​ 
Ah, poor Jerry Falwell Jr., or maybe you haven’t heard.  Few probably care except to raise a sardonic smirk and say, “Here we go again.”  Apparently, the son of a preacher man and inheritor of Liberty University, along with his wife, were swingers, which is to say, traded spouses to relieve the boredom of married sexual life.  Here we go again with another hypocrite who cannot practice what he so vociferously preaches.  The worst of it for the public parallels the fallout from the Catholic priest scandal by creating a cynicism which leads to the rejection of the good because of the bad – and sometimes legitimizing the bad, as in “If even a preacher (or priest) can’t keep his pants zipped, how can (or why should) I?” For me, while I know that fewer priests per capita have been found to be sexual involved with the under-aged than public school teachers, still, it at least seems to be that the holier-than-thou are more accursed than the average guy.
 
Maybe it’s true; maybe the devil tries harder for those who are trying harder to escape him.  This is held as axiomatic for many believers, but I think the grander take-away is this: that it is very, very hard for anyone to eschew all the things of this world.  Even the saints – maybe especially the saints- have a hard time, although in part because they set the bar higher for themselves.  For instance, after my favorite, St Augustine, conquered his sexual desires, he went on to disclaim himself for enjoying eating.  Not binging, mind you, but eating. He realized that he was required to eat to stay alive, but he suspected that he might sometimes eat for the sake of taste.  Oh horror. Such scrupulosity is so far above my abilities that I feel no shame in my weakness regarding food, but only amazement at his strength.
 
But it seems that we are all set upon by a certain weakness that we do care about and that becomes our special vice to conquer.  Some, like poor Jerry Jr, are cursed with the humiliating need to flail it about until all the world is given to picture their pink behinds twitching away with accompanying grunts and groans.  Some walk the line with addiction, while some are congenital liars.  Akin to the liar, there are also many of us who need some sort of trophy so that we can present ourselves to the world as something grander than what we know we are.  Given my recent experience, this might well be the special vice given to me to conquer. 
 
It happened last Thursday, at something called “Adoration” at the Catholic Church.  It is the Catholic belief that the host is not a representation of Christ, but his actual body.  So it is that when a host is consecrated – that is, ritually turned into the body of Christ – it can be worshiped and ‘adored’ just as the man-god would in human form.  Personally, I don’t really care for most of the ceremony of mass, but Adoration is a perfect for meditation, with the host serving as the mantra to keep out external and unwanted thoughts.  After several minutes of this meditation, I usually ask for some advice, or anything God wishes to tell me.  Last Thursday I got the message loud and clear: “Psalm 131.” 
 
I had myself memorize the number, but then forgot about it until I went back that night to read more of Augustine’s Confessions.  In this, he quoted a psalm, and with this I remembered my own psalm and looked it up.  I was hoping for some sign to proceed forth to greatness, like David when he was told to conquer the Philistines, but instead I got this: “Oh Lord, my heart is not proud, nor are my eyes haughty; I busy not myself with great things, nor with things too sublime for me. Nay rather, I have stilled and quieted my soul like a weaned child.  Like a weaned child on its mother’s lap [so is my soul within me.]…(Psalm 131, The New American Bible)  I understood this to mean: Nothing but child’s stuff for this lad, who is but a weaned babe on his mother’s lap.  No greatness for this one.  Bummer.
 
Being disappointed showed right off the bat my own need for recognition, and this immediately set off this not-too-sublime mind of mine in pursuit of why I needed recognition.   This forced me to recognize that I don’t need anything beyond what I have: a family in pretty good shape, a house, money for food, and the common distractions of reading, writing, playing guitar and, alas since Lock- Down, watching Netflix and Amazon Prime series.  Sure, I’m getting old and nothing works quite as well as it used to, but such is the fate of all flesh.  Otherwise, I have everything I need, or should need.  But I don’t.  Obviously, I want people to be impressed with me. 
 
This is, when looked at with the naked eye, an embarrassment, a state of affairs much like the un-weaned child, who sits not with contentment on his mother’s lap, but cries to be nourished with something that, given his age, he should not want or need.  I want, but I don’t really ‘want.’  I have been thoroughly fed and should now be a man in need of none but God’s succor, but this is obviously not so.  Still I cry: Oh give me a great deed to accomplish so that they may build statues to me, at least in their minds!  Yes, all so unnecessary and, when looked at squarely, so pathetic.
 
There is an odd ending to this lesson, however.  Friday night, after I had written the first page of this essay, I went back to reading Confessions (this Friday was also Augustine’s official day of recognition).  Since it is a dense book, I only read a few pages of it a day, and often miss reading it when traveling, so I did not catch what Augustine had really been writing about for all of this section of the book.  Finally he told the reader in no uncertain terms that this section had not been only about his famous struggles with sexual dalliances, but with temptations in his life in general.  The sexual need had been the most shameful thing for him, but he had also to struggle, as briefly mentioned above, with food and with such nothings (to us) as enjoyment of music and visual beauty.  All of these were temptations that could and sometimes did lure him from thoughts of God, and all of these things he admitted to largely subduing.  But there was one thing he thought he might never be able to conquer:
 
 “…there is a third kind of temptation which, I fear, has not passed from me.  Can it ever pass from me in all this life?  It is the desire to be feared or loved by other men, simply for the pleasure that it gives me, though in such pleasure there is no true joy.  It means only a life of misery and despicable vainglory.… yet in what others say about us and in what they know of our deeds there is grave danger of temptation.  For our love of praise leads us to court the good opinion of others and hoard it for our personal glorification.”  So it is that I was in part redeemed, for if one of the greatest saints of the Catholic Church could not conquer his need for praise from Man, who am I to condemn myself? 
 
But there is a catch.  It is not that I am freed from such a problem.  Rather, it shows me that a once-common man, Augustine in his youth, was able to subdue the other lures of the material world for God, leaving only this one tenacious element of pride.   Just as with Augustine, I should be able to do away with those others, and, since I now understand it, should work on dispelling the distraction of personal glory all the more.  Although we – at least I – often treat self-betterment as if it were a game, for Augustine it was no game, but rather a struggle between eternal death and eternal life.  It was a big, big deal to him, and clear to his supreme intellect that to be caught up in the things of this transient world is folly.  And so it is; so it is that, when vices are written out as I have done regarding praise, they do show themselves to be attitudes of weakness and vainglory. 
 
Augustine should know: he died 1600 years ago, and all is less than dust except for his thoughts.  All he knew, from the Roman Empire to contemporaneous theories on geography and cosmology, are antiquated, of interest only to historians and those who dally in the past.  All the conquerors and emperors and great artists and singers and philosophers of the day are either now poorly remembered or gone from all human memory.  To be revered by Man is vainglory, just as Augustine said, and other temptations are even more ephemeral.  Where, then, is a way out of this “game” but to acknowledge the truth, that all is folly in this fallen world?  For a man of Augustine’s genius, admired as he was and is in spite of himself, he could do nothing less.   
 
  
 
 
 

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Yesterday, as I stretched on awakening from my afternoon nap – I take one because I can – the first thing I saw was the book binding with the title “Iberia” (by James Michener, if it matters).  Funny thing was, in my semi-sleep, a part of me did not realize what that meant.  Another part did, and it wondered at the part that didn’t.  Iberia?  What’s in a name?  The part that didn’t know wondered at its foreign sound, and languidly guessed at what it meant: Tales of Arabian Nights?  Mohammed and the zealous hordes?  Which is to say, this mind had an idea, perhaps taken from the mind that understood, but not an exact idea.  It was different.  How could that be?  How can we have two thinking minds?
 
This morning I was looking for a decent CD to run on the old portable that sits on the dishwasher while I cooked a breakfast that had to include peppers and tomatoes, since we have 15 tons of them in the garden and they are threatening to mount an attack.  I shuffled through them (the CD’s, not the tomatoes and peppers – one does not shuffle through a mountain), seeing some that are definitely for winter only, or for spring, until I found one on the bottom that took me by surprise.  It was conductor David Wilcox’s Cambridge Choir rendition of Thomas Tallis’s masterpiece, “Spem in Alium” (which I believe I have mentioned here before.  If you need a big nudge to believe in God, this is it.), which I have been looking for over a year.  And there it was.  Of course I played it, and it brought the well-needed whelming of faith that is usually so hard to achieve.   I thought that this is why I found it (primitive that I am) and it was, but only in part.  It also suggested to me an idea that went so well with Iberia.  Here it is:
 
Think: when you lose your glasses, you really do know where they are.  Your mind is playing tricks on you, like a leprechaun that is stationed in your brain.  And when you are standing on stage and forget your lines due to stage fright, horror of horrors, you certainly do know your lines, but that leprechaun is acting up again.  One part of your mind is working either apart from another or actively against the other part.  I will not try to understand why here, and I’m sure it can fill a psychologist’s doctoral thesis, but it is so. 
 
Now think of that rush of spiritual feeling that many get from Thomas Tallis’s work, or from other songs or from cathedrals or the rock formations of Zion National Park.  Yes, these outside elements tip feelings off, but they are not in any way the feelings themselves.  We might have a great one-liner from “Dust in the Wind,” but there are none in the rock formations at Zion, nor really in “Spem,” because the words are in Latin and they can’t be understood anyway in the blending of the chorus.  Rather, the feelings come from within.  They were hiding there all along and needed prompting.  This is not like sex, that often needs another body or imaginary body to get the juices flowing, but rather something else that is entirely free from the material world, although it can be invoked by things of the material world.  It is, and has to be, within us at all times (wherever ‘within’ is). 
 
We live, then, with our normal side paired with the immortal and the sacred, both always being with us even as the sacred is normally sensed as being apart.  Like the glasses we lost, a part of us knows where the sacred is, but just like the glasses, we continually forget where we put it.  Something, a leprechaun of sorts, hides it from us even as it knows how to retrieve it.  Even if it is bequeathed to us by the Holy Spirit - which it must be, just as life is – it is still there with life, necessarily side by side.  The question is, what stops us from living with it at all times?  Unlike sex, an experience of the holy does not wear down our bodily chemical needs, nor does it age or become undesirable.  Like sex, if we experience it once, we want it again, and unlike sex, with spirit we can and want to have it all the time, forever. 
 
But that is not for this world.  That is the problem we as a spiritual species are set with in this dimension of living.  We are beset here by two minds, one on and one usually off from the one on, the latter relentlessly distracted by the hard-wired world of brick and mortar.  It is the job of the great spiritual leaders to give us techniques of “memory” that are used for tasks far more important than finding glasses or memorizing lines, and it is the gift of great artists to help us break through the maze of memory loss to get back to base one, back to our origin and to our future, our alpha and omega.  This is something we want to do, just as we want to find our glasses, but to want is not enough.  Finding the memory, the mind that always knows but hides, is what we need to do. 
 
The ways to do this always converge on denial of this world for the other.  It makes sense – we cannot remember where our glasses are if we are simultaneously thinking about other things, which is probably how we forgot them in the first place – but who wants to be mindful all the time?  This is the greatest challenge for the Masters – to find the technique that can save us from forgetfulness.  To follow such technique(s) is the greatest challenge for ourselves.  But if we at least know that the other is there, or are told by those we trust that it is, we just might drift towards it as our life naturally fades.  It might be that, as our material brain deteriorates, we can finally come to hold in our other mind that which lasts forever.   It could just be, then, that grandpa or grandma in their dementia might have turned the tables, with the daily mind lost to the spiritual mind.  It might just be.   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

​ 
It’s been a strange summer of disrupted plans and unplanned excursions, the latter being attempts to patch over the former, with the default being camping trips to state forests and pilgrimages to the always-faithful cabin in the UP.   So you will note irregular postings which will probably continue into September, as lemons are stubbornly being turned into lemonade.  Who do I blame the most for those lemons: the virus, the amoral news media, the immoral politicians, or the ignorant and frightened masses? 
 
Or maybe myself.  Time will tell, but this last week was spent up at the cabin, where I heard the book-on-CD, Explorers of the Nile, by Tim Jeal.  Oh, the Dark Continent!  It went so well with my readings of the Old Testament for its barbarities and cruelties, from god-like perverse kings to the outrages of the Arab-Swahili slave traders.  The book should be read by every Black Lives Matter supporter who imagines that the evils of slavery were invented by white slavers in Anglo America.  They will discover, if they can bear it, that those evils existed in Africa during and long before – and long after – the American experiment in exploitative racism.  The list of casual cruelties is endless.  Read the book for the disgusting details. 
 
But this is not about blame, which has become such a useful, if dishonest, tool in current political discourse and action.  Rather, it is about the nature of ourselves, we of all colors and geographical backgrounds.
 
We have visited these grounds before: what is Man?  Is he the harsh force of nature as depicted by Hobbes, that man whose life is “brutish and short”?  Or is he the benevolent Bambi in the woods, if only the yoke of civilization had not been placed on his shoulders, as Rousseau the raconteur wished to tell us a few years before the triumph of the guillotine?  In Africa we have a sometimes-surprising glimpse of that nature through the outlook of the many explorers who sought fame and adventure in attempting to discover the source of the Nile, something sought since the time of the Pharaohs.  Some, like Richard Burton, thought that, ultimately, the black savage was irredeemable.  Some, like David Livingston, loved him but wished to convert him to a better way through Christianity.  And some, like John Speke (the one who discovered the source, though this was clouded by his co-adventurer and later enemy, Richard Burton) found this “savage” so much more refreshing than civilized man, who was in his opinion was cowed and tamed to a degree in which life itself was not really worth living.  For this reason above all he had become an explorer.
 
But the cruelties.  While certain of our citizens burn buildings to protest the brutality of Western Civilization – the same hypocrisy I found in the old days of the Vietnam War “peace” movement – they do not realize that most of the ideas that they hold dear about human rights and anti-racism came about through the Judaeo-Christian religions.  The people of the Old Book were every bit as brutal as the warlord chiefs and slavers of 19th century Africa, and the iron hand of the Roman Empire did nothing to further soften them.  Rather, it was the voice and edicts of their god, who has become for many of us our God, which civilized them in the manner in which civilization means compassion and mercy.  But messed up?  How many times have we heard of - or experienced ourselves – the neurosis which defines much of modern life?  It is this mess of unhappiness, propelled by inner feelings of guilt and worthlessness, which John Speke wished to escape, even at the expense of his health and ease.  
 
In a different way, our revolutionaries in the street are fighting to relieve themselves of the boredom and comfort of their controlled lives by destroying their source, even as they fling around empty notions of justice.  It is not justice that they really seek, but freedom from civilization.  I know – I have been there, although I have never thrown a Molotov cocktail at anyone.  I tried to shirk the yoke of civilized decency in my youth, which led to what I have written (wait for the plug) in my book, Dream Weaver.  I, too, believed in the goodness of humans if only we were set free – from capitalism, from religion, from school, or from whatever seemed handy at the time.  
 
Of course, our current revolutionaries have no intention of setting YOU free.  And that is the way it works without our notion of civilization.  With no eternal moralities to confine us, we would be less neurotic, but so much more selfish.  In the days before the maturation of Christianity – and we might include some other religions based on compassion – the strong controlled the weak.  They controlled them as much as they wanted too without having to think of others as people equal in worth to themselves.  Those others were commoners, or of different ethnicities, or of darker skin or, as we are seeing now, of the lighter variety.   There was no eternal one-ness, only a one-ness of the ego of the honorable lord-high mucky-muck and his chosen cronies in race, family, or ideology. 
 
What do we find from the explorer days of the Dark Continent?  It may or may not be Man-in-the-rough, as there were true nations in central Africa, which only technological Europe of the time could call primitive.  But it is Man without compassionate religion, Man without realization that all humanity is his brother and sister.  As the explorers tell us, life in Africa was freer and lither in personal expression, but far more brutal and usually shorter.  There, the morally compassionate could not live for long with the other, the natural ego-centered self.  At that time there was no real choice to be made.  As one African chief told an explorer, “The good are only good because they are weak.  Once they become strong, they become bad.”  But now, because of that pesky thing called the moral conscience, there is a choice. 
 
It is seldom that we have the chance to fully compare the ‘other’ to our own side, but in in our current world of doubt and tumult, we now can. History tells us that we cannot have both equality and moral relativism at the same time, for without that inner morality, the strong always end up abusing the weak.  Fortunately, we are still able to choose which direction we want.  Such books as Explorers in Africa show us the consequences of our choice – that there is no path that we might take that will fully satisfy our human nature.  However, it is clear, at least to me, that one choice leads to a more mature and greater truth than the other.  Hopefully, we are grown-up enough in this liminal time of history to make the right decision. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

​ 
Lo those many years ago when I was writing my thesis and thought myself an old man – at thirty five, little did I know – I came across some unexpected problems.  One group of Indians I had lived with in back-woods Venezuela used bananas, along with sweet potatoes, as their staple food.  The problem came when I looked up the provenance of the original banana.  Did it come from tropical Africa, the Near East or Southeast Asia?  Not a bad question to ask when we know that potatoes, tomatoes and corn came from the New World, sugar from the Nile delta, and pineapple from far east Asia.  It should have been a question answered simply, right?
 
It was not.  It happens that no one really knows where the domesticated banana came from, and there are, or at least were in the 1990’s, still arguments about where the original wild species sprang from.  Archaeological sites with banana traces, they tell us, are hard to find, as the banana is tropical and things in the tropics that are not made of stone do not last long, and as for seeds, well, domesticated bananas have no seeds. 
 
The problem came up again with dogs.  The same group I lived with had this small, very agile hunting dog breed that I had not seen elsewhere, so I looked up the origins of the domestic dog.  Were dogs, in general, world-wide before the arrival of Columbus?  Answer: unknown.  Many authorities on the subject tell us that the domestic dog arrived with Europeans, but we all know about the Aztecs and the Chihuahua breed, made small and hairless and docile for the culinary appetites of the Azteca upper class.  So, dogs were here, but barely, according to the records (and what about Huskies and Eskimos, aka, Inuit?)  Or were they here big time and simply not noticed?  Early dogs and wolves and coyotes, after all, are from the same source and are capable of interbreeding and creating viable offspring.  Maybe those canine bones at the old camp sites were Fido in the rough. 
 
The same can be said of human species.  It is still held that we all came out of Africa, and a DNA marker test claimed that Eve – the mother of us all – spilled out her troublesome, world-trotting brood about 50,000 years ago, meaning that all of modern humans were once brothers and sisters just a few years ago, in geological terms.  That sat well with the crusaders against racism in my graduate days in the 80’s, but the past twenty years has seen a remarkable change in the genetic records.  Now it is thought that humans had many genetic offshoots from an original proto-hominid over the past several hundred thousand years, including Denisovan, Flores, and the well-known Neanderthal species, or sub –species.  These can no longer be dismissed from the modern Sapiens sapiens because it is believed that most of us carry some of these “other” genes, somewhere between one and three percent among Asians and Europeans, although less to nearly no percent in sub-Saharan Africans.   And don’t get started on the Australian Aborigines.
 
Meaning, at least to me, that things are still up in the air, which is a challenging place to be.  We need a foothold if we are to start an investigation, and air allows only wing-holds, which are fluid and unsubstantial.  With no foot holds, we can begin to accommodate all sorts of ideas, crazy and standard alike.  We can say that aliens seeded the world, literally mating with the proto-hominids on earth.  There is some possible reference to this in the Bible, in fact.  Or we can say that races are fundamentally different, as common knowledge once had it.  As the author of The Last of the Mohicans (James Fennimore Cooper) wrote, “we [races] all have our gifts.”  This, unfortunately, was the belief which opened the door for slavery based on race, which led to the anti-racist “one out of Africa” preference later on, with or without paleoanthropological evidence. 
 
Meaning, we don’t know even a slice of what we think we know.  Our knowledge is hindered not only by a shocking lack of evidence – some hominid species are represented by only a hand-full of bones – but by several twists of prejudices and preferences that cloud the correct interpretation of evidence.  We can use this to take a second look at all our beliefs today, both those before “PC” and those of “PC” itself, or at any other beliefs or interpretations.  I believe I could even make a stab at clouding the objectivity of mathematics, but I won’t because my time on this earth is limited.  Let me only conclude that we don’t really know where we came from and certainly do not know where we are going to.
 
Boy howdy, do we see this in the old movies and TV shows.  Often, our reaction to them is, “How sweetly naïve they once were!”  But they were not naïve at all.  They – those people behind the black-and-white images on the screen - started wars, developed massive corporations and nations, tortured and saved and loved and hated, all with the complex passions we have today.  They were not naïve, but rather were working off a different set of facts using different reference points.   It is nearly a guarantee that we will look really, really stupid – perhaps criminally so – to some generation or to generations in general to come. 
 
It is this that St Augustine was working towards when he wrote that real knowledge was a gift from the Holy Spirit, not an intellectual acquisition.  Dipping back into his work Confessions once again, he reminds us that he studied with the intellectual greats of his day, 4th century Rome, at a time and place when most kinds of thought were allowed – certainly, I would say, as much as is allowed in America today.   As we do today, they had a vast array of cultures to learn from as well as vast resources in historical records, preserved as they were in the great library at Alexandria.  They were closer to the greats then– to those Einsteins known and unknown who invented the fundamental roots of technology and formal logic.  Many scholars were aristocrats whose slaves did all the work for them as they studied and thought without disturbance.  This was Augustine’s world.  And yet he discovered real truth only in the writings of the crazy Jews from now-destroyed Palestine.  The truth was not just in the writing itself, but in what was behind the writing, buried layer upon layer within.
 
Which brings me back to that odd time in Jerusalem’s Museum of Scrolls where I saw dozens of faces embedded in the calligraphy of the scroll of Isaiah, one of the prophets most closely identified with Christ.  They were not there, of course; they could not be.  Only an older woman and I could see them.  The faces seemed much bigger than the writing, but were still none-the-less embedded in it.  Impossible, but there was no doubt that they were there for us.  This seems to me to be an example of what Augustine was talking about.  The faces, just as the writings, did not portray the truth, or at least not all the truth, but acted as a door-way to the truth, a door that was opened only by the gift of the Holy Spirit.  For me, that gift is still giving, even as I write this.  It is a lesson from Spirit that what we know – the facts – and what we believe we know – our reference points – signify no more than squiggles on a piece of paper.  What is important is what we are allowed to know beyond our ignorance and prejudices.  Such is the gift beyond human knowledge, and the only truth of any people or age. 
 
All we think we know by our own devices, then, is contingent, and will forever be.  Real knowledge is only that gift from the Holy, sparked by our investment of time and effort into the spiritual keys we have been given, such as the Book of Isaiah (or not.  Rain falls on the just and unjust alike).  It is so because truth is far, far beyond what we can even imagine on our own.  See how alien the faces in the scrolls were, how unexpected and surreal.  See how impossible it was that the promised King of the Jews should come as a common laborer who was tortured and killed like a common criminal.  Such things are forever outside our expectations until they are revealed.  Such it is with every truth – outside, beyond, given to us only at the whim of the infinitely creative principle.
 
Where did we come from?  Where from the banana?  I imagine the latter might someday be answered, and the former never, but it is enough to know that even the most basic questions can lead us into an endless maze.  That is why we were told by the prophets to be like children; not to be immature and rude, but to be wide open to learning, to things beyond our smug premises.  God works in mysterious ways because we cannot know a scintilla of how he works unless we are given the gift of insight.  Few will then understand what we have learned, but it will be alive at least within us.  We might peal the banana, but knowledge of the heart of Man will remain only within the realm of the miraculous.