We were going to go, and then we weren’t, and then we were.  In a project for his Spanish class, our son was supposed to do one of three things, and he decided on what he thought would be the easiest – taking a trip to the Chicago (National) Mexican Art Museum, and he didn’t want to make the long trip to the Big City alone.  At first I sighed – it is a 2.5 hour trip that gets uglier and more congested the more one goes south and east.  Normally we take that route for a flight out of O’Hare, which is nothing but panic and crowds and hustle, and this would be into the bowels of the city itself - perhaps even into some dangerous Drug Lord ghetto (such are thoughts of rubes like me about the City).  So I was relieved when he told us a few days before that he would be going with two friends.  Saved.  But then, one got diarrhea or something of the sort, and the other demurred, and we were back on.  There goes Sunday to a lot of driving and dodging city drivers, I thought, and of course that’s the way it was, at first.
Being Sunday, though, it wasn’t too crowded, and as we approached the neighborhoods that we seldom see, I was surprised.  This was not gentry country, like down by Millennium Park, but it wasn’t bad, either – older brick row houses slightly shabby with age, but still well-kept.  All the people on the street had that Indian look of Mesoamerica, but there was no garbage, no muffler-less cars blasting the eardrums,  no chaos of beggars and illegal street vendors and slinky young pick-pockets, as in Caracas or any city, Mexico.  No, it was clean, orderly, and, well, nice, with kids playing in the playground and families out with strollers taking in the warm cloudy day.  Good so far.  And as we followed Siri for directions, there we were all of a sudden in front of the museum, and there was a nice, open spot immediately across it to park – for free.  Lucky day for a rube. 
Inside, the museum was not large, but not small either, and it had an extensive gift shop and clean bathrooms – both goods signs.  But best of all was the art, as it should be. 
For some reason, I have had an affinity for Mexico ever since I learned about it in a rudimentary Spanish class in Junior High.  I found I loved the music, the customs, the overall culture as I was then taught.  It brought me eventually to take a semester abroad in college in Cuernavaca (a few hours south of Mexico City) where the country gave me all the sadness and depth that was dormant in my knowledge.  With all its poverty, filth, rip-offs and occasional threats of violence, I came to love Mexico – not just for the cheap booze and good beaches, but for the place, the history, the people.  The depth, the pathos, the - I don’t know - subtle flow of spirit in the small cities, the towns and countryside.  It was my place.  Maybe in another life, I don’t know.  I would move there in my dotage except for the corruption and the drug problem, two sides now of the same coin. 
Oddly, my son has an inexplicable attraction for Mexican woman, in spite of being raised in white small-town Wisconsin, but I will not go any further there.  Rather, we go to the art, the celestial art.
There were, I think, five rooms in all, starting with the oldest Colonial period (1520 to 1812).  Here, the artists were almost exclusively of European background, copying the styles of the home continent, which were airy and celestial, focusing on Divine Christian themes, but with a difference.   Here was the heavy touch of evangelization to a heathen people – to be expected, and distasteful to modern sensibilities – but also, that sense of the new, of God come to earth oh-so-close.  Mexico then was, to the Europeans, a nearly blank slate, a calling, a location just outside of Eden.  The “primitive” people, ignorant as they were, were not caught in the cynicism of the crumbling ends of the medieval period of Europe.  No, they believed in spirit, so much so that The Virgin came to them at Guadalupe at the very beginning.  No one doubted it; Mexico had both the marks of Hell, with the vanquished Aztecs, and of Heaven, with its simple, believing people and vast, unexplored (again, to the Europeans) spaces.  It was a new beginning and a new hope. 
Never forget the Virgin of Guadalupe.  As we moved to another room into the first era of the Republic after the revolution from Spain (ending about 1820), the faces on the paintings got darker, and the themes more human specific – peasants gathering sheaves, battles against France (Cinco de Mayo), Mexican-ness celebrated, still following the Virgin, for although Mexico was now for the Mestizos, it was still full of open nature and spirit – the spirit, again, of Christianity, but customized for that great new mix in the New World. 
Now into the era post-Civil war (ending about 1920, with several more large conflicts lingering into the thirties).  We all know Diego Rivera and his wife, Frieda, Euro-Mexicans, to be sure, but post-Christians in spirit.  Here Mexico comes into its authenticity, whether real or imagined.  We see the Virgin again, but she is surrounded with skulls and skeletons, back to the days of the Aztecs and ancestor worship.  We now have the spirit of the past poured into the mold of Christianity, both taking their place for a mixed people and a new culture – not Indian, not European, but now fully Mexican, with the skeletons literally out of the closet.  It is the Day of the Dead as we know it now, that mix of Halloween (All Saint’s Day) and appeasement of the souls of the dead, as it was in the beginning and apparently, shall ever be.  Here we have the bright colors of the tropics besides the somber pastels of European style.  And here we have the peasants victorious, however ephemeral that proved to be.  We move closer to the future.
In sala cuatro – the fourth room – we step into modern art.  There are the protests of the poor, there are the protests of the immigrantes, the bad Yankees building walls, sending people back, exploiting the farm workers and so on.  Controversial as ever.  But still, there is the Virgin, shown again and again with here glow and her star-studded blue shawl, now not only with skeletons, but stripped, groaning, tortured by ecological disaster; or filled with grotesque, cancerous kernels of genetically-modified corn, straight from Monsanto.  We also have, from the first to the last room, Indian art, particularly that of the Huichol, who still practice their ancient ways, taking peyote and worshipping Mother Corn.  We have the bright colors of their visions, and their spirit inside the Virgin Mother, Corn and Christianity, Indigenous and European spirit coalesced firmly at last, comfortable one within another.  We have arrived at the modern era, and the Mexico that I have learned to love, in spite of the dark, in spite of the other meld: Spanish corruption and Aztec mass murder. 
Dark, light, Hell, Heaven, still inside Mexico, still brewing, still turning.  Politics rise, fists raise, we see the spirit of non-spirit, of Marxist materialism, but still there is the Virgin, and now Mother Corn, still the spirt, one and the same, that I heard whispering nearly 40 years ago.  It is different than the US, and not always better – millions in immigration testify mutely to that – but it is still magical, still there.  The museum - it brought back that childhood dream of Mexico, and rekindled it.  It was not a fantasy; Mexico with all its problems still baths in a special spirit.   Thanks, Chicago.  FK    
                    

​Last night, we had a tremendous thunderstorm that sent the dog scrambling between my legs at every turn.  This morning, a warm front is moving in and with all that rain, spring is on.  The grass suddenly is greening, just like that, and the feel of growth is everywhere.  Nature is joyfully desperate to live, and nothing short of some horrible holocaust can stop it.  Life is meant to live, to grow, to fight and struggle to stay alive and reproduce for more life. 
Such it is and such it has to be, for dying is the easiest of things.  Just stop eating, or, if you are human and don’t live in a caretaker society, just stop working – hunting, gardening, fishing, or whatever it is that one does to stay alive.  Same with the animals – stop flying from cats, stop picking for worms, whatever – just give up, and you are dead sooner rather than later.  Without the strong will to live, we and other species simply would not live. 
Not so in the mythical Garden of Eden, and not so in the dreams of heaven.  In the hobo song, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” cigarettes grow on trees, whisky trickles down the rocks, and there is a lake full of stew.  No work, no problems – but that sort of paradise, as far as we can tell, has nothing to do with “here.” Here we struggle not only today but in our minds for tomorrow, living in daily fear of what the doctor will have to say about that stomach pain, or about that deep fatigue.   Live, live, live, no matter what; live no matter if it is off a garbage dump in Manila; live even if we must cut off our limbs to beg, or even worse. 
In contrast, we are told by the great prophets that we should not fear death.  Jesus tells us not to worry, for what worry has ever brought a moment more of life?  We are told to live like the sparrows or the lilies of the field, by the grace of God’s will.  But we know, as Adam knew after his expulsion, that Man must now work by the sweat of his brow.  We know that if we do not, we will die.  We do not want to die.  Where is the truth to heaven?  Where is the truth in living by God’s grace?
I have read many books about extraordinary people who were able to survive pure hell by extreme grit – through an iron will to live.  One memorable one was The Long Walk, by a Polish officer captured in WWII and sentenced to years and years in one of Stalin’s Siberian gulags.   They had wanted to kill him, and he was tortured to confess that he was a spy.  He refused, enduring terror and pain, because, by God, THEY were not going to kill him!   It was this stubborn anger that carried him through to the gulag, and then to escape – where he and some others had to walk through much of Siberia, the Gobi desert, and over the Himalayas to British India.  He made it after freezing, boiling, starving, thirsting – every misery extreme nature could throw at him.  He retired later to England where he nursed his mental wounds, apparently for the rest of his life.  But he had survived the impossible.
Then there is the popular book made into the movie, Unbroken, about the bad -boy –turned Olympic runner who was taken into the USAF to fight the Japanese in WWII.  Most of us now know the story – his plane went down in the Pacific, he drifted for over 40 days with almost no food and water, then was captured and tortured and starved and nearly worked to death by the Japanese.  He survived.  Afterward, he suffered miserably from PTSD for several years, then was saved by religion and lived to nearly 100, helping troubled children and people in general throughout the rest of his life. 
One life put forever on hold, another released to do good in the world, specifically because of religion.  But that is not the point here; rather, it is to ask the question: how much is living worth to you?  I have recently read of the extermination/mining camps of the Nazis, and how the Jews and those other “undesirables” were worked and starved to death in poisonous caves.  One who survived talked of those who would give up – the walking dead – and it could be seen in their faces.  They had decided to die, and did so.  I recall a bit of disgust by this author over this – where was their grit, their defiance, their will?  Many of us might agree, for we all admire the person who never, ever gives up –for in life, giving up is the easiest thing to do.  Yet I have thought about it, and I believe I would have been one of those who would give up.  Unless I received some special kind of grace, after freezing and starving, after seeing that there was little hope, I would have just let nature take its course.  Call me a coward, but I have seen this in nature, too.  Grab a field mouse, for example.  He will first struggle to get free, bight and squirm and do whatever, but after he finds it useless, he will give up.  It is true that mice are nature’s candy, and they must know it, yet isn’t there something wise in this?  Isn’t it wise, sometimes, to give in to death?
On one level, it pits the world against spirit; why should one fight so hard against the inevitable?  One is only going back to God – what’s the problem?  Isn’t it a lack of faith that causes us to struggle so?  Aren’t we mocking God’s will, standing up to the mountain that is too big, ever, to move?  Many a martyr might agree.  In might even be that in fighting so hard, we are displaying our fear of death.  For most in such extreme examples, this is not the case, but isn’t it so for many of the old who cling to life so desperately? 
On another level, such clinging shows an appreciation for life, and our willingness to endure pain to stay with it – which might be another form of spiritual grace.  Our Long Walk subject apparently remained bitter; our Unbroken hero made it through to the other side, where bitterness evaporated precisely because of the ordeal, without which he would never have found God.
I seldom start these blogs knowing exactly where they will go; rather, I posit a question or situation to find out where it will take me.  It is a learning experience and a big reason why I write.  Here, I am forced to back off my original contention that dying might be the noblest thing of all.  It might be, it is true, for dying might take more courage than struggling to stay alive.  But it might just be giving in to despair as well (which I can still see myself doing.  Heroes are heroes because they are special).   For the sparrows and the lilies of the field, they do as they were made to do, one way or the other; for humans, we make choices, and the reason for those choices are paramount.  Do we stay alive out of spite, or because we see it as our duty, our call to learn and grow?  To do the latter takes the greatest courage of all – practically that of a saint.  But for our Unbroken man, who survived out of orneriness, the growth came later, unknown beforehand to him.  It came from grace out of his suffering.  Perhaps that is what we more normal people might learn – that staying alive might have a purpose, even if we are frightened or miserable in the process.  But also, that dying might have its purpose, too. 
In the scriptures, I believe what is meant - this living by the grace of God - is not to fling off work and live like a Bohemian, but rather, to find as best we can the will of God in our own life – that is, the spark that makes us the sparrow, the lilly, the direct product of God.  In other words, to give our will as best we can to that other will, and then fight like hell if necessary to attain its, and now our, goals. 
Suffering to stay alive is not always worth it, but sometimes it is.  It depends on the internal content to the sufferer, and whether he can read the signs.  I pray I could do so under such circumstances, whether it be to die or to live.  I also pray to keep the bitterest cup from my lips, but that is not up to me.  Courage, yes, and faith, which is courage’s best companion.  Either way, life or death, we could all be heroes.  FK              
       
                                                                            

​During Lent, I get a Catholic daily video by Mathew Kelly on things to consider concerning spiritual issues.  One received a week ago was especially concise: what, it asks, is your vision of God?  What was it when you were a child?  A teen?  The upshot being that one’s image of God affects one’s relationship (or non-relationship): if it has not grown along with maturity, then what of that relationship or lack thereof?  

A good workshop thing to do, and I paused to consider: as a child, I saw God as a giant eye always looking down upon me, judging.  This would be creepy had I been an adult, but as a child, what else was new?  Weren’t grown-ups always looking in and judging?  God’s benevolence, or at times lack of it, was that of my parents, and less so, of other authority figures.

As a teen, this outlook changed dramatically.  I was drawn into Eastern philosophy and religion, and tended to see God as a non-entity, a mystical void that held together the universe.  There was no longer an “eye,” and no longer direct, human-like communication with this invisible force.  Rather, I was left on my own to look outwards and marvel at the things I did not understand.  Morality as I had been taught no longer held sway outside of the big social no-no’s.  I was more or less free.  It was a 60’s thing which allowed one to do as one wished inside a very loose parameter, perfect for my desire to experience the world in ways beyond the boundaries of the former “eye.”

Age has taught me that morality is a more coherent net than I had hoped for, for the effects of certain actions often carry far beyond those actions.  Casual sex leads to unwanted pregnancies, STDs, and emotional turmoil; drug and alcohol abuse lead to bad health, really, really stupid decisions and actions, and failure in general; and excess concerns over worldly success and acclaim lead to anxiety, insecurity and a general, persistent unhappiness. 

What then of that image now?  The Big Eye was immature, but (perhaps) more right than I had thought.  If basic moral rules were meant for us to lead to a better life overall, that meant that God was not a non-entity who only persisted as a kind of mystical glue, but rather something that wished well for humanity.  Yet, the eye will not do either; as one learns more of the vastness of the universe, one could not confine “IT” to the reproachful gaze of the schoolmarm.   

What then? Perhaps “IT” is a mystical benevolence?  But what of the bad in the world?  Why would a caring God allow the daily horror that we all see on the news, and sometimes experience ourselves?

All told, the image of God is what this blog often must confront, for that is the image we all look for (or away from) when something comes to us from out of the blue. This includes those who believe they believe in nothing, for we all ask: why do good or bad or weird things happen when there appears to be no reason for them?  Why, in fact, is there anything?  Our image of God, or lack of it, ultimately directs how we experience any experience that cannot be readily explained.     

​Modern novels stipulate a nonsensical world replete with synchronicities that somehow are connected but that make no sense – expressing the feeling that there IS a force in the universe but that it is not approachable or comprehensible, something like the Big Eye that, in contrast, does NOT care either emotionally or intellectually. 

One might say that this no more incomplete than other images we often have.  The trouble is, this new perception of God in the arts throws away former images of God while refusing to embrace anything new that is substantial.  This is a conceit, much like the complaints of Doubting Thomas.  Here, the baby is thrown out with the bath water.  It would be better, rather, to give credence to the well-worn views of God, understanding that none are ever complete unless we, ourselves, are complete, for God cannot be found in pictures, words or logic.  We must then stride for a personal relationship with God, vaulting beyond whatever image we have taken from those classical views.   The rest is up to us and to grace, for God can only be fully known personally.  In the end, no image will ever fill the complete bill.    

​We might say that God is both impersonal and personal, both the glue of the universe and the eye that watches over us; but “IT” is forever so much more.  We will always complain about this incomprehensibility but shouldn’t, because we desperately need a frontier that can never be conquered.  This is in our nature, for it drives us towards the personal God that is also, always, beyond us, enticing us with new lands, with dangers and promises, and with the fullness of what it means to be alive.  Enticing; leading us on beyond the image.  FK                                                              
      
                                                                            

Today, a new Essay, "House of Usher," found under "Essays" in the website.  FK

Last time, I wrote that in spite of all the evidence of divine will about me, I still continue on as before.  On second thought, though, this is not true.  In light of life’s experiences, I can no longer ever think that this life is a meaningless blank, a dark billiard table of chance happenings that works only from physical laws that somehow have arisen out of nowhere.  But what of it?
This realization (and question) came from a conversation I had with someone who is regularly beset by cynical nihilism and depression.  Why, he asks, in this mess of crooked politicians and murderous gangs of all types, should we even keep on living?   Add to that the probability of a long and painful death, why not end it now and stop the madness and pain?

Well, I said: if this world is held together by a spiritual glue as I believe, then life is not meaningless, no matter how it appears.  It is a cosmic thing whose meaning recedes away from us, but it is not something thrown together by chance.  If we are made in the image of eternity, then life in every detail has great, even infinite, meaning.  That we can’t grasp it is part of our purpose – to try.  And when trying fails, to try again, and then to have faith, for faith is bound with the certainty that this world has been formed by more – by much more – than chance.  Faith, then, is not blind; it is made from (to me) the obvious – that this world has a design to it.  Faith is then only a continuation of that belief, even if we can’t understand that design (as no one does, regardless of belief or method). 

After first speaking, this statement had to be modified for everyday reality.  It had to be said that belief does not make bad times go away; that belief does not make us not curse our bad luck or our illness or our losses.  Faith does not eliminate grief and pain.  Rather, it gives context to them, and fits them in the overall design, often only after they have been lived and reflected upon.  It is in this reflection that faith not only can save us from continual despair, but can give us more fuel for the fire of faith, for on reflection, things DO take on meaning. 

Nice words, but reality also has a habit of crushing mere words, even if it eventually confirms them.  I found that out this morning when I woke at 6:30 AM, an hour before necessary and two hours before I have normally been waking up before Day Light Savings Time.   I suppose I am not the only one who got up grumpy this morning, and perhaps not the only one to then start evaluating my life in a dark light.  It did not take long to go through a personal history of failures, some caused by my actions, and some solely (as far as I know) by fate.   On top of that, the early spring we have been having has come crashing down with freezing temperatures and a gray sky which has scattered several inches of snow on the formerly clear ground.  Winter again.  Bad sleep.  Life sucks.  The conversation with the depressed person came back to bite me, right on the … schedule.

Except for that one thing: there still remains in me the belief that life has meaning, a belief that has already circled around and made a light mockery of my pessimism.  This would not have been the case if a true disaster had stricken, for that takes time, sometimes a lifetime to begin to understand, but for this daily stuff, oh what a fool I am!  Although even in saying this I cling to the superstition that maybe I shouldn’t say this, for I do not want to tempt fate, but I feel it must be said: what, really, are any of our plans but plans of mice in the big picture?  Yes, one may be plucked up by the hawk in the middle of one’s busy, myopic life, but every ecologist knows that this, too, is part of the plan.  Not a comfortable one for the mouse, but part of a whole that was meant to make of imperfect pieces - somehow - a perfect finished puzzle.

No, the touch of a greater meaning in life does not immunize one from depression and grief, and certainly not from bad things; but it makes those other times, the in-between times, so much better, because we then understand that we are part of the big mystery; because we then are fed by the knowledge that we are part of the great design.  In that design we might manifest accusations against fate and anger, but we will not know the howling terror of meaninglessness.
​
Some may see belief, then, as only a protective shield, but even this depressed person admitted that his darkness was a shield: to expect the worst is to never be disappointed.  I might even say that the hardened atheist is doing much the same: better to know that life is meaningless than to guess at all the possibly scary stuff that it might really encompass, from karma to sin and worse.  But what emptiness in between!  One does not have to know all the face of the earth to know that it is a round planet; and one does not have to know the truth to know that there is truth.  The truth is never just a shield, but it may act like one.  And so, I believe, it does, but if it’s the truth, what’s wrong with that?   FK          
                                         
      
                                                                            

I am nearing the end of editing my essays for the book, hopefully to come out in about 6 months, and I have learned one frustrating thing: that with all the good advice, with all the examples of the sacred touching my life in so many ways, with all the insights, I am still me.  Oh, maybe there have been some slight changes; maybe a little more patience, a little more acceptance of things as they are, but ME still rages on, knocking from one side of life to another like a – I was going to say “idiot” but I will say “fool.”  I can only say in retrospect that life is like a tobacco habit – even if the habit doesn’t get you high, even if it’s bad and then worse and worse for you, on you go, knowing full well what an idiot – er, fool – you are.   There is always room for improvement, but how often does that come tomorrow and not today?  One more butt; or, for our case, one more day scowling at life’s fortune, wishing for something more.

It’s like miracles: we can have a whole bunch of them, attested to by hundreds or even thousands, such as the life of Jesus, or the miracles at Fatima or Lourdes, and yet, still we scoff like Doubting Thomas, who had seen it all, yet could still not believe, even as he and so many other scoffers had lived before the age of science, which has taken “doubt” to a new level.  This gravity, this blindness, is so strong, and potentially so bad for us - like cigarettes - but still we continue.    
  
In the latest book just finished – Miracles from Heaven, by Christy Wilson Beam, we have another well-written example of a clear miracle that has changed the life of this family, but will probably change few others.   The true life story goes like this: the Beams had three little girls in their Texas dream house, living the life they had longed for – but sometimes regretted (the woman had had a long bout of depression) - when the middle daughter, at age 4, came down with a rare and incurable disease.  It had to do with intestinal blockage, and was both extremely painful and extremely dangerous.  They lived day to day with her condition, their lives spun around the expense of trips to Boston specialists and constant worry, until one day…that one remarkable day when their daughter fell down into a tree.

She had been feeling better and had been climbing the big cottonwood on the property with her other sisters when the branch they were on began to creek.   The elder told her to step off into a large hole left by a fallen branch so that she could pass and lessen the weight on the limb.  The sick sister finally complied, but found to everyone’s amazement that the hole went down to the bottom of the tree, thirty feet below.  She fell head first, and when Dad climbed up to call down, she would not answer.  They called 911, and in came the fire trucks and helicopter (to whisk her away to the hospital when rescued, for everyone thought she must have severe head and neck trauma, if still alive).  They got her out and flew her away; it was all captured on local TV.  And then they found that, besides some bruises and scrapes, that she was OK.  Luck, perhaps, but in the weeks that followed, they also found that her disease was not bothering her.  Months passed to years, four at the time of writing, and she is off her meds, off of everything, and maturing like any other adolescent girl.  Miracle; incurable disease cured.

Moreover, when she was down in the tree, she went to heaven and spoke to Jesus.  The author is no dummy – she knows that the images the girl saw were in part from childhood programming in religion – but the knowledge she was given was true.  She saw her unknown sister lost to miscarriage; she saw a great grandparent.  And an “angel” stayed with her to keep her calm and give her the light needed to see the harness let down to her by the fire department.  As with so many others in near-death experiences, she did not want to come back, but “Jesus” had told her that her time was not up, that she had things to do. 

As with the last book reviewed about the psychologist dad and his dead son, we learn that indeed we have a mission here on earth.  Unlike the last book, we have verifiable proof – from TV coverage to doctors’ charts – of the miracle.   We can believe that it has changed the life of the family, strengthening their faith, but who knows?  I have read other books of similar miracles where the husband and wife later get a divorce.  But for the rest of us, those of us who have read the book, and those who are now reading this  – will it change our lives?  Will we stop our foolishness and have us live as if life were a gift, a miracle, surrounded by meaning and, yes, actual, Biblical-style miracles?  

Probably not, or not much.   And yet, as I have re-learned reading my essays for my own book, we, all of us, are touched by miracles of “chance” that seem too impossible to be near chance; all of us are given opportunities that perhaps we didn’t deserve; and all of us are given trials, from our own faults or simply from out of the blue, to learn, to grow – or to be ground under if we lose faith.  All just like the book by Beam says; all just like so many people have said. 
​
I step from this blog now with a promise to myself to give a prayer of thanks to the Great Blue, that Unknown which guides us, and to keep the spirit of miracle in my heart.  I do it because I think it will help, and I am almost certain it will.  But the gravity of the grind will get me again, no doubt about it.  I, most of us, still have many lessons, seemingly endless lessons, to study and learn.  I only hope they will not be big enough to call for a real- life miracle.  And I pray that I will learn, at least little by little, what it is that pulls this world together and can make us whole.  FK          
                                        
      
                                                                            

A last winter trip to the cabin brought me from melting puddles of dirty snow to the Big Deep, 3 feet base with 6 inch powder in the incredible snowscape of the UP.  There are always the dark hours, though, and I brought with me the perfect book for those times, heavy enough for thought, but light enough for pleasure: Seeking Jordan by Mathew McKay.  

The premise is touching: McKay, a psychologist from the Bay area, gets a phone call from the police late at night, informing him that his 23 year old son has been murdered - senselessly, as it turns out.  He and his wife are devastated, and in time seek out mediums and trans-personal psychologists to cross the divide of death and contact their son.  They are successful, and this book is purportedly co-written, the father using automatic writing to convey his son's answers about the after-death life to him and now, to us.  

This has been done in the modern way since the 19th century, when talking to the dead was no longer considered (by many) the sin of necromancy - the ancient sorcerer's route for gaining knowledge from the dead.  It is the knowledge gained that makes it different from 100 years ago, but it fits well within New Age concepts that have linked Christian and Eastern religions.  To me, who loves reading this genre, this book relates very familiar stuff: we are on Earth to gain knowledge, even at the cost of pain, which can make the knowledge more compelling; we come back to Earth in many lifetimes to learn lessons, or relearn lessons that were refused in the last life; we are schooled in the afterlife along with our spiritual cohorts by wise masters; we choose our next life after this long (although time is different here) period of learning by examining our past  life and others; and that all is love in the after world.  

There are also some new wrinkles in McKay's (and son's) work: that God is all of us, everything, not some distinct all-knowing being; that the universe is made by consciousness, and as we grow as a group, the universe changes; and that the darkness and emptiness of our current universe reflects our own ignorance.  This last made the greatest impression, for knowledge is light, and our knowledge is like the pinpricks of planets and sons in the vast emptiness of our unknowns. Obviously, we have a long way to go before we fill our universe with "light," or knowledge.  

Overall, the author wants us to understand that we never die, nor are ever separated.  He believes, or was told, in fact, that a part of us never leaves the after life, which looks after us, knowing much more about our greater existence and reasons for being here than our conscious selves do (this I have understood to be the Overmind, a term I gave it when first experienced. It was not until later that I discovered that others had found it, too, and had often given it the same name).  Our reason for this painful life of separation and amnesia is to experience the world as something raw, as real, not as the part-time play that it really is.  The pain goes away after death, leaving us with the knowledge gained for eternity. There, we understand and approve of the suffering that is sometimes necessary here.

Ah, but is it so?  I do not believe McKay would use his son for profit in this manner, and so must really believe in his experiences.  In the book, he makes it clear that he understands the probable skepticism on the reader's part, questioning himself often as well.  He knows that many of his peers will ridicule him, or feel sorry for him, but believes that this knowledge is essential - and I believe he believes this.  However, as usual with such New Age stuff, it does seem like wish fulfillment, too down-pat and normal for the Otherworld.  But this might be because it is lost in translation - that to communicate what is on the other side is only possible in our own terminology.  

I don't know; I wish it were so, too.  Hell scares me, and the faith necessary to make it to the Christian heaven is largely not up to us.  In much the same way, the perfection needed to make it to the Eastern nirvana is also way, way beyond most of us mortals. That we always will go to a place of love after death is a nice thought, as is the idea that our departed loved ones are always with us, watching out for us.  

Yes, it seems too perfect, too suited to the comparatively wealthy and safe citizens of the Western world.  On the other hand, the author reminds us that telepathy and talking with the dead - with corresponding real-world results - has been noted by many investigators, who have counted such subjects in the thousands. Yes, something odd is going on, something far beyond what we know in the clouded human conscious.  And yes, we are also told again and again by religions across the globe that whatever god or nirvana is, it is, ultimately, love.  

Are we then to believe the grieving father?  We must reiterate, I think, the idea that we can never really understand what is going on "out there' and must be fed something that explains it in terms we can understand.  It could never be exactly as McKay describes, as we and the others are on such different plans, but perhaps - maybe even probably - the underlying and connecting factor is love; that behind the pain and fear and suffering in this life lies a reason for it all based in love.  Good enough for now, and reason enough to write - and read - the book.  FK             

This is a real transition.  Traces of “spirit” still linger after the Retreat, and I watch them go helplessly.  They – it, the Spirit - is not under my control, and I do not know what it is intellectually.  One of the original19th century anthros – Emil Durkheim, I believe – read the literature of his time about Australian Aborigines, and postulated that religious spirit consisted of the internal reaction to group cohesion made through ritual.  In other words, spirt and what it came from – God – were reflections of celebrations of human solidarity.  A bit too reductionistic for me, but I do recall the great cohesion we had as children in the classroom.  In hindsight, it was special, but it did not have the impact of Spirit, or bring about such insights.  I think Durkheim was only superficially correct.  Spirit brings group cohesion, but it does not bring about the Holy.  That remains somehow above. 

But we transition here to something one of our readers has been pining for for months – ETs!  For many years I have read references in the UFO literature to Jaques Vallee’s Passport to Magonia, and at last bought myself a copy for Christmas.  Vallee is a scientist by training, and in 1969 finished compiling information on “others” that stitched together folklore, religious beliefs, and UFO sightings in a way that was revolutionary for its time.  But as Vallee himself put it in his new forward, his connections have become so commonplace that now they do not stir much excitement.  As I am only about 10% into the book, I agree: the tales of UFOs and fairies are interesting, but no longer surprising.  I do not yet know what his final speculations to the information will be, but as he himself said, he was not writing to bring about final conclusions – but only to raise serious questions.

That he does, and much more.  As I am now a cheesehead, so I take as an example the story of Joe Simonton of (very rural) Eagle River, Wisconsin @ early 1960’s.   One day, Joe heard a sound like knobby tires on wet pavement, and stepped out of his house, only to find a classic saucer of modest size in his front field.  From out of the ship stepped a couple of short people who looked “much like Italians.”  They spoke to him in passable English – except they were heard as if his ears were in his gut – asking for water.  Joe was obliging, and brought them a bucket of water from the house (while not being freaked out at all.  Good ‘ol Joe!)  This they brought back to the saucer, where Joe could see they were cooking odd little cakes on something that clearly acted as a griddle.  Finished, Joe asked for some, and the aliens happily gave him three cakes before closing the hatch and taking off. 

That was that, but Joe thought he’d tell the local trooper about it, who then had the caked analyzed by a government lab.  Findings: typical buckwheat cakes.  Alas.
But Vallee finds that this bizarre incident has great precedence in Celtic folklore, where even today people believe in the “gentry” or “good people” in Scotland, Ireland and the Celtic regions of France.  Here, it is traditional that these ‘aliens’ – described as not angels or humans, but as a superior race in between – to ask for cold water, and to eat, and often share with humans, oat or buckwheat cakes. 

The point being: that the dream-like absurdity of Simonton’s little Italians has vast precedent, and as such, has at least an archetypal meaning for humans.  In that, we might begin to understand the UFOs, who can be seen as modern interpretations of the gentry.  Just as the gentry, modern aliens also populate a dream-like and often ludicrous space, doing incredible things for unknown reasons, often leaving traces of their presence, but never enough – never enough! – to nail them down to this world. 

With this, I must refer to Carl Jung’s world of the unconscious.  Here is not just the dream-world of Freud, with its reactions to the conflict of desires in the waking world, but also a special place of great insight that is a reality unto itself – that is, that is as real to the individual (and unconsciously, to human kind in general) as the waking world.  Here, normal rules or logic do not apply. Rather, meaning does, and much like religious literature, the meaning often remains gobbledy-gook without a guide or special insight.  We are dealing here with another code of being, and other beings no less strange to us than, say, crocodiles, whose mentation is also a matter of observation and insight into another world. 

But unlike the normal visage of the crocodile, the world of faires and UFOs is meant to call us outside of our quotidian selves to (at least) another level of being that somehow is very important.  How much, we do not know, and will not know until we fully grasp the unconscious. This, however, is not much easier than grasping the notion of God, for this world exists behind and beyond our normal discursive mentation.  As the Hindu riddle goes, understanding the unconscious is much like tasting the tongue.  It is not a riddle to be reasoned out, but to somehow be grasped.

As far as I have read the book, I believe this is what Vallee is trying to impress upon us – that something very big is going on, something that is both new and as old as humanity itself. Somehow, too, this unconscious sometimes bleeds into our normal reality to influence us. This, then, is a riddle of importance, but how?  What is the meaning of Bigfoot and UFOs and fairy creatures?  To what enchanted or alien land are these images trying to bring us?  Perhaps within a few hundred more pages of Vallee’s book, the vision will become clearer.  Perhaps it might also lead us to understand the spirit that is calling us in religion, fading and returning with a language and will of its own. FK