​He came at me on our first morning just before breakfast at the hotel in Medjugorje, this priest with a pony tail and beard and heavy black robes.  He was loud and stood too close, but after a few minutes I began to be interested in what he was saying…and with that, he left to talk to someone else in the same over-loud voice. 
 
            A different kind of priest, as I was to find out shortly.  First: although he had been ordained into the Roman Catholic Church (or Latin Catholic Church, as I was told is the correct name) he had switched allegiance to the Eastern Orthodox Church which had schism-ed off from the Latin in the 11th century (If I recall correctly) over, essentially, the question of “who has the power” (officially, they argued over how the communion wafer should be made, a small argument even by Medieval standards).  The schism has been more or less healed – each recognize the other now as having legitimate rites and priests and so on – but the styles are decidedly different.  This I was to witness a few days after the breakfast meeting in the early afternoon in the same, the visionary Mirjana’s, hotel.  
 
Second, he had some unresolved issues in his life, to say the least, but first with the different style. 
 
            Singing: for one thing, the Orthodox sing everything.  We can call that style, but there is a deeper reason for it: singing, with its tone and rhythm, changes mood and even perception, as any fan of music concerts knows.  The Orthodox are all about mood and perception (and mystical union), in contrast to the reliance on the “word” and discourse in the Latin Church.  For us that afternoon, we were treated to a healing ceremony, where chants were chanted and scented oils were placed on lips and foreheads.  That, it turned out, was a preamble to a charismatic effort to cause one to “rest in the spirit” (some Protestants are more aggressive about this, calling it “slain in the spirit”).  Most of us have seen this before, at least in movies: the priest or minister says some words while placing his hand on the head or forehead of the recipient, who then falls into the arms of a catcher who stands behind him, who lays him on the floor to “rest in the spirit.” 
 
I was, as usual, near the end of the line, so I was able to witness those who fell.  Some did seem to lose control and collapse, while others let go with calculation.  Only one person truly seemed “slain,” and it was no act.  She was close enough to me that, when she was touched, I could see her skin tremble all over with something like an exaggerated shiver, which I do not believe a normal person can fake.  She had to be consoled on the floor, as she was obviously in a state of mental confusion and distress. 
 
My turn came a few people later, and for some reason the experience of the woman didn’t bother me at all.  I cannot say that I was “slain,” but I did fall down without reservation, and ended up lying on the floor way longer than I thought I had.  It was a peaceful, although hardly a revelatory, experience.
 
And so we had had our adventures with Father Capers before he joined us that night at the Colombo restaurant, one of three that we often went to later in the evening after church and events had generally ended (the pizza and beer there are excellent, truly excellent, and cheap, too.  No small matter to some of us).   I was (as usual) late, and found the only chair left at the fixture of tables was right next to the good Father.  There was a reason for this: he was telling his life story, and he was mad about it – about how he had been treated, about the hypocrisy of nearly every institute he had come in contact with, so mad about everything that he was screwing with everyone’s peace-buzz.  But he was a priest, and at Medjugorje, they are the undisputed authorities and stars of the show.   He was not to be stopped.  As for me, my place next to him was perfect, for I am not afraid of controversy and angry rants.  In fact, I like them.  As the beers flowed, it became more and more fun, at least for me, and in the end, it became downright illuminating – and, in retrospect, far more frightening than I could have imagined.   
 
Let me backtrack.  Underlying the presence of the Eternal Mother, who is the heart of Medjugorje, are the Ten Secrets that she has given to many of the six visionaries, which will be given to them all before “it” – her reason for being there – is done.  These messages have been written down and given to certain clerics who will be allowed to reveal each one ten days before they come to pass.  Some we know are heavy-duty, because that is the reason for the messages – to warn the faithful.  We are to pray, get our lives in order, go to confession, and so on so that we might overcome the hardships (or perhaps even prevent them) – the great big hardship or hardships – that are to begin, and shortly (at least in comparison to forever, although these do seem more immanent).   When asked about this, our own visionary, Mirjana, said (my paraphrase) “I am standing here, aren’t I?  You can take that to mean that I am not afraid to death of what will come.  On the other hand, be prepared, for the world will be shaken.”  So, we await not the end of the world necessarily, but big, and maybe bad times.  Recall that the visions at Fatima supposedly predicted WWII. 
 
At Medjugorje, then, there is a subtle sense of an impending apocalypse.  Maybe it is not THE apocalypse, as in the Second Coming, but something really big and meaningful for faith and the fate of the world.  And it is in such a capacity that I found I was to understand the anger of our Orthodox priest. 
 
It was not evident at first; in fact, at first, it appeared that Father Capers was a little too self-absorbed and perhaps even a bit deranged.  One or both might still be true, but towards the end of the night, I discovered that the context of his anger was over the moral failure of formerly Christian cultures, as well as the failure and possible fall of the seat of Peter in Rome.  That last revolved around Pope Francis, and I was a bit surprised to find myself agreeing with our priest.  With that, I was carried along with the father in his conclusion that the Church of Rome will soon fall, which would be an almost certain sign of some form of world apocalypse.   
 
Yes, we might look to the hard times through Francis, the on-again-off-again darling of the political left. I personally have disagreed with him about his apparent preference towards open borders.  To me, while this might seem kind, it is ultimately damaging to everyone.  When someone else’s country is messed up, one does not fix it by inviting them all to another country, which leaves one desolate and the other desperate for extra space and resources.  Rather, one helps to fix the broken country.  That, however, was not Father Capers’ concern.  Rather, he was concerned with the increased acceptance of practicing gays, of remarried divorcees, and of other practices, calling this laxness what it official is: an apostasy – that is, a rupture in the bedrock of canonical law (note: last week, it was reported that Pope Francis did not believe in Hell.  If that comes to be true, the apostasy would be huge, producing a genuine schism in the Church).  It was because of such changes of attitude within the Latin Church that Father Capers switched his affiliation to the Orthodox Church, which he claimed was our last hope.  One has to remember that, for a cleric, the individual practices involved are not always as important as the act of upsetting canonical law.  The Pope, it is understood, succeeds Peter and all that he stands (stood) for, which comes directly from Christ. To break with that tradition is to break the apostolic, or sacred, ministry granted the Church through Christ. 
 
To a Catholic, that is apocalyptic stuff, which explained everything about Father Capers.  He believed that the end, or at least very hard times, was nigh.  To him, the signs were everywhere - just as the Virgin seems to have hinted through her Ten Secrets.
 
It was not until Medjugorje that I became aware that an increasing number within the Catholic Church believes that we are headed for exceptionally hard times.  As a local example, just last Tuesday I attended the blessing of the oils (Chrism Mass), which included a gathering and blessing of the diocese priests by the bishop.  In his homily, the bishop was not short of words – or of dire notice.  Arguably, the most fundamental thing in society (and I speak as an anthropologist here) is the family, and this was of primary concern to the bishop, so much so that he commanded, begged and pleaded for the priests to address this ardently back in their parishes.  As sex is now something only for pleasure, he began, so the fundamental bedrock of the family (and society) becomes threatened; people either do not reproduce, or view reproduction as only an occasional, and perhaps accidental or unwanted, consequence of sex.  Marriage lasts only as long as it satisfies the senses, if it occurs at all, and children are raised by one parent, or, increasingly, by the state in pre-K schools.  As sex and reproduction become unlinked, gender itself becomes a matter of choice.  Wrapping this and much more together, the bishop showed how society is losing its natural footing.  In this, everything is up for grabs; in this, life becomes meaningless and decays.
 
By the end of his sermon I could not agree more, nor could I deny the possibility that the Virgin, the angry priest, and the local bishop were absolutely right: that we are, indeed, standing today on a precipice before an abyss.  That is at the heart of Medjugorje, even if people going there do not realize it.  Medjugorje is about anxious or angry priests, about warnings in visions, and about warnings from the pulpit.  Medjugorje gives us peace, but also tells us that something is up, something big, and the religious feel it to their bones, even to their souls, even if they do not realize it intellectually.  Here we are to understand that people are massing against a dark tide, even as others are becoming part of it, the darkness seen by these others as a new and hopeful wave.  A clash is occurring, now mostly in print and in the ballot box, but soon…who knows? 
 
At Medjugorje, the spirit knows.  It hears the almost silent, the almost unheard inner cry of millions who are awakening to what appears to be a desperate and catastrophic fight against evil.  But they appear to be massing on the other side as well, and there, too, they carry their own shield of righteousness.  It feels as if the final battle of the Lord of the Rings, of Armageddon itself, is coming.  And to many Catholics, it feels as if the warning has been captured in the deceptively mild and loving apparitions of the Holy Virgin Mother.
 
Is the eternal battle within the self between good and evil about to go global?  Or has it always been so, and these warnings are but warnings that are for now and forever, for all ages?  Perhaps the answer is in the Ten Secrets; or perhaps it is in the anger of the priest, a sign of the times soon to come.    

​We had heard him on St Paddy’s Day, this Indian man with an Oxford accent, when he ended the Mass in Medjugorje with a special note to the Irish – in Irish.  A man of many languages, he was to give a lecture on the Signs and Wonders of Medjugorje the following day.  I thought little of it then, not because I was jaded but because I was so tired.  We had traveled 19 hours by plane and 2 and one half hours by bus to get here and after a few days we still had not adjusted.  We did not have time to adjust.  We were kept busy by our guides who wished that we got our money’s worth, so much so that Vicki, Jeff and I would gladly have NOT gotten our money’s worth for an extra six hours of sleep. 
 
            But onward we went, following our Indian/British priest from mass to the lecture hall the following day.  I had expected a series of miracles to be laid out for us, and then each put in its place as everyone did here: “It is not about the miracles but about the reality of Christ.”  Of course.  But more than one million people come here every year to this little town in the middle of nowhere for more reasons than to snuggle up to Church dogma.  That might be wrong, but that is the way it is.
 
            As it turned out – as it always turned out in Medjugorje – we got more than we bargained for.  For one thing, our Indian priest was not only a man of many languages, but of many talents.  He was a native of Singapore (Indian descent) and had served as an infantry man in the army there, which had led him to a permanently injured back.  He had also become an MD in Britain, which perhaps accounted for his “posh” accent, as he himself put it (pure Oxford from what I know).  But his greatest accomplishment had begun as no accomplishment at all: he had been chosen by the Virgin Mary to carry her message to the masses.  It took many years, but he has accomplished and is accomplishing his task, so much so that now he is the full-time priest for English speakers at Medjugorje. 
 
            Part of that message is to practice the “five stones of Mejugorje.”  Taken from the five stones of David to slay Goliath, here we are given these five stones to slay our own demons: prayer, Mass, Bible, fasting, and confession. 
 
But we, or at least I, had come to the talk for the “Signs and Wonders.”  In this he did not disappoint, although he continued to apologize for them and remind us again and again what it really was all about.  And then he would please us all and go back to the miracles.  They were hard to believe, but he is a priest, and he is not alone in seeing many of these wonders.
 
            Here is the odd thing: three of the wonders – a spinning sun, rosaries turning to gold, and an overwhelming smell of roses – have been experienced by many, perhaps thousands.  On our group hike up Cross Mountain, we all saw the sun encircled by a rainbow.  I had seen this a few times before in my life, but it is extremely rare.  Taking my cue from our leader, however, I dismissed this “sign” and continued looking elsewhere.  Too bad: shortly afterward, several from our party saw the sun dance in the sky, covered with what looked like a communion host so that they could watch it without pain.  Dang!  And our priest, self-described with humorous deprecation as “the little brown dude,” had just recently experienced that overwhelming smell of roses. 
 
            But all that is nothing compared to the visions our little brown priest, Father Leon, had had more than 26 years before in 1991 when he was only 20 years old.  It was then that he had been in the infantry and was on leave due to the back injury, visiting Mejugorje with about 20 other Singaporeans.  There was only one other English speaker that he met there then, due to the eruption of war (which would soon engulf much of ex-Yugoslavia, culminating in the ethnic cleansing by the Serbs of the Bosniacs, or Bosnian Moslems), and so his group had the place practically to themselves.  It was during this time that he and a friend decided to climb Cross Mountain at night, starting at about 4 AM, to be in time to catch the sunrise from the summit.  While still near the base, both of them saw an orange-golden light shining from near the top where the cross was (and is).  Curious, they climbed all the faster until, near the top, they were able to make out what that light was: a young women of profound grace and beauty floating in the sky by the cross.  He described her as being “alive,” meaning she was no simple image projection.  She looked at him and he felt indescribable love, causing him to break out in tears.  Neither he nor his friend spoke, but both proceeded to rush up the mountain to the cross.  When they got there, Mary, as they believed she was, had moved to Apparition Hill, where she had first appeared to the 6 children visionaries in 1981 – still glowing and still alive and beautiful. 
 
            They returned to their hotel in silence, Leon then directing himself to the church.  Once there, he heard a distinct voice in his head (here, Fr Leon tells us that voices in the head are either from God, the Devil, or the Imagination.  He cannot confirm any of these, but instead has to rely on the message), which he thought to be the Virgin’s.  She vividly told him all of his sins - all of them - for all of his life, not to humiliate, but to correct.  It was, he said, cathartic.  Then he asked her who she was, and she replied, “I am the Mother of God, and the mother to you all.  Tell everyone that I am their mother.”  Then Leon was overwhelmed by a wave of intense, wonderful love, in which he felt that he was the only one in the world and that he was adored and worthy of this adoration.  Then he felt that this was true for all of us, each and every one.
 
            This, said Fr Leon, was why he was telling us his story.  He said he did not want to tell the story; that, in fact, the Mother had told him that one day he would regret this (her) visit, and deny it as well, which he did while in medical school to avoid being laughed at.  But he had to tell us her message, because he had promised this to the Mother and in the end, this he could not deny.
 
            He would not say if this vision, and later conversation, are what had called him to the priesthood.  But he did say that he got one bit of prophesy from her: She told him that one day, in a time of great confusion, Catholics would deny a sign from Christ that should have been obvious.  He said that this denial felt horrible and that the world would suffer for it, and he asked the Virgin for one thing: that his parents would die before this “awful” event.  He added then that his parents were still alive, but barely, hinting that this awful thing might happen soon.  She also told him that he would never see her again until at his death – given that he was “good,” as Fr Leon put it. 
           
Believe it or not, but why would you not?  Especially given that several other ordinary people have seen Mary there – as well as the visionaries, many of whom still see her weekly or monthly.  But would we want our own vision?  My answer is “yes and no:” yes, because we all need such miracles to take us from the sterile world we have made from this miracle of being; and “no” because all who see her are then given an enormous task, or an enormous suffering.  It is, as the priest might say, the way of the cross – that great things are given at great price.
 
            But the greatest thing, the best part of the message, is that she, the Mother of God, loves us absolutely and perfectly, and is with us always.  It is up to us to cleanse ourselves so that we might be brought into the presence of God, but she is there to help and to guide as well as is possible, given our own state of grace, or lack of it.  But she is there.  She is for you – and only for you – just as she is for all of us, each and every one of us the most perfect and beloved child in God’s creation. 
 
             
                       
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  

​We had been sitting – or at least the others had been sitting – on rocks for nearly five hours to be in the presence of Our Lady.   True, me and my son had taken a short time out of the vigil and hiked up the remainder of Apparition Hill in Medjugorje to the place of Our Lady’s statue where the first apparition had appeared in 1981, but we, too, shared in the butt-numbing  penance of waiting at the Blue Cross for Her to come with “her.”  And at last, it was about to happen.
 
            “Her” was Mirjana, one of 6 people who as children first had visions, and then conversations with, the Virgin Mary in 1981 Yugoslavia.   Then, what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina was part of the communist dictatorship under Tito, who had ordered the killing of 600 clerics back in 1945 after his take-over of the area from the Nazis.  He had continued the persecution, torture and murder of the religious until his death in 1980, and was followed by an even more insecure communist government with similar, if not greater, desires to shut down religion, for religion is the greatest competitor of Communism.   Both want your soul, one to save it, and another, communism, to annihilate it.  Mirjana and the other visionaries now enjoy a sort of celebrity status, but in 1981 they were threatened, detained, interrogated, and otherwise persecuted.  They did not, as some now think, have visions of Mary for fun and attention.  Whatever they might be, they were not and are not mentally ill masochists.     
 
            We had met Mirjana just a few days before as she helped serve us food in her modest hotel.  Now, several hundred people, most of them from Italy, were crowded about the Blue Cross at the foot of Apparition Hill to see Mirjana and bask in the presence of the Mother of God.  To us, she had come as a servant; now she was to appear as a prophet.  She was not a prophet, for she only said what she was told by the Virgin, but she could not help but be special, to exude a peace and grace with a blessed quality that is rare anywhere in the world.  Many had naturally elevated her to sainthood, or to something even more.  But she remained truly humble.  We had met her and she was a wonderful human being, but only human. 
 
            Humble and human – qualities that she knew she needed, as temptation was everywhere.  She could, with her fame, become rich and powerful.  But visions of Our Lady seem to never come without a price.  That price is most often persecution or physical illness and suffering.  At other times, that price is temptation itself – the actual presence of Satan.
 
            It has been said – I don’t know by whom – that where Mary appears, so appears Satan or one of his minions.  It is said that a battle for souls is going on, and Mary is the one person who is both fully human and fully perfect.  That is a tempting target for Satan.  But because she is perfect, the evil one must always settle for an imperfect one near her – for one of us.  
 
            Laugh if you want, but none of us imperfect mortals were laughing that day at the foot of Apparition Hill when, just as Mirjana arrived to be blessed with a vision, we heard the screaming and growling erupt from below in the nearby village.   My first thought was:  could this really be?  It must be some odd-voiced child having a terrible fit.  But that voice, the growl that sounded both high and low, it was so loud and continuous!  And that shouting of a man afterwards – what a bad father he would have to be to shout at a young child like that, even with such a temper!  But I knew better; as we all did when, at the time of the apparition, we heard the sound of one gigantic retch, as in vomit, and then no more.   From then on, the growing fear that was certainly in my breast ended, to be replaced by a growing peace.
 
            We later heard the details from someone who knew the priest who had been there.  A young woman had begun to thrash about like an animal alongside a group of nuns come for the apparition.  They had tried to hold the woman down, to at least stop her from hurting herself, but they could not.  A priest came to help them, and on seeing him, the sisters begged him to perform an exorcism.  “Me?” he had said.  “I have no training.  Me?”  But he had gripped his cross and then begun to repeat the Hail Mary prayer.  He had only gotten to the end of the first phrase the second time around when the girl said with a snarl, “I hate you (Mary)!  You rob me of so many souls!”  And then she had retched, and the girl woke as if from a deep sleep, dazed but otherwise perfectly normal.
 
            Maybe you had to have been there, but I can assure the reader that this was no prank and no ordinary acting job, or even ordinary mental illness.  You could feel it to your bones, just as you could feel the peace that followed with the vision. 
 
            We, at least myself and the group I was with, did not see anything or have any great internal flashes of light.  Mary, Queen of Peace, does not usually work that way.  She directs you instead to calmness, to a peace that reaches into what truly is at the heart of that too-often misused word, Love.  But the devil rides behind like a wolf at the heels of a horse.  If Mary is the horse, we are the rider – not the master, but the ultimate victim.  This reminds us that life is not just a matter of clearing one’s head and becoming optimistic and happy.  That works in self-help books and in some New Age religions, but it is not what is.  The wolf of evil may appear as sickness or in the person of a violent criminal, but it will appear sooner or later to all.  For many, it is Mary – and of course, that which she speaks for, the Trinity that is One God – who helps them to outrun the wolf.  I, at least that one day, believed and was grateful for her swift and grace- filled gate.
 
            I will have several more blogs on Medjugorje over the next few weeks.  I might break them up occasionally with some other topic, but there was so much that happened on our nine - day stay that I feel I must write about it before time takes the memories away.    Until next time, FK 
 
           
 

​I have so far claimed what the practitioners of religion claim world-wide: that their religions deliver, if you are “inside the story,” for they create a reality of their own.  If you are a Siberian shaman looking for reindeer herds to hunt, and you do your ritual prayer or dancing or drumming, chances are you will find that herd; if you are a Native American shaman (or priest – the definitions vary) and wish to cure someone, you might follow the cosmic spiral to the land of lost souls and retrieve the soul of the sick one – and actually cure him; if you are a Buddhist monk and renounce everything, you might end your own suffering and dwell in the infinite no-thing of Nirvana; and if you are a Christian and you follow the rules and rituals, you might gain everlasting life in a holy paradise.   All have developed “techniques of ecstasy” as anthropologist Mircae Eliade called them, and if they are from a well-formed, inspired, and time-tested tradition, these techniques often work. 
 
There are many spiritual paths.  In the end, if we are one of the  many who desire something more out of life, I believe we have to ask ourselves two questions: which tradition can we thoroughly get inside of, and which end result do we want most? 
 
            When I was younger, I loved the stories of the American Indian wise men (shamans), and in particular was enthralled by the adventures of Carlos Castaneda in his apprenticeship to a Yaqui brujo (witch or sorcerer).  What wonder!  They became crows and flew, brushed shoulders with beings in alien dimensions, and experienced extraordinary extrasensory powers.  Here, Carlos learned to appreciate the wonders of this world, far beyond the monotony of ordinary living.  Here he also discovered never-ending fear in the enchanted universe, so much so that he had to become impeccable in his will to conquer this fear.  To do so, it was necessary to learn techniques of concentration that took years to develop.  I, however, did not have access to the techniques, and I was afraid to be afraid all the time.  My apprenticeship took place in my mind only. 
           
That form of spiritual power was beyond, and frankly alien, to me.  It was on Eastern religions, then, with their emphasis on personal mystical transformation, that I placed my next bet.  However, although the training was within my grasp, it was simply too difficult for me.  The apprenticeship, as most of us now know, requires years of quiet meditation, best begun in childhood.  It also requires years of study, to, as I put it, get “inside the story,” for just sitting alone by oneself might get results, but probably will not bring one to the portals of that ever-elusive “nirvana.”   
 
            My first book, Dream Weaver, was begun as a travelogue adventure, but almost immediately became the story of a crazy young man (me) in search of the spiritual, which it turned out was the honest truth.  In it, I hitchhiked into Shamanic and New Age lifestyles, as well as into Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian traditions.  None, I found, could hold me long enough to become “my story,” and so the book ended with me going home, incomplete but grateful for the ride (the adventure). 
 
            Decades later, thanks to events that were not consciously dictated by myself, I have found myself back in the Catholic Church, a religion that I had grown to ridicule and dismiss as useless.  It did not have the wild danger of shamanic religion, nor the “sparkle of your China, the smile of your Japan” (apologies to Steely Dan) exotic allure of the Eastern religions.  Catholicism was uncool, to say the least, and still is.  It also became enmeshed with the child abuse scandal, which has further driven people away from its spiritual possibilities.  And yet here I am, a practicing Catholic, for two good reasons (there are more, but these are the biggies).
 
            One: entering the story.  I was entered into the story of Christianity and Catholicism almost at birth, and continued as such until the end of high school.  Its basic story of sin, redemption and resurrection were not only stamped into my soul, but also, in a more general way, into the soul of Euro-American culture (including Protestantism).  In the 20th century, we all breathed the air of Euro-Christian culture, whether we wanted to or not.  The great literature we read, the classic art we saw and the classical music we heard, all had unmistakable roots in the Christian tradition.  These were the best our shared heritage had to offer – our deepest, most poetic selves – and they remain so.  Diving into the Christian story, then, would require the least amount of effort – if I could even have gotten into those other stories so late in life.  And being fully immersed in the story is essential for it to work.  There are no two ways about it – the most fundamental technology of religion is faith, or belief; for without belief, the effects of any spiritual system are usually unimpressive at best (although not always; read about Saul, or Paul, on the road to Damascus).  For deep faith, knowing the story down to the roots is a high priority.
 
            Two: what Christianity promises: not only a better, more spiritual life (which all good religions offer), but a sure path to eternal life with God, which is our ultimate reason for being. 
 
            In this, Christianity exhibits the most remarkable spiritual genius that I am aware of.  Shamanic religions give us some aids on our journey after death, but in the end, all depends on maintaining absolute courage as we pass through a dangerous hinterland to a poorly defined afterlife.  The Eastern religions give us much more specific techniques to escape this “dream”, but the discipline is drastic, so much so that almost all of us are condemned to repeat a material existence for hundreds of thousands of years, if not for eternity.  Christianity solves these problems.  Here, heaven is clearly defined for the masses as an eternal good, and, more importantly, heaven is made accessible in this life for everyone.  This is made possible by the most wonderful of stories depicting the most elegant of techniques.   Boiled down to its most concise essentials, the Christian Way centers on the Resurrection and the Eucharist. 
 
            Entire books have been written about this story, but the most important book of all is, of course, the Bible.   
 
            When one studies the Bible from the Christian perspective, it becomes astonishingly clear that the entire Old Testament is all about the Messiah and the Way to Heaven.  From this perspective, Jesus fulfills everything that was promised in its two thousand year history.  The connections of the Old to the New are so broad and endlessly deep that it is hard to imagine that the claims of the New Testament are anything but true.  Essentially (again, from the Christian perspective) the Old Testament cannot be fully understood without the New Testament.  Here we find that all the smaller stories of the Old Testament were and always have been about one great story: the saving of humankind through the sacrifice on the cross and the Resurrection. 
 
            There is the story, and there is the technique.  The story: humans have strayed from the direct will of God, landing all in the world of sickness, treachery and death.  In the Old Testament, God accepts animal sacrifice to smooth over this “sin,” but the compensation is never complete.  In the New, we find that there is and always has been only one way to compensate entirely – that is, for God to sacrifice Himself for Man.  This is done through the personage of Jesus.  As God cannot suffer and die as God, He has to become fully human, while still remaining God.  Only God can redeem the totality of existence, but only a human can take on the fundamental sin of the human world: suffering and death.  This is the Way, the inscrutable inside, or plot, of the story. 
           
Tremendous stuff, requiring thousands of years of rabbinical thought to uncover.  But that is not all – there is technique as well.  To enter into heaven, not only must our sins be taken from us (in the death of Jesus), but we also must become perfect like Jesus, the man-god.  The eastern religions know this, and so demand the perfection of will that is so difficult to achieve.  Christianity, instead, gives us the Eucharist, the sharing of sacred bread and wine, which for Catholics is not just symbolic of Christ’s sacrifice, but also involves the real changing of bread and wine into the (usually mystical) body and blood of Christ through priestly technique.  As it is Christ himself who is eaten, one is then made into the spiritual stuff of Christ, and so able to stand before God – something that can be done by all, even imperfect sinners.  What is required, then, is not twenty years spent in a cave in the Himalayas, but rather simply getting inside the story (with belief) and then carrying out this most essential of rituals.
 
            In the end, each story and its techniques (I believe) spring from a certain consciousness, through which each follower of a religious tradition can truly enter the story.  Again from a Christian perspective, that is another way of saying what the Old Testament is all about – an inspired work created to change the level of consciousness so that we might comprehend the new (spiritual) kingdom of the Messiah, as well as the technique for achieving it.  It is through this altered consciousness that the “magic” of the crucifixion and the Eucharist becomes capable of conquering death; death, the big kahuna - the enormous elephant in the room - of all religions.  Which, to say the least, is quite an achievement – the achievement of the ages.
 
            And yet…the spiritual dimension is never as clear-cut as we would like.  How it that the "magic" produced through religious techniques sometimes spills over onto non-believers?  How is it that an Indian shaman can sometimes cure an outsider of disease? Or that communion wafers are sometimes proven to contain actual human skin tissue and blood (one in Italy has remained perfectly preserved for 1200 years, blood cells and all)?  More on the miracles of spirit in a few weeks, after a return from the distant hills of Medjugorje.    
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  

​We will be going to Medjugore this month, a town in Bosnia – Herzegovina (across from Italy on the Adriatic Sea), and have been boning up on the tremendous amount of literature and documentaries that have been done on this formerly small farming community.  What put it on the map were six children, from ages 10 to 16, who claimed to have seen and talked with the Virgin Mary in 1981 in the nearby hills.  This was during the communist era, and there was a big kerfuffle at the time between the state authorities and the children – as well as with some skeptical clerical authorities.  But the children continued, grew up, and still continue to have visions and conversations to this day.  While there is no longer any argument with the state authorities – it does not hurt that Medjugorje brings in big dollars - many clergy are still skeptical.  Pope, now saint, John Paull II thought it was genuine and wonderful; Pope Francis thinks he might smell a rat.  Officially, the original 7 visions have been proclaimed genuine; as of this writing, the jury is still out on the rest.   
 
            There will be much, much more on this in future blogs, but for now, I go back to one of the many videos that were made on Medjugorje.  Done by Stella-Mar film studios, it revolves around several individuals from the US and England who have different issues and different levels of belief.  The film crew takes them to Medjugorje and then films them as they pray (or look at others pray – two are atheists) and interact, to see what changes might take place.  It is a fascinating documentary and totally honest – no one throws away his cane or is struck by lightning like St Paul on the road to Damascus.  All, however, are changed, as the follow-up at the end shows.  The greatest change occurs to a young woman, and mother of two small children, who was almost miraculously able to go despite late-stage terminal cancer.   Her change was special:  two weeks after returning from Medjugorje, the film crew was allowed to – really, called to - film her as she died.
 
            To say it was intense is a gross understatement, and I was fortunate to have the cat bothering me on my lap to blunt an almost inevitable flow of tears.  She died at home, amidst her friends who had first made a little party for her.  In a scant two weeks, she had become skeletal, and was very obviously dying.  After the little party, she was laid down in her bed as the priest did his final anointing.  Her husband stood by holding one of his little daughters and they talked: “Is Mommy going to die now?”  “Yes, in a few moments she will be going to heaven.”  And there she was, grateful, hugging her friends and family one last time; and then she lay down and simply left.  It was that fast. 
 
            The contrast in those few moments was striking.  As she was dying, she became super-human in the sense that you could feel her spirit become great, perhaps because it was being met by the Holy Spirit.  A sacred awe filled the house, readily palpable through the film in our own home.  It was that undeniable.  But immediately after she died, there was nothing.  Her body became a mere sack of bones.  Just like that, what was “her” had left. 
 
            Stunning.  The makers of the documentary knew that this had happened when they put the film together, of course, giving sense to these lines first put out as the documentary began (my paraphrase): “Everyone you know or have known or will ever know will someday die.”  And there it is, in words and in pictures; there in this documentary is the basis, the meat and bone of all genuine religions: death.  Scary, painful and/or wonderful, it is always filled with awe and mystery.  Thus it is that all honest religions have this awe and mystery near or at their core. 
 
            There are universals, or near-universals in religion, as my old anthropological studies bring back to mind.  In the primitive religions (as usual, this is not meant to be disparaging.  Rather, the word “primitive” comes from primal, or first, and is so meant here) there is always, or at least almost always, a major character in the religious myths identified by we who study them as The Trickster.  He (he is almost always a “he”) has been made famous in America through the Western American Indian personification of the trickster as the coyote.  The coyote is playful, deceitful, sometimes stupid, and often selfish.  He will outsmart others, only to outsmart himself.  He is at times satanic, and at other times the buffoon (bringing to mind Satan as he tries to trick Jesus in the desert, but I get ahead of myself).  When the stories are told of him, people often laugh.  In the end, when all is said and done, he is us. 
 
            This is at the heart of so many myths – in the end, we are all tricked by death, no matter how smart or cunning we are or have been, because death always takes us by surprise.  It does not fit in our world.   It is, from one perspective, the ultimate joke, for a joke makes us laugh because it is so against normal patterns and logic.  So is death, but once at its edge, we are seldom amused.  Our egos take it very seriously –which makes it the ultimate cosmic joke, as all good jokes have a fool in the middle who is unaware.  That fool again, of course, is us.
 
            And so, as we watch the documentary, we see everyone humbled by the “joke” of death.  Arguments and logic and dogma no longer suffice.  In the end, it is obvious: the great culmination of all our lives, of all our theologies, revolves around death.  Here, both the atheist and the zealot are brought to their knees before the mystery.
 
            In primitive religions, the shaman learns how to walk through the door created by this mystery.  He uses the symbols of death as well as its reflection in life – the patterns and words and songs and rhythms that tumble from this mystery, put forth as gifts from the spirit (or spirits).  These are his passwords to the spirit world, that world through which the spirit passes after it leaves the body.  There he learns that he can manipulate things that are in its shadow – that is, our material reality.  From there he sometimes can cure, can find the herds and other prey, and can curse and cause illness or even death in his enemy.  There he looks for power and obtains it.  There, he also might serve as the guide for the departed soul to let it pass into the good spiritual world that is imagined for that tribe or people – although seldom can he enter that final land, because he is still alive and a stranger to it. 
 
            The myth is an inside story.  As Western civilization pushed into the worlds of the primitive, the shamans found, much to their surprise, that the new people, as well as their technologies, were rarely affected by their magic.  The “others” were outside the story.  How could that be?  How could something that comes from the land of death affect one people but not another? 
 
            I do not pretend to understand the mystery to that depth (this involves the mystery of faith).  Rather, I look to what most primitive religions are designed to do.  They are not meant to cure all peoples, and they are certainly not meant to bring all peoples to heaven.  In fact, they are designed more for manipulating the spirit world for their people here in this world.  While the shaman may work as a psychopomp (link between the spirit world and this world) to deliver his people to heaven, that is rarely his primary function.  This was also true for the people of the Old Testament, who had very amorphous and ambiguous ideas about heaven.  Rather, they wanted health and power in this world, as with many today.  At that time, this is what their religion was designed to do.   That was “their story.”  In this, as with many other religions, the story(ies) was, as some still are, effective in delivering supernatural changes and events.  But is it what we want?  Is this spiritual technology for health and fortune what we need most? 
 
            A look at the death of that woman, and the feeling that poured forth from that, even on film, tells me no.  It tells me that another formula is necessary for solving the great mystery that seems beyond solving, the mystery at the root of all religions.
 
            I leave it there for now, but I believe that many, probably most, of the pilgrims who go to Medjugorje are seeking the actuation of this formula.   They think this might happen because that is what “their story” tells them.   As with primitive spiritual stories, I do believe that this one also delivers what it most promises.   
 
 
 
                 
 
             
 
 
 
 
 
 

​When we go to the movies or a concert or read a good book, we do it for one major reason: to enter the story.  To stand aside and objectively scan the activity or presentation takes away much of the interest and all of the glory.  No; we want to be temporarily transported, taken to another world, given a new set of wings.  We want this because our life story is so bland or so tragic or so empty.  We need other stories to live.  To live well, we need another story working for us all the time.
 
            In the hymnal at church - probably at most Christian churches – there is a song that ends “we want to enter the story.”  At first, I was shocked when I saw this: does the church hierarchy really think that the whole Christ thing is just a story?  Over the last few months, however, I have come to see those simple lyrics as not only an admission of the subjectivity of “being Christian,” but also a concise explanation for what any reality we live in is.  All is a story.  On one level, we of the overall ‘human story’ are born, eat, reproduce, get sick, and die.  That is our one great story, one that it seems impossible to change or escape from.  On another level, all our experience is channeled to a shared sense of meaning.  For some, the meaning is competition, either with one’s expectations or with others.  Did I graduate at a high level?  Is my income better than average?  Am I living an exciting life?  Do I have a bigger and/or better family?  And so on.  This does not suffice for most in the end, where some will quickly resort to cultural homilies: did I help others in some way with my life?  Did I create a family that cares about me and others?  And for most at the very end, cosmic meaning begins to swirl.  Where is my place in this?  How can I really die? 
 
            We go to concerts and movies and such for stories to fill in the holes in our own personal stories.  Many slip from one such mini- story to another, but until recently, almost all of humanity lived under a big, comprehensive story called religion.   This was provided by wise elders, often from a distant past, to make sense of the whole shebang.  Trouble is, all religions seek to direct the adherent to particular sorts of behavior – this is what a comprehensive story does (even our books and movies direct us towards certain behaviors).  Western civilization at some point decided it wanted total freedom – within certain minimal social laws – and so rejected religion, so much so that Iceland today is basically religion-free, followed close behind by the Scandinavian nations, and behind them the rest of Western Europe.  Trouble is, we need the big story.   Trouble is, we now have unleashed upon the earth millions of mini-stories – the individuals from these nations – who are all trying to find their big story.  In this, the ego reigns, and mediocrity, shallowness, and self-centeredness prevail.  It is such that the West – as well as some other areas, notably Russia – scarcely bother to reproduce.  Many are importing vast numbers of poorer people WITH a big story to fill in the actual, objective holes left by those whose story has left them so un-holy. 
 
            Lack of a whole, of a comprehensive story, then, has real-life objective repercussions.  But it is much more than that.  Going back to movies and concerts, most would agree with me that enjoyment of these things is much less if one holds back from full participation in these events.  This, I think, is the real tragedy of lacking a Big Story: that life becomes flat, an objective series of stimulus-response episodes punctuated now and then by something like a romance or a movie.  This is the inner gruel that we have settled for in exchange for certain types of freedoms that, really, were hardly prevented by the former Big Story and often were not that important after all. 
 
            But it is even more than that.  The true Big Stories, religions that have passed the test of time and trial, serve to actually shape subjective, or spiritual, reality in ways that those who are not part of one of these Big Stories find it hard to comprehend – just as someone not part of, say, the Grateful Dead phenomena of the past could not understand the thrill and joy of the Dead Heads who followed the band.    And even more: these Big Stories still are actually keys to another reality that not only can intercede in objective reality, but can transport one into another spiritual reality once the physical reality of the body is left behind.    
 
            It is really worth another blog to get into this more deeply (actually, it is worth a life to get into this, but we are a website here), and I will do that soon, but for now we can say that the founders of a Big Story – for my big story, the Jewish prophets, and then Jesus Christ – understood the nature of non-material reality and its practical effect.   For instance, in the New Testament, again and again it is stated that prayer properly done can move mountains, just as faith can, the two coming together in the end as one (Father, I pray to do thy will).  But that is only the beginning.  Bigger still, there are keys to every Big Story that are capable of taking one from this universally-shared corporeal reality into another one, one that becomes a more complete reality than this corporeal reality because it is so big, so comprehensive that the entire physical plane is subsumed by the infinite spiritual realm.   
 
            I will come back to this some other time – that is, to the keys to that greater reality - but I leave the reader to think: what do the religions - those Great Religions of the civilized world, as well as the “myths” of the primitive world – promise?  What is the formula(s) they use to deliver this promise?  And finally, of all the religions, which “promise” would you most want, and why?  For they work in formulas through their dogma (or myth), and through their rituals, speaking in a coded, special language that we cannot quite fathom but which touches that greater world and does, indeed, deliver.