​For Mother’s Day, my son and I thought it a good idea to buy my wife (his mother) a Fitbit.  The little plastic watch-like thing cost about twice what we had thought, and certainly it will come down in the months ahead, but what the heck: it’s cool.  It has all sorts of interactive apps and counts things like footsteps and heartbeat rates as you exercise, which is, to repeat, pretty cool.  So this morning it occurred to me to ask her, “what’s your heartbeat?”  “Whatever” she said, as we were just getting out of bed (heck, I’d like to know that stuff all the time -  maybe it’s a good idea I don’t get one), but that reminded me of a Herman Hermit’s song, “Heartbeat” that I’m sure all you old codgers know: “Baby, baby, can’t you hear my heartbeat?” I got up and instantly made out the chords to it on the guitar: basic E, B, A, over and over, no minor’s, no off-sounding jazz chords.  Simple; and, by golly, fun. 
I had first heard it in that heady year of the British Invasion, @ 1964, when I was 9 and 10 years old.  There were many other bands with somewhat more sophisticated stuff like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but for a 4th grader, nothing was pure sugar delicious pop like Herman’s Hermits.  That his song “I’m Henry the 8th” got banned from Britain was a hoot.  Imagine them worrying about that stuff now.  So innocent, all of their stuff, that it is almost amazing to me now.  But it was so happy, except for “Mrs. Brown” which was painfully innocent. 

That is not how we were then all the time, we kids of the mid-60’s.  There were the tough kids waiting for us at the playground, or when for some reason we walked home from school.  There were admonishing teachers and parents having arguments, and talks of war, even of nuclear war.  There were relatives dying and scary nuns at Catechism class on Saturdays, but the essence of the everyday for many of us was the Hermits.  Fun; thoughtless; and really, just pure, simple joy.

As a grown-up I usually don’t let my mind wander into meaningless joy.  There are moments of intellectual or spiritual enlightenment, and others of clever, funny chatter at parties or whatever, but the dumb stuff comes seldom.  But it came this morning, and I’m glad.

It is the last day of May and the frequent rains have let up for now.  It is cool, in the low 60’s, the bugs aren’t out yet in great numbers, and the sun is shining on the crisp green freshness of early summer.  The breeze is light and plays on the fields of grass like a comb through fine hair, and everything sparkles.  It is not a morning, for me, of the sublime, of Wordsworth –ian ecstasy in nature.  It simply is, and the song, “Baby, baby, can’t you hear my heartbeat?” is playing again in some area of mind that feels young and uncomplicated – some often- forgotten place that is healthy, bright, and happily empty.  I am not taken here often.  I am grown up and have bills to pay and chores to do and people to worry about and looming old age to dig out great fears.  Still, it is there, that silly little joy that tells us to simply be glad to be alive. 

I could go on about this being our greatest joy, about how this was how God made humans to be before The Fall.  I could, but I won’t.  Instead, I’m going to hit out a few tunes by Herman’s Hermits and then go take a nice walk, thinking of nothing, I hope, but the great day and how nothing can touch it as long as I don’t let it.  Sure, I have stuff to do, but not now.  Now, I just have that one hopeful line at the end of the song, “you’re the one I love” which couldn’t be better and shouldn’t be easier.  I’ll take it for granted now, and worry about the details another day.  Summertime is here.  FK
 
 
                                                                                      
 
 
 
 
 

Contrary to what these blogs might suggest, I don’t always think about death.  In fact, I recently advised someone who has made himself miserable with all the bad stuff in the world, “Don’t ruin your life that way!  That’s like worrying about being too hot because it’s 120 in the shade in Libya. Worry about the heat when You are hot, and not before.”  Callous, perhaps.  Whistling past the graveyard, certainly.  But is there not some truth in this?

Death, however, is a great teacher.  Years ago, I was taking by-mail lessons from the institute set up by Yogananda, a Hindu monk who did not buy a fleet of Mercedes or have a flock of admiring women attending him.  In one of his books, he remarks that monks of his order were encouraged to hang around graveyards, which in India in his day had open sites where one could actually see the progression of decay.   It makes one understand the fleeting reality of life, he said, and it does.  It is indeed important to keep in mind when choosing life’s path. 

But there is something more, something that was brought to my mind while reading about the life of St Faustina this last week while spending several days alone at the cabin in the UP; something more than the subtext that death makes life look like the transient experience that it is.  And it is this: that at death, and beyond, we are totally, completely helpless.  Even the toughest guys, even the most powerful, become babies during and after death.  During, in that we can’t stop it, no matter our fortitude or wealth; and after, because we have no information, no practiced way to navigate whatever awaits us after death.  We are, then, literally made babies, no safer or more secure than a newborn in this world where our health and wellbeing, besides that dictated by our heredity, is entirely dependent on our parents or caretakers, and the historical milieu of the surrounding world. 

This was not just an idea that I was mulling, but a sudden and emotional realization that had me frightened, because it is absolutely true.  In the context of the book I was reading, heavy-duty Catholicism, this meant that we were at the mercy of God the father, the Son, and the Holy Mother.  Here, although “love” and “mercy” are thrown around like flower petals, we find that we will be punished for our sins, not because God wants it, but because justice demands it.  And let me tell you, in this context, we are all going to pay for our various stupidities as well as our outright crimes.  Unless one becomes a saint, which we find in the life of Sr. Faustina is a tough row to hoe, we will pay – and pay, and pay. 

It is no wonder that New Age religion has caught on.  New Age is not anything new, but rather an amalgamation of other religions that emphasizes the good stuff.  According to these ideas, in after-death, we will be greeted by relatives and those we loved, and then brought to a sort of school where we will review our lives minutely, and learn the lessons of love from them.  We will be in a heightened state of awareness, so that these lessons will not be as painful as we might think, although there will be a little of that.  But not too much, because we will be surrounded by love and care that is far more perfect than anything we may have had on earth.  We will evolve then, and most of us will be born again to learn what we had failed to learn in past lives. 

That last part could be a doozy, but at least the greater part of fear of the afterlife is taken away.  I don’t know, though; in both the Catholic and the New Age cases, we are brought to a sort of justice. The latter (New Age) seems more humane than, say, burning in hell or purgatory, but who really wants the hundreds or even thousands of lives required to make ourselves pure? (In Hindu and Buddhist theology, these rebirths could be literally endless, a hell on earth.)  In the simplified version of some Native American beliefs, we were told that warriors would go to the Happy Hunting grounds, but with a little research we find that it was not so easy with them either.  Often, they would be tested before entrance, and if they failed – well, their souls were destroyed.  Unfortunately, then, even here we are left with another sort of hell.

It is true, though, as far as most of the wise people have experienced, that the underlying structure of the universe is, indeed, love.  That it might also come with some sort of justice seems nearly universal as well.  We remain cautiously optimistic, but also fearful of what that justice might be.  Whatever the case, death is indeed a useful thing to meditate on.  We learn, for one, that this life is transitory and not nearly as important (materialistically and socially) as we are led to believe; and also that in its throws, we have no control, none, and have to have faith, for that is all we will be left with.  Although death is not something that must always overcloud life, we cannot always whistle past the graveyard either.  We must face the facts now and then, and hold fast to faith, which is another word for trust. The image of what we trust might not be relevant, but that we trust is, if not for the long haul, than at least for the initial experience.  Then, I suppose, what will be will be, just as it is for newborns in this world.

​Trust; fear; the unknown.  May the love that is inherent in a mother’s breast in this world rule the next.  It seems likely, if not certain.  And may I not be the one (re)born with colic.  FK
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​Another adventure in the quickly yellowing popup camper, this time to the wilds north of Sheboygan, on the lake.  Wilds near Sheboygan?  And on the shores of valued Lake Michigan?  Yes, certainly, in the midst of Point Beach State Forest.  One can understand why miles of lakefront were given over to forest decades ago, for the land is boggy, with choppy old sand dunes overgrown with hemlock and white cedar and swamp in between.  Lousy farm land, but that does not bother people now; people now with extra money and good roads to drive on would eat this territory up, were it not for the state land.

Or not, for Point Beach is known around Wisconsin for another reason: the nuclear power plant.  Rising its stolid, smokeless head a few miles from the main road, it sits there as a sentinel and guardian of undeveloped land.  People do not want to live next to or even near nuclear power plants.  Whether justified or not, people who do blame their cancer, or their dog’s itching or anything else unhealthy on the secret, silent radiation that may or may not emanate from such facilities.  Three Mile Island; Chernobyl; Hiroshima and God knows what other monstrosities of modern science and the military - industrial establishment all hide inscrutably in the massive buildings that sprout electrical wires and towers from every concrete pore. 

But we can vacation there, as if a brief visit is like an x-ray at the dentist, the magical death rays brief enough that we can handle them. 

All very well, but it has rained a lot recently, and those swamps between the old forested dunes are full and humming with ducks, frogs, and, by God, mosquitoes.  Lots and lots of mosquitoes, so many that our camper became thick with them inside, so much so that killing them was like melting snow flakes in the palm of one’s hand in a raging blizzard.  Nothing would work, and sleep would only fitfully come.  An onslaught, a deluge that not even the deadly gamma or whatever rays from the power plant a scant five or so miles away could kill. But of course, nothing kills mosquitoes.  Individually, yes, but as a collective, they are immortal.  They are the Borg.  Resistance is futile.

Not that it was all bad.  Well sprayed with Deet, we took long fairly pleasant walks on the miles of paths there, only itching our ankles occasionally at the bites of the sand flies who do not respect Deet.  We would soldier through it all, for we had a mission, or really, a quest long denied.  Like all quests, it had to do with the spiritual.  Like some quests, it was also explicitly religious.  That the Fatima children were being canonized that (this) week had nothing to do with it, although it could have.  Really, though, we had heard of it, this special place, for years and at last we had the chance, and the thought, to go. 

Our Lady of Good Hope, or more commonly, the Marian site at Champion, is a staple that once was taught to school children throughout Wisconsin, although dissertations on neutrally gendered bathrooms seem more the rage now.  It has, like most religious sites, a great back story.  At the same time as the Chicago Fire in 1872 (or ’71?), north-eastern Wisconsin also caught fire. Known as the Peshtigo Fire, 3,000 people were killed as a record drought charged the slash from heavy logging, causing the blaze to go wild.  It was so hot that people trying to escape boiled in rivers, and the coals from Green Bay leapt across miles of Lake Michigan water to ignite the Door Peninsula.  It was so hot that people in nearby Champion (the land between Green Bay and Door County) clustered together in and about a small log-cabin Catholic Church to find a miracle to save them from the fires.  A miracle did come and save them, and gave them an apparition of the Holy Mother as well.  While every inch of ground around the church was scorched, the few acres surrounding it remained unscathed.

It, Our Lady of Champion, is now the only official spot of a Marian miracle in the US (Mexico, of course, has the Virgin of Guadalupe).  We drove to it from the Mosquito Coast through miles of low farm land and forested hummocks, and on arrival were surprised by its humble grounds.  It is in farm country still, and the church there is of small to average size, erected over the spot of the apparition, which is now preserved in a cave-like chapel underneath.  There is a small cafeteria and a gift shop, but it is not too kitschy or overly exploitative, so little so that it occurred to me to tell the resident priest to (maybe) advertise more.  People were there, of course, and there were white pavilions set here and there for some future event, but those aside, that was it: a church, a basement chapel, a few small commercial connections, and a walk through the Stations of the Cross in a field in back. 

We had arrived just in time for a weekday mass, and decided to attend.  Two priests were there to do their magic before only about 25 people.  One priest, however, spoke in a thick European accent (Portuguese) and we soon learned that he was the, or one of the, priests who presided over the Fatima site.  The pavilions were probably there to hold people for a weekend celebration of the 100th anniversary and the beautification (canonization?) of two of the children who first saw Mary.  And here we were at another miracle site of Mary, and the Fatima priest was there. 

The whole thing came together then, but still, it was a quiet day.  After mass and outside again, the rain began to fall.  We did our walk around the Stations of the Cross, alone with the statues in the greening fields, but first we knelt in the very small, almost claustrophobic basement chapel.  Cast - off crutches of the healed were hung on the walls before a statue of Mary and all about were hundreds of devotional candles.  Most people inside were old, and all limped or hung near hand-holds to steady themselves.  Were they praying to have their old - age illnesses eased, or for children or grandchildren in trouble?  The stories that Lady of Good Help could tell!  But of course she never would, not to any soul but that one soul that asked, that prayed, that beseeched for an intercession from Mary, another miracle.  There had been other miracles there after all, and there was no reason to believe there would not be more. 

All came together; in the Stations of the Cross, we followed Jesus from conviction to death, no one more in need of divine intervention than he, which would not come.  Miracles are for belief, not to remedy the inevitable pains of life on this earth.  We are all guilty before Pilot, and the end can only be put off, just as it was with the children who first saw the Virgin in Fatima, Portugal in 1917.  Two died shortly after from disease, and another was tormented for her vision by sundry and various.  In the end, she lived a long life as an austere nun.  It is, as the prophets of the Old Testament knew all too well, not good to be singled out by God.  One suffers, most often from the hands of one’s own people for upsetting the rotten apple cart.  One’s life is forfeit for the long-term and inscrutable plans of God.  One is rewarded in eternity, but not here, almost never – unless, of course, that’s part of the inscrutable plan.

The gift shop: some kitsch, of course, but lots of good stuff, or at least good religious stuff, as well.  I got a book I am currently reading, No Turning Back by (Father) Donald Calloway.  I read on the back that he was a very, very bad boy before the Calling came.  Last night, I read just how bad.  Really, really messed-up, drugs and sex and rock ‘n roll bad.  Worse ever than you or I bad.  And that fits, too.  He, too, was used although he didn’t know it at the time, used to show that anyone can be blessed, even major league jerks and screw-ups.  Cursed, blessed, cursed to be blessed; the only thing we can depend on is change, ironic turns and twists, the undependable, unless one believes.

That is the problem though, that tautology that is called faith.  Is one’s suffering really a blessing?  Isn’t that believing in pots full of gold at the end of rainbows?

Except that it isn’t.  That’s what miracles are for, slaps in the face of the effects of time, of change, of dunes blown and covered by trees that are to be beaten down again, to turn again into swamps and maybe, then again, into lakes.  Thousands saw the apparitions at Fatima; hundreds our Lady of Champion.  Thousands more have awoken from nightmarish lives into something that made sense, like our Father Calloway.  Yes, these are not as certain as seeing apparitions with others; for these others, the certainty of miracles and revival is within.  But that’s what miracles are for.  Seeing, or experiencing, is believing.  Except when it isn’t; except when even that reality is dragged into the rational.  A spoiled bit of potato, said Scrooge of the apparition of Marley.  Frightened children and ignorant peasants, we say of Fatima.  We say lots of things.  We see lots of things.  We speak, eventually, only of that which we expect to see.

​No miracle there for us, though.  We drove back to the mosquitoes and packed up, destiny home.  It was hot just miles from the lake, 25 degrees cooler by the lake, the change hard to take, hard to dress for.  We like things dependable, even if it is too hot or too cold, even if life drags on with predictable corruption and pain.  We want miracles, anything to lighten the burden of our choosing, but change our minds if they come.  No, it can’t be!  No, that’s insane!  Or if for others, THEY are insane.  Driving back on hard concrete thinking of Our Lady, thinking of miracles, I also had to think: who’s inscrutable now?  Who wishes for one thing, but refuses to accept it?  Who dreams of paradise but insists on something far, far less?  From the parting of the waters, to a glowing vision and a parting of the fires, who is thirsting for water but refuses to drink?  FK
 
 
 
  
 
  
 
 

I’ve had my share of adventures.  Long hitchhiking, backpacking into the Sierra Mountains of Mexico to find the artistic Huichols, several years in the Venezuelan Amazon to live with an assortment of Indian people, as well as a slew of sometimes stupid mind-altered celestial navigations – all more than the Ozzi and Harriet path to sublime middle-class bliss.  These have been nothing compared to many others: imprisonment in the Russian gulag, battles of war, and much, much longer travels that have taken large chunks of people’s lives.  Just down the road, some neighbors have a son who leads white-water expeditions and works in Antarctica in the off-season; then there is a friend who hitchhiked to Columbia from Boston, only stopping when he happened into a congenital war zone; those others who have rowed across the Atlantic, skied to the North Pole, lived years with monks in Tibet – the list goes on and on.  Many adventures were planned, while some only intuited.  Some of the most fearsome, however, just happened.  That would apply to many incarcerated or caught in war zones.  But many others of this nature happen to many of us every day, and more or less right at our doorstep.

Divorce.  I could say proudly that I have never gotten a divorce, but that would be nit-picking, and really only a reflection of a particular life-style.  Because I was something of a bum and perennial student, I was not really marriage material for any mentally stable woman, but I have had my share of long-term relationships gone wrong.  Some were devastating, but none had the rupture of property and the responsibility of children that many undergoing divorce have.  I have seen this up close, as all of us have, and it would be an understatement to say that this is one of those not-wanted adventures that is truly life-altering.  Like many adventures, such an experience can leave one broken, or forever partially broken, or, ultimately free to find a better course of life.  I have witnessed all three results, as far as time will allow, and thus I feel that I can truly categorize this as an adventure that steps beyond my own paltry offerings. 

In chosen adventure, we are often looking for a path to growth, even if we do not realize it.  In the unchosen adventure of divorce, we might find even greater growth, in part through our realization that, unwanted as it may be, we have somehow contributed to its cause.  But still, the greatest adventures are those that come to us without our wishes and beyond our past actions.  They are not only for those who are caught in a war zone, like some hapless Pole in 1939 Europe.  And they happen eventually to us all.

This adventure is called “disease,” which has a curiously neutral base: dis-ease, as if it were some mild discomfort like jock itch.  It is that, but someday, that word will mean much more to each and every one of us.  Often it happens in old age and, since we cannot cure old age, we shrug such stuff off (when it happens to someone else) and call it “normal,” which it is, although it isn’t.  Regardless of age, that last death-carrying illness changes almost all of us – some are comatose in the final stages – in the most fundamental of ways. It is the greatest adventure to the sick and dying, but often to those close to the sick and dying as well.  This many of us also have experience.  When it involves the very old, we eventually carry on.  When it involves those that it shouldn’t, it is often nearly as much of an adventure to the care-taker as it is to the sick person. 

In the book A Path Revealed, by Carlen Maddox, we find a successful man (the author) in such a situation.  A former high school quarterback and varsity basketball player, we can assume that Carlen had a better sense of self-esteem than most of us.  He was smart as well, graduating from a good university and eventually landing a job as a journalist in a major Florida newspaper.  Not long after graduation, he met the girl of his dreams and was married less than a year later, with little drama and heartbreak as far he lets us know.  As children came, success matured and he was able to start his own periodical – which, like most else in his life, was a success.  His wife worked for political campaigns with great success as well in between raising the three kids, and all, it seemed, was going as a good life should.  And then a gash appeared in the glossy exterior of their lives.

Martha, Carlen’s wife, began to forget things.  Her ebullient mood began to change to depression and lethargy.  After appointments with the doctor, it was concluded with certainty that she had Alzheimer’s.  The shock in it was that she had just turned fifty. 
I am just under half-way through the book, but we find all the tell-tale signs of unwanted adventure almost immediately. 

Adventure is a rupture of the everyday to bring in something new.  For the Maddox family, this happened immediately.  The relationship changed from that between equals to that between the terminally ill and the caretaker, which was perhaps the hardest first shift, but soon after they began travelling to try to help – or even cure – the disease.  We find that the latter was impossible, but the former…

One of the first trips was to see a nun in Tennessee who was noted as someone particularly good with terminal illnesses.  One of the most stunning things that she said was, “Now you are on a spiritual journey.”  One might say that we are always on a spiritual journey, but the good sister was very accurate, for we seldom see regular, plodding life as a journey.  That is why we seek adventures.  By saying what she did, she exposed the reason behind the great unwanted adventures: to make us realize that we are on a spiritual journey, not just because of the disease, but in spite of it.  But it is the disease that makes us realize it. 

And realize it they do, with all the hardships that a real adventure has, times 10 (I have long bastardized Thomas Edison’s famous quote, “genius is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration” to “adventure is 10% excitement and 90% misery.”)  It is real, as any real adventure is, with terror, disappointment, despondency, anger – and the occasional insight.  It has, so far, made for a thrilling story. 

Having already read the book flap, I know that the two discover something great and true in this trial.  I await tonight’s reading with great expectations.  But this is what the face of adventure really is – this challenge that strips us of all we thought we knew.  It is awful, and unlike an “adventure” in a popular movie, the ending is not happy, at least as we might hope.  We know before reading the book that Martha worsens predictably and dies.  What kind of adventure is this?  We might ask.  Give us “Pirates of the Caribbean”!

But fun adventures eventually ring hollow.  We are real stuff in a hard world and we demand – something in us demands – the real thing.  No more BS, as some might say.  And this is it, this dying, our real adventure, no BS, no joke.   It is what we were made for, because we make of ourselves something else – something, like Ozzi and Harriette, that is not real.  Oddly, we convince ourselves that the real – the spiritual – is the fantasy and the fantasy – the normal life – is the real.  And then we pine deep in our soul for the real.  And we get it, but not as we would wish.  Like growing up in the normal world, we have to go through hard knocks first, but the jump between the normal, as we call it, and the real, becomes too great for mild lessons.  The normal becomes too normal.  All must be broken and rebuilt.  And all eventually is.

​Carlen Maddux understands this far better than I, for he has been through the whole thing (and still awaits his own real thing).  For me, there is more fear in this final enlightenment than joy, but I see from the first half that he is finding that his Christian God (he allows for other faiths, but this, as he says, is what he knows) is one of love.  This still eludes me, and so I will read on and will read others who know more than I.  But I do know of the hardship, and I do know that it is necessary.  I do know this because of my own impenetrable ignorance as to what living a real life really means.  I feel the lack.  I have adventured because of it.  Still, I have to learn the love which those who come out the other side say there is, after all the pain and the terror of this very real adventure.  FK   
 
 
  
 
  
 
 
 
 
 

​Ticks – that was what I was going to write about.  How ticks have become a big part of life in certain areas of the country, like malaria or dengue fever in others, and how – or why – this may be.  They have affected and infected me.  They may yet kill me.  Whose idea were they anyway?

But something else came up on the MSN site, a place where material for this blog is rare.  In one of their many side-bars, I saw a picture of an attractive female back with a cross dangling from it.  The title was “What I lost and gained when I gave up God” in some blog-zene I had never heard of before, Refinery29.  Whatever the heck that means.  Given its obscurity, I suspected it would be a propaganda piece for atheism, but I was wrong.  Nor was it pro-God.  It was, rather, an honest and straight-forward account of an interview with a British woman of 27 that was about as blunt as could be.

We learn in the piece that only 30% of Britains now have a religion (as opposed to believing in God.  Another study was done in a Scandinavian country with similar results, but the vast majority said they were spiritual non-the-less).  This young woman was chosen for the piece for an obvious reason: she had been raised as an evangelical, with talking in tongues and all, where every aspect of life was seen as an offering from, or a test from, God.  She had been taught to have Jesus as her personal savior, someone with whom she should speak as a friend, albeit a friend with the upper hand.  This Jesus would encourage here, but also chastise her for bad thoughts and deeds.  With a simple decision, the “sin” would be forgiven, and then the world would move to the next challenge and conversation. 

At age 14, she began to become bored with this Jesus.  At 16, she began to drink and use drugs (recreationally, as apparently she does not have an addiction problem) and grow further from religion as practiced by her parents.  Still, she kept her Jesus and gave as her sense of loyalty the pledge of remaining a virgin until marriage.  At college, this pledge set her apart from others, and she enjoyed that special status.  But she was distraught with the ban on homosexual behavior.  In her church, being homosexual was not the sin, but acting on it was.  But she had known gays, and could not find them any more objectionable than any others.  She stopped going to church, and finally went all the way with a boyfriend.  Later, she also had a homosexual experience. 

At one point, she looked at herself and said, “You no longer go to church, you no longer talk to God, and now you no longer follow the sexual rules.  Therefore, face it, you no longer believe in God.” 

By the time of the interview, she said that her belief in God had been something like The Matrix movie – where she found that everything that she had ever believed in was wrong.  The whole God thing had been a fantasy.  It was now so clear to her.

​What was gained?  Freedom from guilt, she said, especially over sex.  What was lost?  Safety and assuredness that life meant something.  Said she: now that she no longer has this fantasy of God, she sees life as just a succession of time.  Bad times and good times just are – there is no justice or lesson or anything to them.  Life is just a ticking away of genes, which is counting the days to her death, which will simply end her life.  Nothing.  She admits that she is not as happy as she had been.  But what, we are led to understand, could she do?  Believe in a lie?

Perhaps the easiest point to her story is this: that although religion gave her guilt, the overall sense of meaning to life was the greater of the two.  To her, religion had been a childish crutch that actually worked – although it was only a fantasy.  The guilt she was relieved of was not as great as the burden of meaninglessness. 

This is worthy of a much longer commentary.  For instance, much of militant atheism is obviously, at least to me, a way to cleanse the conscience of guilt, a guilt so strong that the empty hole left with non-belief is not felt.  Most important, though, is the idea that Jesus, or God, or Buddha, or what have you, is simply a selection from pretty children stories given to encourage certain behavior and give comfort in a scary world.  And I would say that, on the surface, this idea – the same idea our young woman has – is correct.  The vision she had of God and Jesus was an infantile fantasy. 

This has always been a problem with religion.  To make God accessible to the public, it has to speak to the psychic levels of that public.  It is why Biblical historians of faith have said that the Bible is a monument to spiritual evolution; that the God represented there must reflect the mentality of the people.  The evolution seen in God in the Bible is, of course, not the evolution of God – for God is unchanging, is “I AM.”  Rather, it is the evolution of the people’s ability to conceive God, who is beyond knowing as we usually understand it.  Our young woman was taught that, too, but forgot.  She was given a God who was just like her, only morally superior and more powerful, because that is what she and probably much of her congregation could understand.  Had she contemplated scripture more – or cross-referenced her own religion with others – she would have found out her error – or rather, her childish simplification of God.     

​What happened to her is that she outgrew her childhood God.  She did not, however, outgrow God, nor could she.  With due credit to the interview, she admitted her life was less happy and empty.  She still needs God as we all do.  But she has to work on it.  She has to grow her image of God to the level at which she currently is, and then some.  This is done by study, and by meditation and its deeper twin, contemplation.  She might also be helped by adhering, at least for a while, to another religion, one that gives her a more grown-up, or at least different perspective. 

I hope she finds some way back.  It is not easy when most simply do not want to talk about the issue, or have simply surmised that their childish impression of God is all that God is.  In this vacuum, belief is not easy because God does not normally manifest a finger from heaven, or appear shining in the night before us.  For most of us most of the time, God is simply an idea, a fantasy of what might be.  It is only through study, or prayer (meditation if you will) or the luck of grace that the invisible somehow, mysteriously becomes, if not visible, then at least real.  “Mysteriously,” because God is not comprehensible nor equitable with anything in the temporal universe in which we usually live. 

Yet, still, this mystery is reasonable.  The very darkness that comes from non-belief is telling us that life is NOT comprehensible in the ordinary way.  We have been told by the sages that there is a way, and in that, perhaps we first need faith on the spiritual path, a faith that says that there is something out beyond the darkness of unknowing.  But we also know it inside: it is what unhappiness was telling the young woman. 

She is still young.  Who knows?  But most of us at one point fall into the same trap of disbelief as we grow older.  OF course, our God at age 6 will just not do.  But neither will toy trains.  Someday, we simply have to drive or ride the real thing.  FK
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
      
      

​I don’t know when I first heard about Shangri La, although it was present in idea in the opium-induced poem by Coleridge, “Kublai Khan,” which thrilled all of us stoners back in the 60’s.  Who didn’t want to go to such a strange and wonderful place that was both of this earth but also beyond, an exotic eastern Asian form of Eden?  And then there was the band Three Dog Night, who wrote, “The Halls of Shangri La” (I think that’s the name) around that same time.  How do the lights shine in the halls of Shangri La? They asked.  We youngsters pondered.  Eastern wisdom, beyond our silly Western minds.  Yes, that was for me.

In college I tried to read the original story of Shangri La (the notion taken from Coleridge, or at least some other myth of the East then prevalent in the West) in the book Lost Horizon.  I could not get through it, though.  It was so thoroughly 1930’s, so built upon a stale idea of heaven that it was just boring, like our myth of heaven and harps and sitting around on clouds.  The movie was worse – they tried to jazz up the book version a bit with a hot romance and fighting, but still, who wanted that boring Shangri La?  Far in the Himalayas, it should be exotic beyond our comprehension.  Coleridge got it; the others did not.  We wanted what we thought was the real thing.

Many tried to get to Shangri La during the hippie diaspora, when thousands of burnt-out acid heads headed to India and Nepal with only a few bucks to find their guru, who would take them hand in hand to that paradise.  The Beatles did it, too, John Lennon writing later in the song that ends “And it’s making me feel like I’ve never been born” (what was its name? “She Said” ?) of his disillusionment with the guru that his band made all-too-famous.  A former Harvard psychologist, Richard Alpert, dropped out and tuned in to his guru, and stayed; he had found it, he said, although it was within himself.  He went the full distance.  But one wonders…did he have to leave Harvard Yard at all for that inner Shangri La?

One of my favorite travel accounts is by a woman named Alexandra David-Neel, who published in 1929 her book Magic and Mystery in Tibet. Done before the “triumphant” dominance of Mao and his Marxist paradise, she recounts endless examples of magic by the various priests and shamans of the world’s highest and, at that time, most reclusive nation.  It was hard for a Westerner to get into Tibet then, and even harder for a woman.  She must have been something.  And her account was just what we wanted to hear – magic and mystery in the land of Shangri La.  I believed her account and still do for several good reasons and one very bad one: I want to believe. 

I want to believe badly enough to have gotten into Buddhist philosophy in some depth – although not so much in practice where the rubber really hits the road.  It is a religion – or non-religion-religion as some say – which local customs shroud in mystery, although on the surface, there is nothing mysterious about it at all.  It is summed up in the 4 noble truths and the 8-fold path, which teach one about non-attachment to avoid misery.  There is something very mysterious about it all underneath, but on the surface, it really is as dry and as unappealing as unbuttered toast, emphasizing discipline, and then more discipline.  But like the elephants in the Hindu rites to Ganesh, local custom has adorned them to impress the crowd, and for us in the West, this makes its eternal truths exotic and magical.    

Now, I am reading a book by Pamela Logan titled Tibetan Rescue, published first in 2000.  She is an American astrophysicist who became fascinated with Tibet and its religion (and became a Buddhist) after she was allowed to travel there in the late 1980’s.   Her mission for the book was to help restore some of the old monasteries in Tibet for cultural reasons, something I did not think was allowed under communist China.  We find, much to our surprise, that Buddhism is now back in style there, although Mao and his cultural revolution (1966-76) tried with everything they had, including mass-homicide, to demolish everything Tibetan.  I will return to this book at a later time, but now I want to recall a Tibetan version of the conception of Buddha that she recounted: the souls of heaven were busy searching for the right vehicle for Gautama Buddha to be born into, and found it in a queen in northern India.  It was then that a white elephant lay beside her and made her pregnant with the Buddha’s soul.

The full account is much more elegant, but we get the idea: an absurd idea, yet appealing in its magical-ness and, to us, its exotic nature.  An elephant, really?  And yet it is easy to see that this idea is similar, and with cultural adjustment, no less miraculous or absurd than the conception of Jesus in the Virgin Mary.  We can see that the same idea is present in both: that neither was conceived through the normal rutting process, making both Jesus and Gautama exceptional right from the start.  The virgin birth had been present as an idea of purity in the Mediterranean for millennia, just as the elephant had long been endowed with supernatural qualities in the east.  In both, we could expect exceptional people, if not man-gods.

The point being not the equality of religions, but the nature of the exotic.  What is exotic to one people is the norm for another; what is Shangri La for one is just another boring representation of heaven to another.  Certainly, John Lennon could have found God near home in a local Christian monastery, just as Jewish Richard Alpert (now Baba Ram Das) could have found Yahweh in a good local Synagogue.  We chase around the world – or the world in our minds – for something that is already right in front of us. 

And more, for God is not only found in a religious setting.  The mysterious and exotic is always there, if we could see.  In a moment’s notice, with only a slight adjustment of perception,  the wall separating us from heaven, or Shangri La, can come down and find us in paradise in a cow field, or at Fenway Park.  This is, and has always been, the true adventure.  Our actual physical travels for the truth are an expression of our desire, and may yet lead us there, but it is never a location we go to.   It would be so much easier if it were, if we could climb that mountain and find truth at the feet of the guru.  And it might be that he could help, and that the exotic situation might shake us from our lethargy.  That I grant.  But the location, as Ram Das knew, was always right here, at the center of our circle.

This, too, is nothing new, but almost no one acts as if this were true.  Maybe travel is that knock on the head that we all need to truly see, but it is only a clearing of the eyes, not a new territory.  Shangri La is here, and in Tibet, and even in Beijing.  It is brought to us by a virgin birth or a white elephant, by anything that takes, as Paul said, the scales from our eyes, but it is not the knock on the head that is heaven, but the vision that comes after – often with discipline, and always with faith and the gift of grace.  FK
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
      
      
 
 
 
 
 
         

​The weather yesterday morning was the same as it had been for the past week – cold and rainy, a disappointment after early warmth in mid- April.  Good, though, too, in that it took pressure from doing all those necessary things that must be done in spring.  It was early that I woke, earlier than I had wanted, so there was really no decision to make: I would, sigh, go to church.  What else to do but to read the nearly - same headlines as the day before, and drink so much tea that the bathroom becomes the most used, and necessary, room in the house?

It was a sleepy lot in church that made it through the same old rituals that lead up to the beginning of the good stuff, the Gospel, where we actually might learn something - and we did, or at least I did.  It was the story of the “Road to Emmaus,” which took place three days after the crucifixion of Jesus, and the guest priest was warm to the subject.  Here, we find two disciples walking the 7 miles from Jerusalem to Emmaus discussing the astounding events of the past weekend.  They are joined by a stranger who we are told was Jesus resurrected, but who comes in disguise to the disciples to ask them about this event they are discussing.  What, they say, are you the only one in the area to not know of the crucifixion, and the report that the tomb was found empty?  Jesus continues to play dumb until they reach the town and he is invited to stay the night with them.  It is then that he re-enacts the last supper, and suddenly they see and recognize who he is, and then go on to tell all the others the next day.   

What we learn from the priest is that this is the re-enactment of the entire mass: first we are lead along the road to “talk” and then we find Jesus in the communion. 

Fair enough, but something else came to me, just as it came with the Gospel of the Transfiguration which took place on Mt Tabor, or with the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, or all those times that Jesus just suddenly “disappeared” into the crowd like Hannibal Lector at the end of Silence of the Lambs.  It is that God, indeed, works in mysterious ways, ways far beyond our reasoning or even our imagination.  Here, on the road to Emmaus, Jesus is disguised without disguise, inexplicably unrecognizable even to those who knew him well; and then, poof!, he is suddenly there for all to see.  How?  What the heck? 

It is this element of God that slapped me across the face this last Sunday, for it reminded me of how hard I have always tried to control events and outcomes, and when thwarted, have even prayed that God intercede on behalf of those plans.  It hit me, in part, because I realized just how f’ing boring it would be if things always did work out according to my wishes, and more, just how stagnant I would  become, as would anyone else with the same luck.  In truth, our best laid plans are made by and for beings (us) with a comparatively limited imagination and understanding of just what life really is.  It would be like the sailor steering his ship full speed ahead without having the faintest idea about the rocks and ocean depths he is sailing in – or the real nature of his perceived destiny.  If he had his way and was successful, how boring compared to the adventurer who strikes out into the unknown.  More so, sooner or later he will ground on the rocks and then bewail his fate, as if it were fate’s doing.  But no, it was from sailing without a clue, without faith in the instruments or maps onboard that simply were not studies. 

We have maps and instruments in holy wisdom, but still we never fully know, because we are partly blind, so blind that we cannot recognize, in a way, a man we have known well who is walking with us – a man that could be ourselves as well, for we do not even recognize this self at times.   We do not recognize that the road we are on is a road to a sacred feast, and that the preamble is the necessary journey, so that we might be ready to understand and appreciate better the destination.

If we got our way on everything, we would never recognize our journey and perhaps not even the feast at the end.  We would be flat-minded co-conspirators in denial of our greater selves, and our little triumphs in the world would only blind us to the real journey and the destination.  And we would be bored, for our will would not have taken us to where we really want to go if we knew ourselves – to the table where we see the face of God. 

If this sounds just too pie-in-the-sky, one should take a moment to reflect on one’s own life. Were the best moments those things that came about through careful planning, or those that came about as a surprise – the hike that brought us to meet our spouse, or that failed grade that made us change our course, which set us off in what we would find would be our true direction?

We design our world to gain the greatest pleasure or success and to avoid pain.  These are not necessarily bad things.  But that stranger sooner or later will join us on our path and reveal things or take us to places that we could not plan.  Like it or not, as long as we don’t know everything, our plans are a hit or miss thing, but inevitably, “fate”, what we are really involved in and cannot understand, will take charge. 

​Sometimes I despise these surprises, and that, this last Sunday morning, is what really slapped me in the face.   Yes, it is good not to smoke crack and to get to work on time, all these things we know that will help us avoid certain calamities, but often times we have no choice in what happens.   Oftentimes we are simply not going to get what we want.  And this, in the end, is a good thing, not because it is pretty and kind, but because it is necessary for our real purpose.  And it also makes for a far better story.  FK