ashes you are born and to ashes you go," or something very similar (there goes MY memory).  We are reminded that death awaits us, as well as an afterlife, too, when Lent is done at Easter.  But Logan didn't have Easter, nor any of the other beliefs and rituals. He only had his desire to live and his ignorance to protect him from the real world.  The world before him was not any more evil than the world of his future.  It is iis vicissitudes, its suffering and fears, that creates the worst of our violence.  With Logan and his fellow followers, this will happen again.  The world by itself offers no palliative; rather it is by thoughts of the mind and the inner life, of the heart, that give us reason to live in the face of a painful old age and a scary death.

So, in Gary Lachman's The Secret Teachers, we learn about the ways in which the Western world dealt with this perennial problem.  I have just finished reading of the era of the slow collapse of the Roman Empire, beginning in seriousness about 200 years after the birth of Christ, and lasting until the final dismemberment in the 8th century.  It was a time of confusion and warfare, of barbarian hordes and clashing ideologies.  It was also the last of the Pagan era, where intellect gave way to faith, where brain gave way to heart, for the world had to be remade, to be re-understood by the masses, not just the intellectual elite.  And so the West veered off into dogma, and quickly, into intolerance, for a religion built on belief rather than a foundation of thought could be easy pickings.  As the late Medieval period went into its high phase, after the 9th century, the great Christian thinkers of the time filled in the spaces with what was left of the pagan intellectual tradition, culminating with St Thomas Aquinas's works that were based primarily on the Aristotle.  

Thus the via positiva - the way of faith and ritual - was buttressed by the via negativa, or the way to God through meditation. The later is what informs Christian mysticism to this day, but it is still the way of faith that leads most in whatever religion - or lack of religion - is followed.  The inward way is difficult, takes years and years, and does not always work.  But the outward way always does, if only for the moment.

And so it is that the ashes are received on the forehead with the solemnity of death - but with the knowledge that we will somehow live on.  

This is the way of the poet.  Driving back from town a few days ago, a thin coat of powdery snow  was blowing across the road, forming drifts even as I passed them.  In their shifting form their seemed a beauty and truth, both terrible and wonderful, of what we are.  It was not through intellect that this ocurred, but through heart, as if the heart knows something that ouir mind cannot.  It is this, I think, what we call soul, and what must have made the first thinking humans understand that something more than mere living was afoot in life - something greater that perhaps only the wise men can grasp, but something that we can all know intuitively.  

And we often do understand in this way, from the blowing snow drifts and the rolling waves.  It is not from will-full thought, then, or abstract imagination that most of us know something is afoot, but through something in our environment that comes from something else and is written in our hearts.  And so the ashes bring forth that knowledge, in what the ancients called sympathy of spirit, and by whatever ways we might think, we are still brought forth before a world that not only hurts, but teaches, if we are willing.  Perhaps Logan will find his way after all.  FK                
               

In many ways, nothing seems changed.  The view out my window is the same as it has been for the 16 years we have lived here. Now, dead leaves quiver on the sugar maple before me, a cold north wind trying vainly to rip them free.  Beyond are the pines, coated with light snow, and beyond them, the vast corn field with its stubble poking out from the white-whiteness of this newly fallen snow.  It will sting to take a walk today, my glasses freezing the bridge of my nose as the cold goes deeper into the forehead. The snow glare will hurt, and it will be nice to get back inside for a hot cup of tea.  

All the same, except for the new organic pig pens being put up in the alfalfa field to the north, but it isn't really.  The closest town is expanding its borders beyond the new beltway, running up along route 12 to someday join the expansion flowing east from Madison.  Almost everywhere in this country it is the same, and for those worried about jobs, this is a good thing.  Except - except, when will it stop?  In Wisconsin, we have gone from sparse Indian settlements to industrial farming and cities in only 150 years.  Our system depends on this kind of growth but there are, as has been said, limits.  When and how does it end?

This, along with a whole system of thought, is tackled expertly by author Gary Lachman in his book, The Secret Teachers of the Western World.  It is not an ecological treatise, but rather an exploration of the West's esoteric - that is, inner - teachings, and how they have become buried - but not killed - by a changing form of consciousness.  He uses the right-left brain model for simplicity, although he explores this split far beyond this division. The left brain, the logical, discursive side, he claims, overtook the right - the intuitive side - in the Renaissance, a process that has continued to this day, which has almost destroyed the efficacy of the intuitive.  We can not only know this is true by what is valued in our thought processes, but by the fruit of its aggressive expansion.  The discursive side wishes to dis-assemble everything into discrete bits that it can completely understand and control, and thus has set its sights on "messy" nature, by overrunning it with human structures, limiting it more and more to passive farming belts or fenced-in, controllable parks for our occasional amusement.  

However, it has its limits, not just ecologically, but mentally. Lachman, borrowing from a slew of other thinkers, claims that the dominance of one side of our nature always runs into a wall when its excesses become so obvious it falls into self-parody. And more: the discursive mode must constantly pick things apart, down to the tiniest particle, like a kid taking apart a watch, to understand and control it.  However, in so doing, it starts to eat itself up - that is, pick apart the nature of its picking apart.  

In grad school, this was abundantly clear, as we fell into studying the deconstructionists, but one does not have to go to the ivory tower to see that it's happening.  The West, which has dominated the world by its left-brain thinking, is now in the process of deconstructing itself - from its cultures and morality to its very processes of picking things apart.  We see now the dragon eating its tail.  We can clearly see now the destruction of Western hegemony by its own hands

The current political crises in our country reflects this knowledge and this fear, and the concern is real.  However, Lachman claims that this has happened before, and it is part of a spiral process: as Hegel put it, the thesis forces the antithesis, and the result is a synthesis, a movement forward out of reconciliation.  This is part of the magic of "three", from Pythagorean theory to the mystery of Christ.  And thus the book moves on, to sum up this hidden knowledge that has been forced into the shadows by the modern rational mind, but nevertheless remains, because it cannot be lost - it is as much a part of us as our physical brains.  

This book is the best I have read for a synopsis of the Perennial Tradition, representing it with a clear (and sane) eye, but it also brings about our own perennial question here: Will the discursive brain give way to a synthesis with the holistic mode of thought that has been marginalized by the mainstream, or will it insist on running us into the ground, jealous to the bitter end of its supremacy?  It seems to me more and more that, this time around, it will depend on a global presence of goodwill that is so far absent, so much so that it seems our fate is in the hands of a greater force.  This is the greater, unifying force that the esoterists speak of, but they, too, have long differed on how it works.  For some, transitions run smoothly; for others, an apocalypse must first ensue.  Perhaps by the end of the book I will have a better idea as to which way things might know, but it is my guess that no one really knows.  But we do know that, in the end, it will depend on us as always, and how each of us contributes to global consciousness.  FK        

Yesterday, a friend sent me the blog of a woman we had met at the Consciousness Society, a "wing-nut" division of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) that we had both enthusiastically embraced, and even contributed our own wing-nut theories as well.  This woman is a great New Age artist, and in her blog, she showed both some of her work and told us breathlessly of her world tour last year, including many symposiums and art banquets for achievement, as well as visits to exotic (traditional) peoples in Africa.  It made me realize what a piker I really am in the scheme of human endeavor, which is probably good for me, but also something else: how deeply mystical all world's cultures really were.  I had always known that, and that is what brought me to anthropology, but normal anthropology usually only exploits a social version of modern science.  Seldom does it get to the lived meaning of culture - and thus our participation with the "wing-nuts" who strove to do so.  

This reminded me of the artist's lecture at one of the Society's meetings.  Here, she tried to show how our alphabet was derived from circumstances of nature.  For instance, for an "A," she showed a slide of reeds crossed in a swamp that looked very much like the letter "A."  In this, she was trying to prove that a basic feature of our civilization was born from raw nature, linking us holistically with it.  

This was of interest, since her pictures were great, but unconvincing.  For instance, just because a burnt spot on a piece of toast looks kinda like the face of Jesus does not mean that Jesus originated in toast.  

Still, it reminds one of our roots.  According to my encyclopedia, our alphabet was taken from the Greeks and modified by the Romans into what we recognize today, but the Greeks got it from the Phoenicians and the Phoenicians from those marvels of civilization genius, the Egyptians.  Our alphabet is based on phonetics, that is, on an approximation of the sound of the spoken word, but that came later.  The Egyptians used hieroglyphs, which, like Chinese writing, are based on pictures of actual things in nature.  But also something more: on the social-religious meaning of things in nature which were often transposed into features of the gods.  Thus writing itself was a holy endeavor, calling forth our relationship with nature and the gods.  It is, in part, for this reason that scribes were so honored in ancient times (recall the Jewish hierarchy of the Scribes and Pharisees, putting religion and writing together).  But the Greeks and Romans, in a bloom of practical knowledge, replaced the pictures with a limited number of symbols, that borrowed from the hieroglyphic of say, a bird, taking the symbol as a representation of the sound "B" in bird (only an example.  The ancient Greek word for bird probably does not start with a "b").  Thus, all was simplified, and any child could learn to turn simple conversation into writing within a few years.  

This has affected our current civilization in profound ways, making everyone, in a way, a high priest.  Because we now share the same language as those who once spent years bringing nature and god and culture together, we are both democratized (not a bad thing) and secularized, which is often not a good thing. In ancient times, we were placed beneath those of knowledge - but we knew that this knowledge, this depth, was there.  Now we are equals, but often do not recognize our own depth.  We have been "flattened out," allowed to scramble at the surface without even understanding that this, our world reality, is only a surface.  

Last night I also bought a book, The Spiritual Life by Fr. Tanqueray, that was recommended by our not-so-new (now) priest, Fr. Peter.  Fr. Peter, it seems, has lost some of the congregation because of his long and sometimes rambling sermons, as well as because of the conservative message in some of these sermons (too much at times, I admit, on sex).  However, if one listens, his message is really about Being Saved.  This, of course, is the message in one way or another of all religions, but in the modern churches, the emphasis has been placed on social issues.  This is understandable because, as with writing, we have become a practical people, but Fr. Peter is desperate to show us that this is only the beginning.  

And so I bought the book. It is a long and heavy one, and I will have to read it over months, interspersed with others.  It is not only not entertaining like a novel, but not inspirational, like many popular books on spirituality.  It is, to paraphrase the author, a science book, except that the science he speaks of is about how to reach God, rather than, say, fly to the moon.  And with this I realized two things: one, that the mysticism that so enamors me is not some sort of side-show of the weird, but a central tenant of even the hide-bound Catholic Church.  In this book, transcendence is treated as no more of an oddity than is a rocket by an aerospace  engineer.  And another: it once again makes apparent how little we know of what we think we know.  Just as with writing, most of us wander into our churches or synagogues or yoga classes thinking we know what we are doing, but most of us (and I include myself) do not really have a clue as to the depth and sacredness of that which we witness and purport to believe. Religion has become trivialized, stream-lined so that anyone can participate without effort.  

It may well be that in any groupings of people beyond the extended family, we have two choices: adhering to a belief in equality, which takes away the excesses of the divine right of leadership; or in hierarchical knowledge, which poses the inevitable risk of dictatorship or theocracy.  Yet, so much is lost with democratization, where the truly vulgar can become the staple of normalcy, and the greater and deeper is thought to be pretentious, an invented abstraction meant to demean  "the people."  Is it possible that this dichotomy is one of the fundamental problems of society today? And how best to counter it than by proclaiming, as Jesus famously did, that we are all unique and equal under God, but are also fully responsible for our own souls, no exceptions? For with equality comes great responsibility, a burden I think others in other times understood well and traded in for hierarchy and complacency.  FK                                

Decades ago, I was at a small party given by a friend, when his wife (also a friend) asked me, "what is the most important thing in your life?"  Like a polished conservative politician, I said, "God." For an evangelist, that would be expected; for me at the time, it was not, and she reacted with surprise.  

I still react to that memory with surprise.  At that time in my life, I was in a high-pressure graduate program, and was so driven by the need to succeed - to be the smartest and the best in a field with virtually no jobs - that I must have been quite a jerk at times. Somehow, though, this remark made its way through me, even with, or perhaps because of, the great abundance of beer at the party.  It was similar to the time that I was hitchhiking back to undergrad school when a driver asked me what I was majoring in.  At the time I had no idea, but I immediately answered "anthropology" (see my book, Dream Weaver, for details).  Somehow something knew what I was going to do.  Did it also know about this centrality of "god," or was that simply a statement manufactured unconsciously for shock value?  For it would be hard to say that this metaphysical concern truly has come to dominate my life, as anthropology once came to.  No one who knows me, I can assure you, would describe me as a saint, or anything close.

I would not have had this memory were it not for the novel I am currently reading, The Dog of Jesus, by Michael Sakorski. So far, it's been fun: a dog that was at the Crucifixion of Christ happened to be at the foot of the cross when the blood was spilled by the spear of the Roman soldier.  The dog licked it, then was pierced by the same spear.  "Santo" recovered, and was taken to Spain by St James (Santiago), where he left it to a sailor for care while he traveled to Palestine, where he was killed.  2,000 years later, we meet the sailor again, still with his dog in a sleepy mountain village in Mexico.  He gives the dog to a religious boy, Jesus, so that he can finally die, for to live with the dog is to live forever. The dog cures those who God chooses by a simple lick of the tongue. The sailor had helped to cure many, but had long kept it hidden because of the turmoil the knowledge of such a dog would cause.  Jesus does the same after the sailor's death, until ....

I will leave that to those who wish to read the book, or at least until another time.  To bring one up to where I now am, at about two thirds through, the dog has been discovered, and Jesus has consented to allow a billionaire pharmaceutical magnate to inspect the dog, to perhaps find a special chemical in the dog that can be reproduced, and thus heal humankind's ills.  Jesus is given 250,000 dollars and some other things as compensation. When asked what he would do with the money, he replies, "I don't need it for myself.  I have everything I need.  Maybe it would help to buy books for the children."   It was here that I was touched, but not because I would respond that way.  Although I, too - like most Americans - have everything I need to live, I would love to have more.  I would love to buy a better guitar, an ATV for up north, a new roof, some great vacations, and so on.  Like most, I would soon probably find that this bonanza was not enough; I would soon find that there were MORE things I wanted, and would still feel pinched.  

Then again, I do understand Jesus.  I have lived through frugal times when I had barely enough, and been thoroughly satisfied, because of purpose and because of others who shared that purpose.  At times, that purpose was transcendental - I would like to think holy - and it was at such times that want was least noticed.  It was at those times when a worthy purpose and companionship created a field, a sense, of fullness that did not want or even think about stuff beyond the basics.  The idea, then, of desire for such things as ATVs would have made no sense. And of course, it was during these times, as infrequent as they were, when in retrospect there was the greatest happiness. 

This is not new to the pages of this blog.  Rather, I mention it again because of the importance of it.  Our fictional Jesus seems just that - fictional, just as the lawyers present at the deal with the billionaire looked upon Jesus, as unreal or a madman, when he said what he did.  But I bet most of us have had a time when all was right with the world even though we hadn't a penny extra. 

It is an overused notion and, for that reason, corny ("Rosebud" comes to mind), but the great truth that the right spirit is more powerful than poor circumstances should still not be diminished. For some who are consumed by that spirit, they find that it can even overcome great pain and fear of death.  This concept is not, as many have said, only pie in the sky, an attitude meant to lull the impoverished masses into acceptance of their lowly lot, even though that has been done by cynical elites. Then again, we don't have to live as poor farmers like Jesus in the book to realize the spirit, for if wealth happens from honest effort, who's to blame? Rather, Jesus's remark reminds us of a proper point of focus. That point is not mere sophistry, but something so real that most of us have not only experienced it, but wish to live it again, this spirit of fullness, as much as possible.  It is found through right purpose and fellowship, and, unlike great wealth, can be had by anyone.  FK