​The truth comes out – in the book The Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks, he had told us of his hatred for school – and how he had dropped out at the age of 15 to become a shepherd.  While his mother had wanted him to excel as his sisters had, his father and grandfather would have none of it: they’ll change you, my boy! Stick with the farm!  And so he did, until he and his father had a prolonged falling out. 

We read on: he decides on a lark to try to get into advanced studies.  The teacher laughs: why, you didn’t even pass your general exams!  But he is given a chance, and he is brilliant.  He passes with all “A”s and then gives a try at getting into Oxford.  They are looking for cultural diversity, and this prodigy of a farm boy is just the ticket.  We find then that he gets a scholarship and off he goes to the Ivy Tower.  Of course, that is why he can write! 

He had me fooled.  But it is a good thing, for he does provide that diversity, so much so that his professor asks him at one point: so, what do you think of the Oxford students?  Says James: they are too protected.  All of them have had a perfect life, never failing, always secure.  They have no blood in them – everything to them is almost surreal (my words), an intellectual exercise. 

So, asks the professor, what should we do about it?  Why, says James, send them to work cleaning pigsties, or in a factory; some low-paying, going nowhere job to get a feel for how it is for most people.  Not a year abroad in Chile, but hard-butt and dirty work.  The professor laughs: - good one, James!  But James means it. 

Rebanks continually plays with the class warfare theme, showing the shallowness of the upper class, but also the flip side on the working class.  Says he, in town, life for them was drinking, fighting and “shagging.”  He had to read in private, lest anyone think him a snob. That life, too, was not ideal.  But his revelation of the shortcomings of the upper classes is, I think, the real deal and something of vital importance.   The elite, in his eyes, were not so much the cruel masters of the world economy and culture, but rather people who had not lived a real life – that is, had not had to deal with crises of great and ruinous proportions as he had as a farmer, or as anyone has who has lived on the margins of their income.  Of course, we know that they, the rich, have their crises too, but all too often it is caused by this ennui.  Thus they do fiddle with things they do not really know about, often harming those whose lives are desperately attached to keeping things just so, whether on the farm, or culturally at home.  We can site examples of this with our own governmental overreach, but there is a greater point: the need for adversity.  For meaning, we need adversity; to feel our blood we need real, existential problems.

And so it is.  I can think of hard times and what sons of b’s they were, but nothing teaches us about life, and about ourselves, as these bad times.  Nothing teaches us compassion as to have ourselves suffered, and nothing makes us enjoy our small pleasures and triumphs like past failures.  They are what makes us whole and human, and in the paradox of this life, they are what potentially makes us special and even beautiful.  Of course, they can also ruin our lives, make us defensive and bitter, but that is our choice, and we do have that choice.  We do not have this choice if we are not given the obstacles that will allow us to grow. 

​Being true makes life no less painful.  I do not wish for adversity.  I want success and health and wealth and all the good things forever.  To hell with growth.  At my age, I now try to avoid the things that will cause troubles.  But how did I learn this?  And how did I learn to take the trouble when it comes? 

And who, or what, do I depend on when the manure truly hits the fan? 

Adversity is a call to faith, hate it or not.  It is no mean coincidence that Jesus had to suffer hate, pain, and brutal death to become truly human.  Without this, he would have only been one of many other god-beings that once so heavily populated the world.   He had to live our lives to fully understand.  And he did, hard knocks and all.  Believe in his divinity or not, his story is our story, and in this we find that no resurrection is possible without some sort of death, some collapse of our world that had been so secure.

Yes, oddly, it is what can make us beautiful, and it might be the ONLY thing that can do so.  I do not wish for that cup and never will, but it seems to be the great gift in awful disguise.  In some cases, we will never see it as such: murders, war deaths, childhood illnesses and fatalities.  How did the victims learn?  But we who remain certainly learn from them.  And if such suffering has meaning for those who survive, might it not also for those who die? 

I cannot say for certain.  But it is clear: without adversity in this world, we are shells, not quite human.  It is the nature of the beast, of us.  It is the flow of the seasons within our lives that calls us to the greater rhythms and the greater tune.  It is the blessing that no one wants, but the only way that we ultimately get what we want, if we could know it. 

​As for Rebanks, it was the fight with his father that made it possible for him to write his book – and change his and perhaps our world.  A fight he regrets, which has made him ashamed, but which forced him to grow.  Not a tale, but as true for him as it is, potentially, for us all.  FK
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

​I am not sure I like this, this new computer.  Last week, my Old Faithful bought the farm and now I am on my wife’s laptop which is not like mine at all.  I have to look at a lot of keys, because some things like “delete” are way up on the board, and the board itself is positioned wrong.  It hurts my wrists, and the typing is slow.  Sure, it isn’t like I’m in a North Korean prison camp, but it annoys. 

Being a writer, at least for me, is a contradiction.  I need my regular schedule just so or I won’t write at all, but I need different experiences to write new and interesting stuff.  Always a tug, always a contradiction.  Some people, however, have work that provides an even flow of action and thought.  Some people actually do the work that their grandfather’s did, who did the same as theirs, and so on for a thousand years, and only have to perfect what was perfected long ago.  Some people, then, are like the author of the latest book I am reading, The Shepherd’s Life, by James Rebanks.   

I love it.   He starts with a word that might be used only in his area, the Lakes District of northern England made famous by William Wordsworth: heft.   It is used explicitly for sheep – to be ‘hefted’ means to have become a part of the land, used to and absolutely united with a specific parcel.  This sense is passed on from ewe to lamb and has been for hundreds of years in the District, but the author means it not only for sheep but for their human caretakers as well.  As much as a writer that he is, he also has continued his family tradition, and expects his children to do so as well.  When young, he, along with his fellow farmer kids, despised school, for teaching him (them) things and social ways irrelevant to his chosen path.  To his teachers, the Lake District is for tourists and poets; to his teachers, the people on it and their way of life is almost inconsequential.  They tried to get the kids out of this backward lifestyle, to join in the rush to success in the cities of the lowlands.  They didn’t understand.  The world doesn’t understand.  He and all his kin have been and are hefted to the land and they want no other place or way of life.  It is everything: work, morality, friends, family, worldview and, yes, freedom.  Not freedom from the land, but freedom on the land to succeed or fail with the energy and knowledge that is put into play.  For the author, there is no better way.  

I do not live that lifestyle, but I understand.   When they began development of my home territory years ago when I was in my 20’s, I was brokenhearted.  I had known all the fields, the swamps, where the cattails grew and the skunk cabbage, where the owls nested, where all the strange things that called in the night were.   My family was new to the area, but most had been there since the 1600’s.  They farmed the land as their grandfathers had done and so on, and I had learned their appreciation of the land and the work.   We had a hobby farm – one that we did not depend on for a living - with all the animals, the gardens, the haying, all the things of the real farmers.  We helped bring in the hay of our neighbors before a storm, and we watched the weather and the animals as if it had meant something.  Without knowing, this familiarity went deep – so deep, that when it all changed forever, it was a pain worse than losing young love.  The farmers themselves could no longer compete against the big spreads to the west, and they first got other jobs, then sold large chunks of family land to developers.   Many became millionaires, but I do not believe anyone was, or thought they would be, any happier.  It was a tragic necessity, and I think most understood it as such.   We had been hefted to the land, and that bond, along with the pain of separation, would never go away.

It must be like true love, this hefting, for I have never gotten it again anywhere else.  We have lived for 18 years now in southern Wisconsin in farm country, and we have a large haying field and a large garden and have raised dozens of chickens, but it is not the same.  We do not know where the old spring was, or if we do, the stories behind it do not have the same emotional impact.  We do not know where all the animals live, for we cannot walk on everyone’s property as I had done in the old place, but if we could, it would still not be the same.  Some things, once you lose them, can never be replaced.

It is the story of much of America, and now much of the world.  Most of us are not hefted to the land, or to the clan, or to a way of life.  We are freer in some sense, but freer in a bleak landscape that does not speak to us as landscapes once did.  Our values can then shift, bureaucrats who do not know the land can tell us what to do with it, and can tell us how to live.  We do not understand those who are hefted, and are always trying, like the teachers of our author, to make them join the club, to be rich and “go somewhere.”  Except we no longer know where we are going.   

And yes, it goes into religion, too.  There is a reason that the South in our country is more religious than the rest, and also more rigid: just a generation or so ago, almost all Southerners were connected to the family plot and to the relatives living nearby.  It is going now, too, as the whole country becomes itinerant and displaced and …..more free and open-minded.   And richer.  And, oddly, less secure. 

​We can list plus and minuses to this issue, but I will only say that there was a sense of belonging in being hefted that cannot be replaced.   Perhaps in becoming more footloose and culturally mobile we might become closer to a greater, universal truth.  Perhaps we might begin to see all our fellow humans as brothers, as Jesus himself had wanted.  But if you once knew, you know the price and what is lost.  It is no small thing.   FK 
 
 
 
 
          
 
 
                    
                                                                            

​One thing or another has kept me from finishing Father Rohr’s Things Hidden, but last night I at last came across what has to be the real nuggets in the book.  But first, I must say that it is not always easy for me to read Fr Rohr.  He is so optimistic that his accounts of God often come across as unreasonable, a fantasy of his own desires.  Throughout this book, he explains how accounts of the vengeful Jehovah of the Bible are more reflections of what the more primitive mind demanded – that all the gods of that time were vengeful and exacting, requiring sacrifice to do human’s bidding, so what else could God do?  As one reads how Israel slaughtered in the name of Jehovah, however, it is often hard to believe.  But I must say he has largely won me over, for the New Testament is almost all about love, love, love, regardless of occasional references to Gehenna (the waste land) and rich men in hell.  The allegories to this affect, as Fr Rohr explicates, are all too perfect.

Also, he agrees with me on one large point, and agreement always works in swaying one’s opinion.   Recently, Christians have gone through the holiest of times – those last days featuring the Last Supper, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.  What one is made to do during this time is to reflect on the suffering of Jesus.  We are told to feel the lash, the nails, the pain and the humiliation.  How awful.  How God has suffered for us.  Yet it has always occurred to me that ALL, or most, of us go through this hell at the end of our lives.  Witnessing the long and painful path to death of my parents has made me conclude that perhaps the short time on the cross was more merciful (but don’t ask me to try it).  This might appear sacrilegious, but surprisingly, the good father agrees.

This is what forms the first of two parts to what I believe is his primary thesis.  Jesus’s life, says Rohr, is a hologram of the universe, including all of our little lives.  Here, we too go through: incarnation, ordinary life, initiation (into jobs, marriage, etc), trial (and how!), faith (or struggling with it), death, surrender, resurrection, and return to God.  In this, Jesus is not exceptional, but rather the quintessence of the ordinary; he is our lives, put out for all to see.  But there is a difference.  Moving on to part two, Rohr explains that Jesus is, unlike us, perfect in his life (I use the present tense to accommodate the timeless hologram). He is the unblemished lamb that in former times was used by Israel to appease God.  Even so, he is still human.  It is this form, even the perfect one, that must die for true resurrection to occur, for our bodies as we understand them are our “false selves” – that is, who we think we are – and they must die for all of us before “resurrection” or true union with God can occur. 

And then the kicker: in the image and actuality on the cross, where Jesus became the Christ, we are given the nature of God in the only way God could fully speak to us: in blood.  Not words, not poetry, but in the visceral, the real, the undeniable.  And in this, we are made to understand that God is not seeking vengeance or sacrifice, but is inviting us to him with all the pathos that can be mustered for Man.  The suffering on the cross, then, is not a black mark formed to show us how rotten we are, but God’s way of telling us that it’s OK – that forgiveness and love are to be ours regardless, not because we deserve it, but because God desires it.  It is our invitation in blood, and all we have to say is “yes.”  It is the supreme act, as it were, of love and acceptance.

And, as I see it, it fits.  It fits for all, regardless of one’s religious beliefs or lack thereof, for God is not in finality a face or a body of text, but rather a draw for participation in the hologram, in the whole of the program – in what might be called heaven.  And the only thing that stands between us and that is the false self. To overcome, we are given our trials and sufferings, to do as Jesus does – not raise the dead or be perfect, but to fill the template of life, of surrender, resurrection, and return.  It is a journey that we ALL must travel, and as Fr Rohr puts it, we may do so willingly – Heaven – or begrudgingly – Hell.  

In most of the essays I have written, I have been surprised to discover in the writing that something else was always working behind the scenes as I blindly followed the action.  This something else, I am certain, is working for all of us at all times.  It is in this that we might choose heaven or hell – to choose to see the marvelous in life, or to despise its discomfort.  As Fr Rohr would have us believe, God does not send us to Hell, as no loving being would, but WE do – and it is impermanent, anyway, real only as long as our false selves are real.  Instead, we are graphically shown through the Crucifixion that we are humbly, shockingly humbly, asked to join in the universe as full members, no recriminations, no questions asked.  We only have to say Yes. 

Not bad, Fr Rohr!  Still, even Jesus, even knowing the template, had his moment of despair.  So shall we all.  But that’s OK.  In the end, it will be as in the beginning, and life will prove a wound healed so perfectly that it might not have existed at all.  FK
                                                           
                    
        
                                                                            

​In putting together my book of essays, I painfully came to my problem child, “World’s Ugliest Man.”  It will be the longest essay in the book at 5, 000 words, which makes it un-publishable in regular journals, but that’s not the problem.  The problem is the ending, for there was a very definitive ending.

It takes place in the back woods of northeast Vermont near the cabin some friends built (with a little help from me) back in the 1970’s, near where a “greatest generation” guy from Boston had also made his own place to live, and to retire.  He was a WWII vet who had been blown apart in the war against Japan, and then had been painstakingly stitched together over many long and probably painful months.  They had not been plastic surgeons.  His face was left an ugly quilt, almost too much to believe.  Over the years, we got used to Al and we always visited his place every time we took the long walk into the woods to get to the cabin. 

The core of the essay took place one night when I was returning from town with a bottle of wine and one of rum.  He invited me in for stew, and that began a great drinking fest that left both of us floored.  During this time, he told me of how he had stalked the killer of his mother and had killed him himself, burying him in one of the great cranberry bogs of eastern Massachusetts.  Past midnight, I finally left for the cabin with my parent’s dog, still drunk, where I had to cross a pond first before climbing a steep hill.  It was late October and the pond was covered with skim ice.  Once most of the way across, I noticed the headlights of an SUV coming down the broken logging trail to the cabin, which was almost impassible (so much so that it was easier to take the canoe than to walk).  I yelled up to the vehicle in surprise, suspecting foul play, which made the dog jump to the edge of the canoe and tip us over.  Completely taken by surprise, my heavy boots and backpack sent me plunging 15 feet or so to the bottom of the pond, which was ice cold and completely dark, where I had the presence of mind not to breathe, to take off the backpack, and to kick off from the bottom to surface.  I swam the canoe to the shore, then stumbled in the dark forest to the cabin, whose door had been kicked in.

Years later, I heard that Al had developed prostate cancer, which he was not going to fight, declaring bluntly, “I’m checkin’ out.”  Which he did a few months later.  The crux of the problem for me in the essay was this: both Al and I should have died years earlier in our respective adventures, yet we were saved by near-miracles – but why?  He had gone on to live a hermit life interspersed with family visits and squabbles, while I had not exactly lit up the world.  So many others would have been better to save, but instead, WE were.  Why?

In the essay, I could only end by saying, “In the end, Al had to know; in the ugly patchwork of his life, in the end I know that he must have understood.”  Yes, but understood what? 

In a book I am reading now, Things Hidden by Fr Richard Rohr, one of his greatest themes resides around grace.  By definition, grace is not earned or begged, but freely given by God.  Rohr recounts several Biblical figures, most notably David, who was picked to be King of Israel from the last and least of the sons, and who sinned egregiously, at one point allowing a man to die in battle to protect himself from the scandal of having impregnated this poor man’s wife.  And yet David knew that, good or bad, evil or holy, he was God’s chosen – and indeed his own life was always shrouded by grace in spite of himself.

David had a mission for God, of course, but the lesson is that God gives his grace freely, as is His will, whether we understand it or not.  Usually we do not.  And that, I now understand, is what Al finally learned: about a fundamental nature of God, not from mind or rationality, but from ways spiritual, as Paul put it, for the spiritual can only be known in its own way.  And it can be known, but rather as men and women “know” one another in sex, as the Bible puts it.  It is a mystery, yes, but knowable in the spiritual way.

In trying to understand my own survival, I have often looked at my life to see if somehow there was a logic to my personal miracle.  There is none, at least as far as I can know.  Perhaps a great grandchild shall save the world or find the cure for cancer, but how can I know?  Rather, it is, during life at least, something to be understood only as grace, and to be grateful for it, regardless of the meaning – if there is any.  Rather it is the lesson we must learn, as Fr Rohr would put it; the lesson that grace is given freely, as it must since none are deserving, but freely, from a God that we are finding through slow learning who is more anxious to come to us than we are to him; for a God that maybe really is not about sin and penance, but about the mystery that some call grace.  FK                                           
                    
        
                                                                            

​I had waited a month for Scorsese’s’ movie “Silence” to come to the video store, and this weekend it finally arrived.  The check-out guy warned us that it was 3 hours long, and I shrugged – a good movie, like a good book, can take as long as it wants.  I was worried, though, that Scorsese might do to Jesuit missionaries of Japan in the 17th century what he had done to the Crucifixion, scandalizing many with his portrayal of Jesus as a fairly ordinary, and married, prophet of the Jews.  However, my wife checked comments on the movie and people seemed to like it, barring its slowness and length.  Length was no problem for me, for I knew that the photography would be delicious (as it was).  Scorsese isn’t called a genius for nuthin’.  Silence, well done, could only enhance that.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the deadness of the silence.  The plot is this: in the early 1600’s, all the missionaries to Japan had been tortured and killed, along with their acolytes, with the exception of a certain Father Ferreira,  who had apostatized – that is, had publicly forsaken his beliefs - to become a married member of Japanese society (I should note that this movie is based on actual accounts).  Two young Jesuits who had been his students couldn’t believe this account of him, and successfully begged their superior to let them go to Japan to find the truth.  On arrival, what they first found confirmed the hatred the Japanese authorities had for Christians, who were hounded, tortured and killed.  They themselves had to quickly go into hiding.  Eventually, several Christian villagers who had protected them were exposed and killed, causing the two fathers to separate.
 
After this, we follow only one Jesuit – Father ”J” (I forget his name).  Here we see him move from one location to another while his peasant protectors are slaughtered; here we see him captured, turned in by a Japanese Judas; her we see him suffer as his fellow Jesuit is brought back to him, and then drowned along with several of his protectors before his eyes; here we see the full weight of a cruel and devious Japanese psychological attack as it attempts to bend him to renounce his faith.  Finally, he is met by Fr Ferreira (Liam Neesen), who indeed has apostatized.  He explains to Fr J that he renounced not only to protect his followers, but also because he found that the Japanese were unable to understand the Catholic faith.  He tells Fr J that Christ to them is only the sun, not the Son, and will always be so.  He explains that the Japanese can only understand God, or the gods, through nature. He escalates further, telling Father J that the faith they have been taught is not The Truth, but only one small truth among many.

Fr J is then put to a final test. He is forced to watch as several of his followers are hung upside down in deep pits of filth to die slowly.  They scream and they retch, and finally, through his tears of agony and guilt, he hears Christ tell him: “I came to reduce your suffering.  Deny me to save others.”  He does so by stepping on an image of Christ.  Afterwards, he lives for decades working for the Japanese to inspect and reject all imports from Europe that have a Christian theme.  It was certainly meant as a galling insult to his faith.  It is only at his death and cremation that we see he has a small crucifix cupped in his hands.   

It is a complex film, where we scarcely know through the dialogue what the movie wants us to believe.  Are the Japanese really incapable of understanding Christianity? If so, how did the pagans of Europe do so?  Is one religion – the Shinto and Zen Buddhism of Japan, or Christianity, superior one to the other, or only dependent on cultural background?  And, did the two Jesuits really diminish their own faith in renouncing, or did they do so only to protect others? 

Unfortunately, with so much time, the movie could also have gotten into the politics of the era.  In the 17th century, both Japan and Europe were still largely theocratic, with politics and religion intricately intertwined.  Because of this, the Jesuits in Japan were correctly seen as an imperialistic advance by Europe.  On the other hand, this was the Shogun era in Japan, where the dominant aristocracy and their soldiers had a firm boot on the necks of the peasants. Christianity, with its emphasis on individual equality, would have threatened their reign, and perhaps caused it to fall.  There was a lot more going on in that time than questions of faith alone.

Yet the movie could have been fine without such background.  The themes are potentially compelling.  For instance, the title “Silence” refers to Christ’s lack of response to Fr J’s prayers, where instead, Fr J is left only with uncaring nature and cruel humanity in a foreign land.  This captures everyman’s moments of fear and pain.  But when Fr J finally does hear Christ, it is cartoonish in tone, giving us the feeling that the voice is make-believe and only in the Fr’s head.  Just as God is for us all.      

And that is where the movie takes us.  Regardless of what is said or shown in the movie, if we listen to the silence in our gut, we “hear” that there is no God and that such beliefs are only a part of a wishful imagination.  We “hear” that if God exists at all, he does not comfort us in our troubles, but rather leaves us to suffer the cold world of reality alone.  It is a hard and dark message.  It causes one – or at least me - to have a hard time believing in anything sacred.

I am not sure if the movie was made to put us in this place of doubt to experience what we all will experience during difficult times in our lives, or to simply cause doubt, but it did depress me immensely before it made me think: hey, wait a minute!  Spirit is real!  Nearly half of Americans have experienced it, as I have, and not just once.  It is seldom a voice in the head, but rather a gut-level sense of certainty, of harmony and unity, that cannot be denied when felt.  It usually occurs in silence, but not at any moment that we (or at least I) can decide upon; rather, it comes as grace wills it.   Doubt arrives only after spirit leaves, when we are left to the “real” world once again.  Spirit may not validate any religion, but it does validate a higher reality that engulfs the quotidian with benevolence and unity.  It also acts on our lives, sometimes in dramatic ways, but seldom as we expect.  It is the mystery, that which happens in real silence; a silence no less than that suffered by Fr J as he strained to hear God’s voice.  But it seldom speaks in a clear voice, and seldom if ever in cartoonish strains.

Spirit is not fickle in nature, although nature reflects it in part, just as it is reflected by fickle human nature.  But it will not yield to our pleas, whether we are priests or not.  It has its own ways, and its ways are not those of any culture or fantasy.  Fr J and Fr Ferreira had to confront the absence of manipulative certainty over spirit, but the movie never confides with us that Spirit exists.  Perhaps this possibility is spoken of in the tiny crucifix that lay in the dead Fr’s hands before he was burnt to ashes, but hope in this movie is smaller than that cross, while doubt fills the whole screen.  

It is a good movie for those who wish to plunge into the depths of uncertainty and alone-ness, and, on the eve of Easter, into the despair suffered by the dying Christ, but no answers are found here.  If one is looking for an uplift of faith, go elsewhere.  This movie, at least for me, is a plunge into a pit as foul as that which tortured the Japanese Christians, and from which we might be extricated only by the denial of God – only to enter another pit that is even worse.  FK                    
                    
        
                                                                            

Tuesday before last, we commissioned the pop-up trailer and began what should have been an epic journey, down to Miss to see Mamaw, and then across the near-infinite state of Texas, across New Mexico, and then into Arizona to visit neighbors who are now living the retirement dream by NOT living in Wisconsin during winter.  We never got there.  In part, because we spent longer in Mississippi than expected, and in larger part, because of the largeness of Texas.  900 miles from the Gulf to El Paso, half of that distance a nearly featureless desert.  How about, we thought, going to the Florida panhandle instead?  Palm trees, warm ocean, sea food, and only 5 or so hours away  - why not?

I admit that we wimped out, but we got our sea food, we got great, really great beaches, and we got the warm water and hot weather.  It was all nearly great, but we had to leave earlier for the north than expected because of severe incoming weather, and also because of our campground, although that is the place I am going to write about.  As usual, it is the ugly that is more interesting than the pretty.  

Ugly site, yes.  As we should have known, at this time of year, the really good camp sites near or on the water are all taken; in fact, reservations at the state parks go out 11, count them, eleven, months!  It took my wife many painstaking visits to her ipod (or whatever they are called now) to find a place that had openings, the most likely one being 20 miles from the ocean.  After dark and with both of us starting to snarl, we finally pulled into this place that was besides a vast construction site where they were widening the highway by about 50 yards.  We drove across packed earth, and then down into a basic camp ground where we instantly found our prescribed site: right next to the highway in a small tree-less field right under the big camp streetlight.  As we groaned and pulled in, we were instantly met by the manager, who was the brother-in-law or something - the relations got complicated - of the owner.  He spoke with the deep southern drawl of a real-live north Floridian.  No need to fill out forms, no; just give us the money and we'll avoid all that hassle.  Off the books, eh?  Fine by me.  We counted out the money, and then got the beginning of a several-day story which woke up our cynicism from the moldering cellars of our now-middle class lifestyle.  Life, we relearned, is not always pretty.

Our manager, John, had worked for years as a  bouncer in the local strip joints where college kids and local yokels went to booze and drug it up while ogling jiggling flesh.  He was semi-law, carrying a gun with the power to forcefully detain, which he did, often.  Young people got high on meth and something called flaka which made them capable of drinking huge amounts, and gave them great strength and zero sense.  People on flaka, he said, would charge at headlights like bulls, and start ripping and tearing at people with teeth and fingernails like real-life zombies. He had had to shoot several of them, and had killed three, including an old "friend:" "I hated to do it, but he'd gone crazy with meth and whatever and wouldn't put down that gun." Oh, yeah. He had been shot twice himself, and stabbed at least as many times.  Fights were almost nightly, and he told me certain things that I never would have known: did you know that all tequila is water down 60% in Florida bars because it alone, of all alcohol, leads to the most violence?  Did you know that "Ecstasy" is legal to take and posses in Florida, and some clubs will have buckets of it for free at the entrance (it is illegal to sell - how do they get it?) because it allows drinkers to drink endlessly without becoming violent?  Did you know that bouncers there have special ultra-violet glasses, so that when fights break out, the management shuts off all lights except the ultra, so that only they can see while they haul off the brawlers to the police cars?  

Not me, either, but the stories went on of the new fad, bong drinking hard liquor, and of the several deaths each year of college students trying to climb hotels by the balconies.  Some get so high, they simply jump off to fly.  "Saw one guy do that. When he hit, it sounded like a sack of tomatoes."  

"You still doing that (bouncing)?" I asked, incredulously the next day.  "No, can't, broke my back."  Oh?  "Guy at work ran into my car while I was next to it, and it popped out a disk to my spine. The company said no one was hurt, but now I got really big bills to pay and an operation coming up.  Doc says if I don't, I'll end up paralyzed.  You see that car driving up around the construction up there?  That's the insurance company checking me out, all the time.  My lawyer say this is worth millions."

One morning, I saw him just before we were heading off to the beach.  I said the usual, "how are ya?" and he said, "tired" with a satisfied smile.  "Was up most of the night shooting hogs.  Gotta go back to find mine in the daylight.  I hit him good, lots of blood, should find him easy."  He did, and later, I saw the large cooler he had to de-game the meat, soaking it for 4 or 5 days in ice water to make the meat edible.  I thought about his back and hunting and skinning 300 pound hogs, but no need.  There was another story.

That came around when I mentioned his kids, who were thoroughly enjoying being part of management.  I thought the two were the product of him and the younger woman who often walked around with him but I was wrong.  That would have been too simple.  No, she was a girlfriend "not yet married."  The kids came from his former wife, who had lost them some time after the divorce, after she had become a meth addict.  "Went from 245 to 115 pounds in 3 months.  Said it was because of the divorce." He let that dangle, not having to say "bullshit."  He got the younger kid because she was living with a convicted child molester, and the other when they both ran off to Alabama, for reasons unknown.  I never thought of Florida as paradise, but now I started thinking the opposite.

Next day, or maybe that same day or another, I waved to him as I was going to the bathroom.  He only scowled, making me a little worried: what did I do to piss him off?  I did not want to piss off this guy for obvious reasons, but when I saw him later, he explained:"Guy in that trailer had a light cracked on the outside and said it was vandalism (and I suppose the manager's fault).  I called a trailer guy in at my expense to have it replaced, and then the guy drove off ripping out the electrical wires (supplied by the park).  If he tore out the 30 volt (?) that's 500 dollars and a felony. I got the cops on it now."  Trouble, trouble, trouble, some of it part of his job, but some of it bad luck, as if he attracted it, as if he was a lightening rod for violence and messiness in general.  

A few days after we left the camp, we found ourselves in Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, listening to an audio book about the WWII experiences of one Felix Sparks, who fought the Nazis from Salerno, Italy to the Eagle's Nest in Bavaria.  In the grueling, months-long battles in Italy, the author told us of men cut in half by 50 cal machine guns and shrapnel, and of men gone insane from the constant poundings of bombs and cannons.  Said experts, no man - none - can handle more than 200 days of this kind of stress.  The author (I'll get his name and that of his book later) quoted several soldiers and wrote down their points of view, with a fairly good consensus among them that there is no kind or loving God, not at all.  There can't be.  

But I think of our manager and all his bad luck, and am led to say that none of it I can think of comes from God, but from choices made by humans.  We can also say that of war and all its horrible consequences.  God, really, can only be blamed for two things: one, free will; and two, making us capable of committing such horrors.  The latter, it is said, comes from the former, whose error comes from the latter in an odd logical round-about.  But what can be said of the flowers that grew from the rotting corpses of fallen soldiers in the field?  Or of the fine beaches of Florida amid corruption and vice?  How can we stitch them together into one fine, seamless robe?  Because both are there - the loving God of wonder and light, and the darkness of the damned.  As a child I had wanted to be a brave soldier, and now, I shudder at the thought.  I also used to party like an idiot, and now would not think of it.  It is not that I have become less brave - even if I have - but more aware.  Awareness grows with time, and maybe it is this maturity, played out over millennia, that makes the garment whole.  Maybe, hopefully, it, this life, really is all about growth, grown-up and serious style.  FK