​
            In his book The Man Who Quit Money, Mark Sundeen continually brings us back to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces.  In the beginning we might wonder why.  By the end, we understand perfectly: Daniel, aka, Suelo, the man who quit money, did not simply come to live without money from a reading of The Sermon on the Mount.  Rather, he went through the fires of hell, of suffering and near death, to get there.  That is the hero’s journey. 
 
It might have been less dramatic.  Suelo grew up with decent, but fundamentalist parents.  When he discovered he was gay, much to his chagrin, it was a major blow to his parents, especially his father.  This in itself, the family conflict and disappointment and religious marginalization, has marked the “hero’s journey” for many people who find that they are gay, but Suelo’s journey required much, much more.  When we fully understand how all-encompassing his sacrifice of money is, we come to understand why his is the journey of the hero: to accomplish impossible things, the hero must often go through impossible trials.   Suelo had three, the first beginning in Ecuador. 
 
The author quotes Campbell when he says that there is no such thing as chance on the hero’s journey, but rather opportunity disguised as chance, which is almost always lived as a great challenge.  For Suelo, his first great trial began when he was with the Peace Corp in the foothills of the Andes of Ecuador.  He was picking and eating berries with others, and by “chance” ate several that looked a little different than the others, but close enough.  When another saw what he was doing, she told him that he was not supposed to eat them – that the locals called them morideros, a combination of the words for “dog bight” and death. 
 
Within hours he discovered the truth to the name.  He was both intensely sick and hallucinating, falling into a mental space of eternity, but of a bad eternity.  He was caught in an endless cycle where there was no meaning for anything forever.  These feelings gradually receded until he was tempted to smoke pot with this fellow workers.  The horrors returned, and this time stayed.  This was when he wrote his parents the letter telling them that he was gay.  This was when he merely fell through his chores, since nothing meant anything anymore.
 
Homecoming held no hope.  With time it became apparent that this was what life was going to be like forever, so he decided to end it by driving off a mountain.  This was crises number two.  By some miracle he was saved, and that is when he began to piece his world back together again.  In doing this, he found two things that answered his craving: one, that in nature was healing and strength; and two, that following chance brought you closer to God.  That, in other words, one should put oneself at God’s disposal in nature to experience his will, which we usually perceive as chance. 
 
With this, he threw himself to the wind.  He drove with two women to Alaska, and after work on the docks, went into the mountains in early summer.  There he met another idealistic young man and the two went further still, at one point crossing a stream bloated with ice melt.  Barely making it to the other side, they stayed in a hunter’s cabin for three days until the rains stopped, then tried to make it across the stream to go back.  The stream was now a raging torrent.  Making it to some rocks in the middle, the other man gave up and wept.  Suelo pushed on, but after several efforts in the icy current, he, too, gave up and wept as he clung to a chunk of ice – giving him his third crises – and his answer.  It was simple but powerful: he found that he wanted to live, plain and simple.  With this, he threw himself into the stream, risking it all, and (of course, or we would not have this story) made it, eventually saving the other guy as well.  But it was this that gave him the will to live, and the strength to depend purely on “chance” – that is, on the will of God. 
 
In this, he would not depend on money.  Ever again.
 
And so he has not, to this day, or at least until the book was written.  
 
Here’s the funny thing: his discoveries are not that uncommon.  Most who believe in an active God, or Life Force, understand that there is no such thing as chance.  That the universe appeared by chance is to anyone not caught in the materialist maze simply ridiculous.   If made, then it is made by and with natural laws; and if governed by laws, then it is governed by intelligence – intelligence that makes of “chance” – our interactions in this world - a part of the laws of the universe.  Nature is a part of that creation, and purely responsive to God’s laws.  If, then, we wish to discover our path, it is most clearly poised in our actions in nature (It is still there among people, but more complexly arranged). 
 
But here’s the hero’s journey: if God works in our lives – and if (and this is the big “if”) God cares about us, as we are told in the Sermon on the Mount – he will care for us as we are, as children in nature.  There, we must find our faith; there, our very survival demands absolute faith, as it did for Suelo when he plunged into the river.  That was his hero’s destiny – to live, finally, without money, as close to nature as we can be in today’s world.   Try it sometime – it’s a big step, taking a whole lot of faith.  It makes the rest of us look small.  And in him, we see that God does care.  He, Suelo, lives. 
 
Good for him – he is a braver man than I.  It is almost a comfort that he had to go through hell to meet his destiny in faith, because that puts me, and most of us, out of his bounds.  Heck, we say, we couldn’t go through that!  But for some, that’s not necessary. 
 
There’s a book I’m reading right now by a woman known only as Peace Pilgrim that puts the classic heroic journey to shame.  In it, we find that she went out and lived in the modern world without money, requiring no journey through hell to get to that tremendous level of faith.  She simply figured it all out.  In this, she leaves no way out for us, making it clear that we can all become creatures of pure faith.  In the next blog or there abouts, I’ll try to tell you how she did it, and in this, how we can, too. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     
 

​     Many people think it is Christianity, particularly Catholicism, which created the prohibition against having sex freely and can point to the letters of St Paul to prove it.  Part of this is true – Paul did worry about the debauchery of his gentile converts, which really ruffled his Jewish aesthetic feathers, but sex and spirit/religion have always been intertwined.  We know of the worship of the phallic lingam of the Tantric Hindus, and of the bizarre sexual/religious practices of many of the tribes of New Guinea, but most sex/religious connections are of the prohibitory nature.  For the majority of Hindus, sex for men is an expenditure of spiritual energy (women are another matter.  In fact, not too much is written about female sexuality in religion, except that it should be reserved.  Obviously, further study is needed there) and should be limited to occasional encounters with a duly married wife for reproductive purposes.   It was the same for many American Indians, Aborigines, and, well, just about every group everywhere.  Semen contained spiritual energy; it could be given at a cost to the giver, or retained to increase all sorts of personal power, both physical and spiritual.  It is a belief that is held by most people to this day (including many American athletes). 
 
Sex is also one of the most abused practices in religion.  Jim Jones of the Guyana massacre had bizarre sexual obsessions which he played out on his followers; Indian gurus of the 1960’s and after played upon the naiveté of Europeans and American to have a sexual ball (watch Wild Wild Country on Netflix, about the sexual antics of Bhagwan Rajneesh in Oregon in the 1980’s); and we know of religious leaders of our local American churches who have betrayed the trust of both adults and grownups for their sexual desires.  They are really too numerous to mention, and in my mind are rolled into one squirming mass, from the mega-church leader in Colorado who was snorting meth and having bisexual orgies to the numerous Catholic priests who have defied their vows before God to prey on children.  The strong sexual desires of many religious leaders is and has long been well known.  In one of his novels, John Steinbeck highlighted a minister disgraced by sexual misconduct, declaring that God and sex were so intimately entwined as to be inseparable.   
 
It is true – sexual orgasm (again, at least of the male variety) is the one truly ecstatic experience that most (men) can have on this earth, and so is a natural link to the ecstasy – and the love (no matter how reduced) - of God.  That it also has the potential to create human life also gives it an inseparable link to a creator god.   But, like most natural gifts to humans (such as intelligence), it can and often is abused.  In the Christian tradition, because sex parallels so many God-like characteristics, it can, just like God’s most favored angel Lucifer, become the tool that most disabuses the will of God.  In the same way, those who are considered closest to God are the ones who most offend God by their sexual abuses. 
 
And so it is.  In our church, no one ever saw it coming, or going for that matter.  Less than two weeks ago, a man who is now 25 and lives in California shocked our area with a long public pronouncement of his sexual antics with Fr. B when he (the boy) was between the ages of 12 and 17.  He had gone to the same Catholic grammar/middle school as our son, and the same public high school, and our son had known him as a unique but inoffensive character.   He had come out as gay after high school, and said in his statement that he had been a willing participant, but thought that he should expose the priest in case he (the priest) was forcing himself upon others.  Of course, the trial has not yet taken place, and there is still room for doubt; but of course, a grown man may not have sex with a minor, especially one so young, regardless of that minor’s willingness.    
 
One of the most vicious things about sexual abuse in cases like this is that priests, just like teachers and counselors, are given special trust for children (or were.  What are we to become when we trust no one?).  But that is not my point here; rather, what we see here is an irrational, even diabolical, sexual drive.  This abuse allegedly took place in the early 2000’s, well past the well-publicized Catholic Church scandal of sexual abuse that was exposed in the later 1980’s.  By the 2000’s, everyone was on edge about this, and the hierarchy was on the look-out, for apart from the moral travesty, the sex scandal seriously hurt the potential future of the church – and, to put it crassly, the dignity and offices themselves of the hierarchy.  We who helped out with the school were even forced to take a painful course on sex abuse and how to notice its signs and bring an end to it.  And yet this priest, who was very active, well known, and beloved of many of the congregation, had the stupidity and/or arrogance and/or spiritual and cultural blindness to have an affair with a 12 year old, expecting that nothing bad would come from it.
 
Many believe that it is the celibacy rule of the church that makes so many Catholic priests predators, but there are also married Protestant abusers, and many school teachers who also abuse.  In the case of the later, it is not a spiritual propensity, but perhaps a Freudian - style perversion, an arrested development, that brings such teachers into teaching in the first place.   But it is that spiritual connection that bothers us most, and certainly seems the more pervasive, perhaps because of its diabolical nature.  If Fr B is guilty, he must understand as a priest his own guilt in the eyes of God, sins as deep in its own way as premeditated murder.  How was he able to live even before he was exposed with such guilt? (We will assume here for the sake of argument that he is guilty.)  The church might say that he allowed Satan to possess him, and in so doing, was convinced that it was OK – that the boy was gay and in need of a special love and understanding.  Really, though, I believe the devil did not have to speak at all; instead, it was the voice of sexual desire increased by the spiritual longing that sex temporarily relieves – a desire for ecstasy in one-ness.  That is the ultimate goal of the spiritual, and why it crosses paths with the sexual so often.  Sex is the material path that shadows the spiritual path.  For a spiritual person, it may be taken as an exemplar of spiritual ecstasy, but only as an expression, never the final goal.  Once the confusion is made, however, the mind then makes excuses as to why, just this time and with just this person, it is OK to break the rules; no, even better than OK – rather,  why this time there should be a special-case dispensation of the spirit, eliminating sin and guilt. 
 
Jim Jones, Bhagwan Rajneesh, Mormon polygamists and certain Catholic priests – caught by the Holy Spirit, and then turned by sexual desire into gruesome caricatures of what they should have, and could have been.  We will never see the end of it until the End Times – sex is just too close to our greatest desire, and too tempting for the forces of evil to abuse, either within or without.  Its greatest harm is to those who are not quite certain of their spiritual path, or who might reject one or the other or all of them because of these terrible hypocrites.  Which is just what evil would want, and just what we don’t need. 
 
  The real religions have known about the potentially disastrous power of sex forever, and this is why they have always kept this force under wraps.  It may seem over the top to us moderns, but look at the mess and disillusionment that an abridgment of these religious laws often make.  Best we understand what we are dealing with and not throw the baby – the core of spiritual morality - out with the bath water, the silly rules.  Too bad that Fr B (and too bad for whoever his victims might be, if the allegations are true) became deaf to the truth about this eternal danger in the chorus of his own longings and the bellow of his self-conceit.  
 
 
 
 
           
 
 

​
            In Mark Sundeen’s book, The Man Who Quit Money, he tells us of his first sighting of this money-less man, “Suelo,” after Suelo had become Suelo and quit money: “…but could this old guy, gray in the muzzle, with deep lines on his face and pants worn thin, be the Daniel I had cooked with a decade before?... He smiled at me.  The sight of his teeth, dark and crooked, rotting right there in his mouth – it chilled me.”  Yes, that is the fate of anyone who quits money – bad teeth, bad clothing, and eventually bad health.  Oh, and don’t forget – cold wet nights and never enough food.  I know: I went mostly moneyless for months at a time in my youth as I hitchhiked the country in search of some sort of heaven (see my book Dream Weaver, Amazon).  It is uncomfortable stuff.  But I know something of why he does it: to live by fate, and to live free. 
 
I still remember those times as something, if not beautiful, then special.  To live free.  Funny how that coincides with a notion that came to me recently, just before I bought this book, from Bible study, of all things.  Not everyone would note this, but an old hitchhiker would: in the Bible, people pulled up stakes and hit the road on a whim.   Joseph took Mary and Jesus to Egypt after Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem, just like that.  Later, Jesus and the Apostles often camped in the wilderness, cooking fish over a grill, while later still, Paul went and lived off the Arabian Desert for three years after his epiphany on the road to Damascus.  Afterwards, he traveled for tens of thousands of miles, often on foot, camping off - road as he moved from town to town.  It was OK then; travelers abounded, and given that they moved by foot or hoof, a journey from Jerusalem to Macedonia could take months.  They were given food here and there, worked (Paul was a tent maker) on the fly for necessaries elsewhere, and foraged when possible.  He and his disciples were not considered ancestral hippies or bums.  The world then, for all its barbarities, was unquestionably more open, if one had the courage to face bandits, and the luck not to run afoul of some local petty tyrant.
 
It did not take too many pages more of reading to discover that Suelo’s life-style and my conjuring of Biblical times was more than coincidental.  Suelo had been raised a Christian fundamentalist, waiting and expecting The Rapture to come any day.  Material goods had little value in a world that could disappear at any instant, and the words of Jesus about the sparrow and the lilies of the field – that they did not reap nor sow, but were cared for by God, just as you are – were taken literally.  His family did not live that lifestyle, but understood it as the ideal.  Daniel, aka Suelo (from the Spanish, meaning earth) was determined to live the ideal, and he did. 
 
Most of us don’t, and the author of this book ventures to tell us why.   Much of the beginning reads like soft neo-Marxism: before white man, the land was open and free to all, beyond owning, but with his coming came capitalism, and from thence forth, we became slaves to money.  This is Marxist because we are told here that Man is made from his economy; that is, that before capitalism hit America’s shores, the living was free, if not easy.  That was not the case.  Indian clades, or tribes of chiefdoms or states, did own land.  It was seldom owned by an individual, but by the group, owned individually only as long as it was put to use.  Go onto Iroquois land in, say, 1700 to settle for good and one would not get a wave of love, but either be forced to pay tribute to the nation, or be killed.  No – the spirit of man comes first, and his systems follow.  The systems differ but emanate from the same spirit, which is almost never one of open love.  It is this spirit that marks the story, and the struggle, of humankind - a clash between the primal powers of greed and want, and of love.   
 
Still – land in Biblical times was there to camp on for the traveler, just as it was at an earlier time in America.  At an earlier time, too, we were nearly self-sufficient, living from that land, needing money only for extras and some low-tech tools.  Nowadays, it certainly seems like we are slaves to the almighty dollar.  Even if one owns a house outright, the taxes due must be paid.  Homesteading, even in Alaska, is illegal.  Only American Indians can live for free on their reservations, and almost all have long given up self-sufficiency.  This is not only because much of the land left to them is too hard to live from, but also because our tech economy of money is, simply, easier.  We get a lot more for our hours of work – or from welfare checks – than we do from gathering and shelling hickory nuts. 
 
The book, then, is not, or at least should not, be primarily about money and capitalism, but about what we have traded for an easier life: freedom.  Money chains us, but so have social and cultural obligations for all of human history.  Money is the contemporary monster, but that monster has always been with us in other guises.   Again and again in the Gospels, Jesus admonished us to be free, even in those pre-capitalist times.  To be free is to be free of human law as the driving factor and at one with God’s law, which gives us everything we have always wished for, if we only knew it.  To sway from God’s law – God’s will – is to be perpetually dissatisfied.  In dissatisfaction, we create situations that we believe might alleviate our dissatisfaction.  One of those situations is a capitalistic system, with its emphasis on monetary wealth, but the emphasis could have been on prestige and social position, as it was for Biblical – era Jews.  Then, they lived by the letter (rather than the spirit) of the law and the respect that this garnered, and it was this system that Jesus addressed as hypocritical and enslaving.   
 
Now, however, money has become our greatest master.   Suelo has decided to be free by being free from money.  I have only read 40 pages into the book, and I am impressed with his freedom, but also with its downside.  This includes not only the material disadvantages, including the lack of medical and dental care, but also the impracticality of us ALL living like this.  Suelo, after all, lives primarily from the garbage of the mainstream.  Like a buzzard or jackal, he requires the skill and energy of the hunters so that he can live from the leavings.  If land were open to all, he could forage for more, but not for long if we all decided to do the same thing.  Our system might be moneygrubbing, but it is efficient.  Industrial farming, with all its machines and genetic manipulation, is what allows over 300 million people to worry more about weight gain than loss.  Without that tech, and without the incentives of private property to develop and buy and utilize that tech, most of us would, simply put, die. 
 
It is not his lifestyle, then, that is practical.  Anyone who has pondered Jesus’s comments about living like the wild things knows that, without special powers, we cannot actually live like that.  It is, rather, the attitude of trust in God, and of understanding our place in the cosmos, that frees us.  We are not to be consumed by money, or our stores of grain or gold.  Some of those things are essential for life, but we should not be oppressed by their possession.  Do what has to be done in an honorable way to survive, but then move on.  Live, instead, to find and to follow one’s cosmic role.  With this perspective, one becomes free to fulfill the adventure that we are intended to live.  With this perspective, we see the stars at night, and not just the ground that we strain to see to keep from stumbling.
 
A lot more pages left in The Man Who Quit Money.  I have no idea if the author or his subject will bring the reader to further wisdom, but the questions raised even this far into the book certainly can.  With this, I do believe there will be more to come from this fortunate literary find.      
 
 
 
 
 

 ​ 
            This is in reply to Cal Roeker’s comment on the last blog, “Discovery Through Denial”: (Note: this was written before the latest comments (below, added to "Discovery"), which would have changed at least the tone a bit.  Yes, as Rooson notes, a pilgrimage is a time of reflection; and the word "privately" at the end of Roeker's comment does change its emphasis.)
 
            If one is really interested about spirituality and ego, read Thomas Merton’s No Man is an Island.  I believe I had a blog on that a few years ago, but it’s always worth a refresher.  To summarize, anything can and usually will be used by the ego as either a defense or a boost – including criticism of aestheticism, which might just be a defense against an inner laziness.   For instance, who hasn’t heard people say, “I don’t have to go to church – nature is my cathedral!”, and then they barely go to nature, and rarely with an attitude of divine reverence?  The criticism is the cop-out, a defense against changing a routine that the ego thrives on, comforted and cushioned against challenges to its supremacy.
 
            The ego hates challenges, unless they are easily overcome and give instant bragging rights.  Yes, everything can be used as an ego boost, but as stated in the last blog, when the challenge is truly great, the ego often fades from relevance.  Then it comes down to surviving the challenge.  Simply put, it is more likely the critic of the pilgrim rather than the pilgrim himself who is assuaging his ego.
 
            It is like this: in a documentary about Baba Ram Das that I saw and wrote about a month ago, there is one great excerpt that the picture had.  It was of a young and charismatic Richard Alpert (Baba Ram Das’s original name) telling an audience (my paraphrase): “I am one of the few people I know who likes talking to dying people.  I like to because no one anywhere else is more honest.  There is no bull shit among the dying.”  An arduous sacrifice or pilgrimage is an attempt to mimic the state of dying – to leave the normal parameters of our physical being to experience what is beyond.  It often succeeds, simply because it is so difficult.  The ego becomes only a rider then, a hitchhiker taking a back seat to what is really driving the car, which is the inner eternal spirit. 
 
            So it is a better path, but like everything else in this world – maybe even among a few of the dying – not without its frauds.  In said book (above), Merton mentions all manner of fasting and penance that he and his fellow brothers did to garner accolades.  We have only to recall Jesus’s admonition of the Pharisees who fasted to impress others with their holiness: “When you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites.  They neglect their appearance, so that they may appear to others to be fasting.  Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward.”  (Mat. 6: 16)  Note, however, that Jesus did not say to NOT fast; except for his disciples, who were “guests of the bridegroom,” it was taken for granted that fasting was good for the soul.  We are just not to brag about it.   Jesus’s forty days of fasting in the desert serves as a prime example (of course) of the value of fasting and self-denial.  It was then that he met, and bested, the devil.  His action was not to boast, but to serve as an example.    
 
            Then there is (Saint) Padre Pio, recently canonized.  This is actually an interesting case because it shows the degree of skepticism, even hostility, which the Church hierarchy has towards special sacred events or people. 
 
            As a child, Padre Pio did not play with his classmates in his small hometown in Italy, because they blasphemed.  Instead, he played with his guardian angel, who he could see and talk to clearly (he could also see others’ angels).  He slept with a rock for a pillow to mortify himself.  As a young novice and then priest, he would fast for so many days that they would have to send him home to his mother to fatten him up.  But then came the stigmata – that is, the open, bleeding wounds he developed on his hands, feet, and side that mimicked the wounds of the crucified Jesus (the first known case was with St. Francis in the 13th century).  This was too much for the bishops and others in the hierarchy, who believed he was somehow doing this to gain attention, or because he was mentally deranged.  He was examined by many doctors who could not explain the amounts of blood lost without death, or the lack of infection or bad odor in and from the wounds, but nevertheless, an onslaught against him as a fraud continued throughout his middle years.  He was forbidden to hold public mass or to leave his convent or to appear in public (the public found him anyway and adored him to the point of obsession) by the Vatican (the Holy Office) itself.  Eventually his supernatural powers (to heal, to bi-locate, to prophesy, to read minds) and saintliness could not be denied.
 
This shows the extent to which even the Catholic upper echelon marginalizes those who undergo hardships for spirituality.  Penance is often something that is questioned even more severely by the powerful, which Jesus might have foretold in his Beatitudes, where he blessed the meek, for it is always the innocent laity who first recognize the fruits of the Holy Spirit in both Man and nature.  Could it be that the smart, the official, and the revered are reading into others what they would do themselves, as the Pharisees did? 
 
In any case, it is clear that to do some sort of spiritual penance or exercise is better than doing nothing at all.  If you fear your ego will get in the way, tell no one and admonish even yourself when you start to think that you’re great.  But don’t say that it is all silly - that God is within you, and what more can you need?  Unless you are one of the few born without sin, as the Jews and Christians would put it, you need spiritual help, and penance in the form of fasting, or of pilgrimages, or of other actions that stress the will, have been known by nearly all people of all cultures to, as the American Indians say, “make the gods pity you” and grant favors.  Although you might not deserve them anyway, you probably deserve them more than the guy sitting in his armchair already satisfied with his share of holiness.        
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

​ 
            After our recent twenty-one mile “Walk to Mary” from Green Bay to the Marian shrine at Champion (with a 25 mile bus trip in between after mile fourteen) I brought up the idea of the famous five- hundred mile Camino de Santiago in France and Spain to my wife and son.  Both said “no,” with an additional comment by my son: “No way, but you go if you need it for your ego.” 
 
            After looking up the Camino, I was convinced not to go – too crowded and commercial and noisy – but I did not wince at my son’s biting put-down.  He just doesn’t understand pilgrimages yet.  Yes, there might certainly be ego involved – I know that many who walk the Camino proudly sport the scallop shell they receive after completion on their backpacks – but just like running a marathon, some pilgrimages are so demanding that the drive of the ego is lost in the process.  With a marathon, it becomes a contest between comfort and will; and with a pilgrimage, between living for the world or for the spirit.  That is what it comes down to in the end.
 
            In this, a pilgrimage affects one very much like a fast done for spiritual reasons.  In both cases, one is denying worldly comfort for spiritual discipline and strength.  On fasting, here is what Richard Foster had to say in his excellent book on spirituality, Celebration of Discipline: “Anger, bitterness, jealousy, strife, fear – if they are within us, they will surface in fasting.  At first we will rationalize that our anger is due to our hunger; then we will realize that we are angry because the spirit of anger is within us.  We can rejoice in this knowledge because we know that healing is available through the power of Christ.”(pg. 55)  
 
            Talk about spot-on.   The day of our pilgrimage was perfect – temperature around seventy degrees, a cool breeze off of Lake Michigan, a bright sunny sky, and the bursting out of the flowers and leaves of May.  But it was all on hard-top, and as one seasoned hiker wrote, “I would walk forty miles in the mountains rather than twenty on pavement.”  Although a few people seemed unaffected, for most of us our feet became swollen stumps dotted with painful blisters.  Is was grueling.  On top of that, for some reason (maybe the novelty of the pilgrimage) I was hyper as all hell the night before in our hotel room.  Because of this, I drank five beers to sleep, and then woke up pretty much for good at three when the alcohol wore off.  I thus had a bit of a hang-over and a horrible lack of sleep for the walk.  Add to this the pain of the feet, and I was impatient outwardly and worse inwardly.  The funny thing was, I knew that it wasn’t just the hike, the beer or the lack of sleep that was causing these bouts of bad humor.  Hour after hour as the pilgrimage plodded on, I realized more and more that the bad humor, as Foster put it, was in me already.  It was just waiting for an excuse to come out.  I realized this even as I felt the bad mood, and was glad for the realization.  It was a gift of the walk.  Because I was doing this as a sacrifice for spirit, what was bad became very good, a valuable insight that will help purge me of at least some of my inner demons.
 
            This is what a pilgrimage is for – to purge spiritual toxins, to suffer and to overcome, and to contemplate and realize what one is and what in life is really important.   Like my son, many people believe that the best we can do for our soul and the world is to give time and/or money for those in need.  Certainly these outward forms are good, but how good would my pilgrimage have been if I were snarly the whole time and did not have my realization?  How much less the good, then, when giving is done out of resentful obligation.  In this way, we can see why the disciplining of self is so important spiritually: it helps to cleanse us of blockage to allow the entrance of the good.  This makes us more willing, and certainly more spiritually attune, to give, so much so that the practical person might say, “Sacrifice the self in pilgrimage and fasting so that one might become more generous.”  But that is a footnote – although an important one – to the story of living.  By doing that which cleanses, we become less affected by random events and emotions, and more in tune with divine will.  In divine will, we do what is best for ourselves as well as for everyone else and the universe, to boot - and we ourselves discover a greater joy that elevates not only the self but everyone else around us.  Life, then, becomes at least a little bit better for everyone regardless of how the divine spirit calls us to act.
 
            No Camino de Santiago for me, but some other adventure in sacrifice and/or spirituality calls.  It always has and always does, for me and I think for us all, all of us offered ways to clear our own blockage and become part of the solution, for both ourselves and for others.  I can’t wait to see what it will be, but the gift of spiritual discipline might insist that I do. 
 
 
           
    
 

​There are certain young people I know who consider life a drag – a slog to an inglorious and inevitable demise.  What’s the point?  A few pleasures here, a bunch of hassles there, some real pains in the asses over there, so why not end it all?  Humans, after all, are destroying the environment and filling the world with their corruption and cynicism.  Better that the end of the human race comes sooner rather than later, an end that is assured anyway through our greed and technology.  Why prolong the agony? 
 
This essay is an extension of the last, in that we are confronting the fantasy world of boredom that we have created to protect ourselves from the terror of the big, dark unknown.  Ours is not a boring world, anything but, but for many young folks today, journeying towards truth is harder than ever, for they often have nothing, no belief or spiritual practice at hand, to serve as a guide into this unknown.  Without that guide, the already terrifying becomes hopelessly daunting; in the short run, resignation to death and despair is found to be the better option.
 
The world, however, and we humans within it, are not designed to resign.  Most of us do not really want to die, because that is the one state of being from which not even boredom can protect us.  What, then, do we do if our blind fear has created a more comfortable but meaningless world where there is nothing to live for?  In such circumstances we are forced to act, to move on.  The prime objective for all life is to continue living; and for humans, there is also the need for a reason(s) to live, even beyond the fear of death.  This is as planned; we are made for the adventure of discovering meaning, and through spiritual longing are given the drive to satisfy it.  
 
But what if an age group doesn’t even know where to begin?  In this, the attitude of these depressed young folks is not entirely their own fault.  It is the collective elders who have given them this bleak caveat, arrived at through generations who have gradually dumbed down the ultimate realities of human existence to instead ameliorate the discomforts and fears of material life.  For instance, I could tell young folks to go to church to find a reason to be excited about existence, but most church services have become so routinized that they elicit yawns even from the old fogies.  We old fogies are the ones who have done that.  We have done that because we increasingly do not want to consider the serious cosmological consequences of our thoughts and actions in a world connected by an all-permeating spirit.  It’s all too big, too responsible, and too scary; better to isolate and contain the spiritual stuff to a small time and place; better to point out the silly anachronisms of a service or mass so that we can ignore the serious underlying messages: that we all are created for a purpose and that we are expected to fulfill that purpose. 
 
That we are created by an incomprehensible cosmic force for a purpose is frightening, but thank God for that, for a life that does not have its risks and terrors is not worth living.  To live in an insular world, as these nihilist young people often do, makes life not only pointless but boring.  That we are also expected to fulfill this purpose implies that we must live in a certain way, which is a burden, but it is exactly this that gives us the framework needed to find fulfillment.  It is also of utmost importance to know that these messages - that we are created for a purpose and are expected to fulfill it - happen to be true. 
 
Here we find the beginning of the vision, as people of wisdom have known throughout all time and cultures: that we are all on an epic journey towards our ultimate destiny.  We people of the Book call that destiny “God.” 
 
The entire nature of this journey is the antithesis of boring.  In fact, it is this journey that has underscored all the greatest stories of humankind, from Gilgamesh to Abraham to Luke Skywalker.  In our current version of reality (I refer to our contemporary cultural vision), our dragons do not breath fire or have scales, but the obstacles keeping us from God are real enough.  The dragons are our inner demons who wish to trap us with vices or certain ways of thought, from gross sensuality to the very plague of these young people, hopeless nihilism and ennui.  Sometimes these dragons are more visceral: the horrors of war, gang violence, rape, and all those other timeless evils of humanity.  Combined with the natural dangers of disease and accidents, we are set up for one hell of a story.  There are also dark dungeons along the way, now mostly made from depression, and the paths that fork, one leading us further on our destiny, the other towards the dead ends of meaningless death or vice, or boredom and despair.   This makes of life the ultimate challenge, to say the least.
 
All that might seem too abstract, even corny, to young folks, so they should understand this: along the destined road are wonders and terrors of a miraculous kind as well.  We are built for adventure, so that we might have the courage to begin our journey through the wilderness.  We find our courage through proper foundational beliefs, so that we might begin to lose our fear of the unknown, and with this, allow the unknown to live in us.  With this, strange coincidences occur; we meet the right strangers at the right time; we find our destined love and our destined work, all of which bring us the excitement of life that compels us to strive further onwards.  Even angels might appear in the mist; even existence itself might whisper its meaning if we understand that our destiny is guarded by, is made clear by, our final destination.  By following our destiny, nothing is impossible; by keeping in mind the destination, anything is possible. 
 
            Sacred purpose gives energetic direction to our entire lives.  This is all that young people need.  It has always been the older folks’ obligation to instruct the young on finding and achieving that purpose.  This is to make of life a gift, not a chore.  This has always been, and should always be, a peoples’ greatest gift to the young.     
    
 
 
 
 

​May 2, 2018 – Dots, Math and Paranoia
 
We bought this little camper a few months ago called a “Tab” and have been dying to take it out for a test journey, but the weather decided to give us the second coldest April on record, and the record for April snowfall.  All that cold stuff started to change for the better a few weeks ago, so that finally, this last Sunday, we had a chance for a simple one-nighter in a local state forest.  It worked out great, giving us a chance for a long walk the following day.  We are taking these long walks - six and seven and nine milers - because we are going on a “Walk to Mary” this weekend, a twenty -one mile walkathon from De Pere, near Green Bay, to the apparition shrine of Mary at Champion.  Even with practice, it will be a killer.  What, are we nuts?
 
Of course we are, and it was exactly on that premise – that we are religious nuts – that I got off on a discourse about religion and fanaticism on that long hike.  I noted that I agreed with the Catholic Church on some integral things – for instance, that the material world must be put in its place beneath the spiritual world – which is part of the reason for the mind-over-matter twenty -one mile hike.  But there are other things that I just cannot get myself to believe because they seem too pat, too “olde-time” medieval, too fashioned by the hierarchy for an ignorant people.  Purgatory?  Judgement Day before a celestial tribunal?  A seat at the table?  All of these things seem to allude to something important, but I feel that they should not be taken literally. 
 
What I feel, of course, might not have anything to do with the truth, but I try.  In fact, we all try; we all try to connect the dots, to make things make sense.  It is what people do.  Thing is, when it comes to the big stuff like “What is the meaning of life?” or “What force was it that made the universe?,” we have woefully little information.  So we do what the Catholics did (to add to the Bible), and what the ancient Greeks did, and what we all do to this day: we filled – or fill – in the dots. 
 
We can look at the points of light in the sky and try to make sense of them by imagining them into animals or mythical figures, as the Greeks did.  Of course they are not those animals or gods.  Or we can try to put those points of light together just as the Greeks did, but out of ignorance, get even that scheme wrong.  And both groups, the Greeks and the guys who got the Greeks wrong, can go on thinking that they put the dots together just so to make sense of it all, but both of those groups will have gotten it wrong.  It is not just them; none of us has all the information, so all of us put the dots together wrong.  We are all trying to put a million piece jigsaw puzzle together with only 17 pieces in hand.  We try and we try, but we just can’t do it. 
 
But we think we can, because that is our need and our nature.  If a group thinks it can and agrees on the scheme, it is called culture (and religion within that culture for the big picture); if only one or a few connect the dots together to explain the big picture, we call it paranoia.  In both cases, we are wrong, but in a group we have at least the security of being wrong together. 
 
This is not so in all instances, however.  Years ago, I read that the ancients, particularly the Egyptians, considered mathematics a sacred tool given to us by the gods.  To become a mathematician, one first had to pass through a rigorous course in a mystery school.  I could not understand that then, because math had been given to me as a dull mechanical tool – and a pain in the butt – in our secular school system.   Now, however, I understand: math is the tool not just to build, but also to understand the mind behind the universe.  It connects the dots in an unambiguous way, one that cannot be mistaken.  It always works under the circumstances that it is suited for, and it makes sense.  It works everywhere for everyone.  It is an astounding discovery of the mind behind the dots, and leads us directly into the mind of the gods (God). 
 
We, however, no longer see math that way, and I have come to the conclusion that if the average priest could raise a person from the dead, that, too, would become just another ho-hum event in our ho-hum world.  The thing is, as the mathematicians of old knew, this is NOT a ho-hum world.  This is a world, from our limited perspective, of miracles and will always remain so because we will never have enough pieces of the puzzle to work out the big picture, at least through our normal senses.  But we have to believe that we DO understand.  We are all paranoid delusionals who believe in a fantasy world and then yawn about it and wish we had magic, or Peter Pan, but not really because we wish to live our lives in a bored, unsatisfactory manner.  We do this, one can only conclude, because we prefer boredom and meaninglessness to the fear of not-knowing. 
 
I know that frightening feeling of coming close to knowing; I have been on the edge and it is a terrifying place.  In a lifetime, many of us have, and the thing is, once we have, we cannot help but want to go back, even with the terror.  We cannot help but look for a way that will bring us back to that terrifying cavern that is so frightening, yet so beautiful, so filled with wonder and meaning – a place that we know on first sight is our destiny. 
 
And so we find a proper vehicle that fills in the dots just enough, while tugging us along towards the edge, towards that endless gulf of mystery.  And in this, like little kids going back to try the bicycle again, we rediscover the miracle that is life without the paralyzing fear that made us reject the world of the spirit in the first place. 
 
So we accept those concepts – that practice or religion – with its silly quirks to get at the big picture without freaking out, at least not entirely.  This is called belief.
 
Odd how it all works out, too.  Just as I reached the conclusion in my (overly winded) monologue during that long walk that life IS a miracle with, from our perspective, anything possible, I noticed something small and unnatural within a bush.  Had there been just a little more foliage, I would have missed it, and even as it was, it was odd that I saw it.  I got closer, pushed the branches away, and noticed that it was a small porcelain angel that someone had hung there.  This was a state forest, not a shrine, and there was no reason that we could see that this would have been placed there, much less so because almost no one would see it then, and no one at all in the summer months.  It was also then that my wife thought to start the rosary before the walk was finished – which we finished right at the very end, in perfect time.
 
Paranoid?  Delusional?  Yes, maybe, but the idea behind it is not.  We may be religious nuts – to go on a twenty one mile walk we must be - but miracles are real. We may be connecting the wrong dots, but the bigger picture, life itself assures us, is bigger than any of us can imagine, something in which anything is possible.   As humans, we need to stay focused on that bigger picture to complete our destiny.  To help us, there is always an angel to jolt our routine so that we might see beyond, as long as something in our lives – some belief or attitude – is there to remind us of our humble ignorance in the face of the infinite.