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          I was doing it again, for the third time to be exact, and it was hard to fathom why. The annual Walk to Mary, from the church of St Joseph in Norbert College, Green Bay, to the Shrine of Our Lady of Champion, is stated as being 21 miles. It is really 22.5 – and boy, those extra yards are noted towards the end - and it is broken at mile 14 for a bus ride to get past the highway system on the south end of Green Bay. It is very pretty the first 7 miles along the Fox River, not so pretty the next 7, and wide-open corn country the last 7 (or 8 or so), which can be more challenging because there is no cover, none what-so-ever, those last miles. By then, the toll is made vivid – sun burn, dehydration, muscle cramps and blisters, blisters, blisters. You stare ahead down the long road and see no end in sight. It will never end. You cannot believe you are doing it and vow that this will be the last time.
 
            That was me, fer sher. It was worse this time because I was walking with injuries: a healing Achilles tendon, a bad knee from rock jumping in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a touch of sciatica in the left hip, and, worst of all, age. I had recently experienced heart-attack like symptoms which may have been gas but were suspicious enough to cause worry, and I was still recovering ever-so-slowly from the effects of two weeks of bad sleep with travel and inconsistent food.
 
            Oh, we had fun the night before: the barbecue house served great stuff and had a splendid choice of ice-cold drafts. I had two large ones and life couldn’t be better. It was all bon-vivant, even at 5:30 the next morning as we hustled to get in on the preliminaries at St Norbert’s. But at about, oh, mile 7 the reality started to kick in. The rejuvenating energy of the morning coffee was now showing its teeth by turning into jitters, and each mile got longer and longer. Fun became an inconceivable concept. An unwelcome sense of annoyance crept in, old-man stuff that couldn’t be sloughed off. Mild to middling pain, not enough to end the epic but enough to make it miserable, gave me a limp that would drag on for hours. By mile 17, all I could think of was that cold beer; by mile 20, all I could think about was ending the misery before the gathering thunderclouds turned into driving rain and deadly lightning bolts.
 
            At that point, thoughts became different. I really believed that I if I had been struck by lightning, it would be directly from the hand of God, and I would either be given super powers or would rise up, up, up to a martyr’s heavenly reward.
 
            Alas, there was no such luck. Rather, we ended up under the vast tent canopy that had been placed adjacent to the church so that the several thousand walkers could all join in on late-day Saturday mass. We had gotten there so late that there was no time to go to the bathroom or rest on the abundant grass that surrounded the small, unassuming Shrine of Our Lady of Champion. Besides, within 5 minutes of our arrival, the rain began in earnest, coming down in such torrents that at times we could not hear the (very good) singing from within the church. 
 
            The wind picked up. It got cold. The mass went on and on as we were made to stand endlessly even as our legs ached, our bodies shivered, and our feet screamed. Then something very odd happened. As I would learn later, I was not the only one affected.
 
            I will not go into the special nature of Our Lady of Champion here in detail, but only relate briefly why this place is special enough to get thousands of people to punish themselves with this long walk.
 
            Adele Brise moved with her family from Belgium to Champion in the mid 1800’s when she was just a child. Shortly after, in 1859, she received a vision of the Virgin and a message telling her to go out and become a teacher to children so that they might read the Gospel. She did, becoming a nun and forming with others a group that educated the immigrant youngsters in the area. With funds gathered by them, they had a chapel and dormitory built on 5 acres of land in rural Champion (ie, the middle of nowhere, which it still is). On October 8th of 1871, the lumbered-over area on the other side of the bay caught fire (at the same time as the infamous Chicago fire). The fire was so large and hot that coals flew across the bay and engulfed the Champion area in flames. With even the creeks boiling from the heat, people took refuge within the 5 acres of the chapel. Next day, everything was destroyed right up to the border of those 5 acres. 3,000 people in total were killed in the fire, including all the animals left behind by those who sought refuge. Everything and everyone were saved, however, within the chapel boundary.
 
            In 2010, the Catholic Church proclaimed the site “worthy of veneration.” In 2016, it was officially designated a national shrine to Mary, the only one in the United States. To commemorate the former, the Walk to Mary was started in 2013. 300 people attended the first; 6,000 the last. This year, the name of the shrine was changed from “Our Lady of Good Hope” to “The National Shine of Our Lady of Champion.”
 
            As said, with the exception of the portion of the old chapel that is still at the site, there is nothing spectacular about this place physically. The small church that had replaced the chapel was expanded by a basic pre-fab construction, and the nicest of the few other buildings there might well be the gift shop. Several acres are dedicated to a walking rosary that is bucolic and peaceful, but certainly not special enough to merit a several-hour drive. Nothing, really, in the physical nature of the Shrine merits a long drive, let alone a grueling, all-day walk. Yet thousands take it up year after year in increasing numbers.
 
            I had not really thought about the oddness of the whole enterprise during the walk, but as I stood freezing under the fraying tent trying to hear through the rain and thunder, the “why” of it landed on me unprovoked with stunning clarity.
 
            It came with a vision of Heaven. As I try to write about it, the facts I thought I had known now have become scrambled, but it went something like this: without losing vision of what was all about me – the tent, the thousands of people, the pouring rain, the chill wind – I had a broad interior vision of a landscape lit up in white crystal. Trees, grass, telephone poles – both those within and outside my mind (or so I recall) - were lit with a radiance that sang joy, that gave joy, that promised in the fact of its very being an endless joy. There was nothing in this world that could compete with this joy. It was self-sufficient and complete. It was a true happy place. I have no idea how long it lasted, although it did not seem endless, and I have no idea how it came and how it went. It was and then it became a memory all in its own mysterious way.
 
            Holy Toledo! What the…? The pain of standing in the cold was still there, but now it was more of a trifle than a misery. The mass went on, the Gospel was read, and then the bishop of the diocese, Bishop Ricken, began his sermon. After a few opening words, he presented us with a question: “This place is suffused with the holiness of Our Lady and her Son. You have sacrificed so much of yourself because of this. Many of you have come with requests. Tell me, how many of you have already had your requests fulfilled? Please stand up if you have.”
 
            I did come with requests, as most did, and none of them were fulfilled as far as I knew, except for the fact that I had made the full walk in spite of difficulties. But then it occurred to me that I was wrong – that I did indeed have my greatest request fulfilled. What was the other stuff - my interior verbal requests for this or that – compared to what I had received? I had learned with certainty that everything else was small potatoes compared to the vision of heaven. Not unimportant, but small. This knowledge alone placed the cornerstone of faith within my grasp.
 
            Of course I stood up. At least 20 others did as well. Apparently I was not alone with my vision. Then the bishop asked, “And who here expects their requests to be fulfilled in the future?” Practically everyone else stood up. Said the bishop after this, “See the power of this holy site? It is true. We know it is true” (all quotes paraphrased).
 
            He is right. There is something really special about this unassuming place where so many were miraculously saved during the fire, and which was miraculously rescued from obscurity 140 years later. How do these things happen, these visions, these miracles? What is this hand that guides us through epics and eras and tragedies and histories? What is this unimaginably vast power that actually has the time to care for and call to each of us?
 
            After mass, we all turned to find one of the dozens of buses standing nearby to take us back to the parking lots or hotels where we had left our cars. I pulled my raincoat closer, but quickly found that it was unnecessary. Just as the rain had waited for mass to start, we found that it had stopped suddenly right at its end. From there, all was fair sailing into the night.   
 

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          What do you watch on a Sunday evening with rain pelting the roof and nowhere to go? The possibilities on Netflix and Amazon and Hulu are limitless. A particular beauty, “The Librarians,” caught my eye, advertised as “adventures galore, secrets even more!” or something like that, which did get me to thinking: just what DO those mousy women with cat-eye glasses do at night when their hair comes down?
 
            But no. Incredibly, instead I clicked on – for both myself and my suffering wife – “Freud’s Last Therapy Session” featuring Sigmund Freud in his last days in London during WWII, where he met with famed Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis. Anthony Hopkins plays a domineering Freud who nearly cleans Lewis’s plate with his raw, scientifically-based assessment of Lewis’ conversion from atheist to true believer.  “Fairy tales!” he says. “How can a man of reason believe in this nonsense?” Although Lewis has an answer for everything in his books, here he seems to have lost his voice before the aggressive, self-assured Freud. So much so, that I had to glance at my wife now and then to see how she, a true believer herself, was taking it.
 
            It did not look like she was taking it well, and for good reason. The questions it raised in my own mind, however, made me watch with fascination. When Lewis feebly recounts his past arguments for atheism with his friend and colleague JRR Tolkien, he tells us that Tolkien pushed him to investigate the facts about the historical record of Jesus. That, and some personal experiences, convinced Lewis. We know the ultimate argument he would have had to confront: because Jesus really existed and said pretty much what the Apostles said he said, one would have to conclude that Jesus was either a liar, a madman, or exactly who he said he was. For the first, there were thousands of witnesses to his miracles, and no sane man would allow himself to be martyred, as the apostles did, for a lie; for the second, his inscrutable intelligence in the face of his critics negates any idea that this man was insane. This leaves us, as we all know, with only the third option.
 
            Freud did not listen to this argument, however, but rather talked of how silly this all was in the face of quotidian reality – it is, we might have to admit – and what a nasty god ‘God’ would have to be if he did exist. “Look at the suffering!” Freud stormed. Retorted Lewis, “Men, not God, have created our suffering.”  “Oh yeah?” replied Freud, “What men made my daughter die of the Spanish Influenza when she was 27, and her daughter die of tuberculosis at the age of 5?...I only wish I could  meet this monster and confront him on my death!” (all paraphrased)
 
            At least Freud did admit in the end to not understanding reality. That should have been a big opener for him for the entry of divine truth.
 
             Yes, the film did not allow Lewis to answer as he should have in many cases, but it did continue to push me to think about additional arguments for and against the belief in Christ and God that I have read. The notion of God being ‘all love’ while allowing the brutal realities of our world to continue is, of course, the biggest impediment to those who might be brought to belief. There is an answer to this, however, with two parts. The first, to which Lewis alluded, is the fact that men are themselves evil and bestow much of their suffering on each other. The second is that, through the story of Adam and Eve and the tree of good and evil, we learn that humanity caused its own separation from God by exercising the gift of free will. We all share in this separation, and it excludes no one, not children, not saints, and of course not sinners. By removing ourselves from the full protection of God, we opened ourselves as a whole to death, sickness, suffering, and of course our own evil.
 
            At the end of the film a note is flashed to the viewer, telling us what most already know: that Freud’s writings and research changed Western civilization forever. This is true, but how did it change us? His studies correctly uncovered truths that we hide from one another and ourselves, exemplified horrifically in the Oedipus complex, but incorrectly correlated that with our lack of souls. We were, for Freud, only thinking animals, doomed to frustrated sexual lives imposed upon us by society. He also understood that it was necessary to chain the demon within, even as it created neurosis, but the world never learned to what extent that “chaining” should be. The world took his discoveries of our hidden sexual desires and frustrations, then, without caution. From this we have gotten what we have today – broken families and growing sexual dysfunction as people try to fill the hole within themselves through sexual expression. What many do not understand is that sexual need, as with any physical need, is ultimately endless.  More, as Freud refused to admit, it is not our only or even our greatest drive. What society has created from his writings is a wrong-headed attempt to fulfill itself with what will never fulfill. It (society at large) is behaving much like a dog endlessly trying to catch its tale. Round and round it goes until, theoretically, it drops dead from exhaustion while solving nothing.
 
            Additionally, Freud’s studied failure to recognize Man’s connection to, and separation from God (he had ample opportunity, being raised in a strong Jewish family) sunk him, and the society that followed him, into a morass of ultimate meaninglessness. Instead of understanding that the universe was clearly created by a creator that logically cared for its creation, he pushed God away out of anger, leaving himself and his followers – many of us – alone with our broken and deeply perverse selves. There being no God, there is no truth but what can be ferreted out by a limited scientific method. With that, we have been allowed to toss off significant portions of traditional morality in an attempt to appease our never-ending psychological needs. Here we see the dog again chasing its tale, much as our society comes perilously close to spiraling into a dark pit from which it might not return.
 
            The writers and producers of the film exhibited the same myopia as Freud, even as they made genuine attempts to give both Freud and Lewis equal standing. We are allowed to sympathize with Lewis for his need for God and heaven, but in the end are warned against actual belief. As Freud said, God and heaven are fairytales suitable only for people with primitive or childish minds.
 
            It is an idea that exists in many of our political and cultural leaders today. But they are only resisting the actual evidence, just as Freud did by refusing to consider the importance of transcendental experiences among his patients (and thus his break with Carl Jung, who famously DID acknowledge this). So do most of us, at least at times. In this, we are showing our fallen nature, for our “fallen-ness” is not to be found so much in our ‘naughtiness,’ but in our failure – in our subtle refusal – to see beyond the flat world that Freud helped to create and perpetuate. It is this blindness that unites us, a blindness that comes with our separation from God.
 
            Lewis perceived that his periodic feelings of inner joy could be correlated with the real presence of God. We can see from his writings that he believed that this spiritual space elevated him and can elevate us above our worldly cruelties and twisted complexes. Freud refused to acknowledge anything of the kind. If we are to believe the film, this was done not out of a scrupulous compilation of his studies, but out of disappointment, hatred, and pride. We cannot follow his lead. It not only leads to a dead end, but leads to death itself.
 
            Freud’s view of the human being is the perfect reflection of our shared brokenness, but we are so much more. It is not Freud’s unearthing of our inner broken selves that will save us and the world, but rather the re-discovery of our higher, spiritual being. That is what the longing for the spiritual path has always been about.