Today, a new essay, "Panic Button," under "Essays" in the website.  FK  PS - and take a look at the beautiful comment on "Real Presence" (below) by Cal 

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The party was over and the darkness beyond the tiki torches was denser for the descending fog.  I was more than ready for bed and one beer over where I should have been, but she wanted to stay later.  “She” was a retired nurse, and even as her husband shifted uncomfortably in his seat, she projected a great interest to talk.  Things hummed around recent events and church stuff for about an hour until we got around to spiritual things, where death inevitably entered, and where, it became apparent, she wanted to be. 
 
I did too, even as I had to fight slipping into sleep.  I had been against the thought of death until well into middle age, when it finally appeared to me as the great arbiter of truth.  I explain how this happened in the story “Dark Angel” in my book, Beneath the Turning Stars.  I have spoken of it before here, so I will not go into details, but in summary, it is about a car accident on a road deep in the woods of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan that a friend and I happened upon on the way to the family cabin.  A few other people had already stopped, and something in the feel of things out there in the middle of nowhere compelled us to stop too.  It was as we began to walk to the wreck that we felt it, the eerie presence of spirit that I called the dark angel.  It was still and calm and frightening in its depth.  We were to find that a 17 year-old girl had died in the accident, and the feeling from her death hung with us for weeks.  It was unavoidable and totally otherworldly. 
 
The retired nurse knew it well, but she insisted that death had a feeling of complete peace and was not eerie at all.  She did admit that new nurses often ran from a room where someone had died exactly because of this feeling, but they were then talked into returning.  Death and its attendant spirit was, as these seasoned nurses knew, normal, and only once had it ever been horrible.  Our guest had not witnessed this, the screaming of a woman dying of cancer, but she and all the other nurses who were not there said that they were relieved that they had missed it.  That would have been horrible.  But this was exceedingly uncommon.  To the people who worked in death, it was almost always a peaceful and solemn experience.     
 
I had read of this before, about the “beauty” of the after-death spirit.  In the sweet little book Night’s Bright Darkness, by Sally Read, the author opens with a remembrance of an Irish nurse who washed and wrapped corpses.  The nurse treated the bodies politely as one would treat delicate people, and after the preparation would part the curtains to the day and open the window, saying, “Now we open the window and let his soul fly…,” just as she said for the man who Read had helped to prepare with her.  Read had been terrified up until then, but suddenly she felt the corpse become small and insignificant.  How, she thought, could this happen in a modern London hospital where, “The soul was long out of fashion.”?
 
I still recall with a bit of shame the last time I saw my terminally ill father a short time before the incident in the woods.  By then I lived far away, and my visits to him were infrequent.  He had been in an old folk’s home for over a year, ever since he had become incontinent and blind, and in that time he had become almost totally silent, sleeping most of the time.  They said he had cancer of the brain, but no one really knew for sure.  Really, to all involved, he was just another dying old man with no future. 
 
The hallway to his room had the usual stink of urine and antiseptic, and lost-looking old people with walkers and wheel chairs wandered about.  I found him in bed and asleep as usual, but he awakened instantly when I said hello.  He replied very brightly and with great pleasure, “It’s good to see you again, Fred!”  Still oddly uncomfortable, I began to mention some political shenanigans then current, as my father had always had a keen interest in the news.   The words fell in the air like lead.   It was not just that he was not listening, but that this other spirit was there, the same one that I would come across a few years later in the UP.  It had no interest in the politics or daily life of Man.  Rather, it spoke of truth as a deep cave speaks of silence.  Both my words and my attitude felt irrelevant.  My dad would slip into death a few months later. 
 
In the Book of Exodus, we find Moses tending a flock of sheep near Mt Horeb (Sinai) when an angel of the lord appeared to him in a fire flaming out of a bush.  As Exodus 3: 4-5 says, “When the Lord saw him coming over to look at it more closely, God called out to him from the bush, ‘Moses!  Moses!...Come no nearer!  Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground.’”  This is it: in the presence of death we are on holy ground, which can be anywhere.  This is what we feel.  Death does not bring all of the Holy down upon us, but it is the opening, an unwavering and undeniable presence that is stunningly real, so much so that the uninitiated run from it in fear.   Some become callous to it, and some use it in mockery out of defiance, but this only underscores the point that “it,” not just death but the “it” that comes with it, is a big deal. 
 
My conversation with my dad fell flat because it was as nothing in this presence; so it is with any social pretense or discourse at all.  Death tells us, “Here, look.  This is your true home” - not the cold stillness of the dead body, but the awesome “other” which greets what comes out of the body, now finally free to acknowledge that which was always there.   The rest of our concerns are like the golden calf worshiped by the Israelites even as the Lord spoke on high to Moses.   We swim through this “other” like fish through water, but are overwhelmed by the frenzy of active life.  It is often only death that reminds us of what our priorities really are: the peace-filled reflection and awe-filled worship of the holy presence.  For if we understood, we would know that we are always on holy ground, just as our still bodies and freed souls will one day proclaim to all in the sacred sound of silence. 
 
 
 
 
 

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            “Tell the king, on earth has fallen the glorious dwelling, and the water springs that spoke are quenched and dead.  Not a cell is left the god, no roof, no cover.  In his hand the prophet laurel flowers no more.”   - from Julian: vol 111,  by Wilmer Wright. 
 
It was suggested by a religious pundit that we should ask, while at church, for some words given by the Holy Spirit.  I try to do this but surprisingly often forget, but I did not forget last Sunday morning.  It is hard to hear this voice at first, as it has to go through the filters of wishful thinking as well as counter-voices of cynical disruption (maybe my own particular curse), but at last I got through to what always feels like the calm in the eye of the storm.  It was there where I rested my mind seeking advice, but what I got instead of words was a clear and beautiful picture of sand being washed around by low ocean waves on a beach.  I could sense the meaning, which was incredibly deep, suggesting that all acts of nature were God’s voice to us, but I wanted the words; I wanted the words now!  Every few minutes I tried to go back to that space for the words, but still got this picture that was both beautiful and filled with portent.  After several times the spirit apparently relented, for I finally got a one word answer, mentally shouted at me.  It was “Patience!”  It was not as full of meaning as the picture, of course, but with it I did finally understand better what was being said.  It was that God is in all things, timeless, and that all things will work eventually to the satisfaction of God.  Like the ocean and waves and sand, however, God’s time stretches into eons and eons, way beyond our time.   Things will come around, but often not when we want them to.  God will not be rushed.  All things right and beautiful will come when the time is ripe. 
 
So I read the message from the Oracle of Delphi (written above), to Julian the Apostate, ruler of the Roman Empire out of Constantinople, in 362 AD.  These were the last words ever recorded of the oracle, who chewed on laurel leaves and inhaled their smoke to go into a trance to reach the gods.  Julian had just traveled to Antioch to winter-over his army before attacking the Persians and was looking for oracular advice.  Instead he got this message that told him that the gods no longer spoke to the oracle because the age of the gods had passed.  This was a bitter blow to Julian, not for the lack of advice on Persia but because of the news that the classical gods of the Romans and Greeks were now effectively dead. 
 
I suppose he could blame much of this on his uncle, who had been the emperor before him.  It is complicated, but it boils down to this: the emperor before Constantine, Diocletian, had avidly persecuted the Christians, who had become an overwhelming threat to the old Roman system of belief, before retiring, leaving the empire to two chosen “caesars,” both of whom had very ambitious sons, Maxentius and Constantine.  Constantine had a Christian mother, Helena, but was not a Christian himself when he met Maxentius for battle at the Milvian Bridge by Rome in 312 AD.  It was there that he saw a cross brazened in the sky inscribed with the words, “In Hoc Signo Vinces - conquer by this sign” – which he did.  In gratitude, he legalized Christianity, then became Christian himself.  In the 320’s he moved to the solidly Christian east and built his new Eternal City at the Bosporus, called Constantinople (now Istanbul).  There he prospered, did some good and some awful things (for instance, he killed his oldest son and boiled his wife alive in her bathtub), and died, leaving the Empire in a mess once again.  After killing his brothers, his son Constantius II reigned briefly before dying young, leaving the empire to his nephew Julian.
 
Up to that time, Julian had been a scholar of classical literature, in love with the glory of the pagan past.   He despised Christians for being so dewy-eyed and meek and forgiving, preferring instead the virtues of courage, honor and duty of old Rome.  Much to his disappointment, however, he could not persuade the bulk of the people in his eastern kingdom to turn back to the old days, not even with carrots and harsh sticks.  Even as he waited for war in Antioch, the people there despised him, so much so that he left as soon as possible.  He had recently tried to cause the collapse of Christianity by rebuilding the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, thereby mocking the prediction of the second coming after the rebuilding, but an earthquake had destroyed his efforts and no one would dare try it again.  And then in the midst of a hateful populace at Antioch and his other failures at pagan conversion, the Oracle of Delphi had told him that she was out of business.  There were no more gods. 
 
An emperor cannot simply turn away from a war, and Julian believed that by defeating the Persians he could bring back the loyalty of the people to his rule and to the pagan gods.  Alas, the campaign was a fiasco.  He was forced to retreat, was picked apart by guerrilla-like tactics along the way, then was met by the full force of the Persians, where he was killed in battle by a spear through the side.  It is claimed that his dying words were “Vicisti, Galilaee – Thou hast conquered, Galilean.”
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The sands are not just the “sands of time” but an ordering of the universe over vast periods of time.  Certain things will come to pass, but only as they fit with everything else in exquisite divine harmony.  For the Roman/Byzantine Empire of Julian’s reign, the time had simply come for Christianity and there was nothing that the all-powerful emperor could do about it.  It is interesting to note that since then, Christianity’s time in the Mideast has also waned, its near-demise beginning with the conquest of Constantinople by Muslims in 1453, and extending into the present, as radical Muslim leaders, as well as the state of Israel, marginalize, exorcise, or simply eradicate Christians to this very day.  Yet, less than 40 years after the fall of Christian Byzantium, Christopher Columbus began a new epic for Christianity in the New World.  Now we find Christianity in decline in the very states and colonies where it had once thrived.  The sands of time are endlessly shifting.  If the New Testament has been interpreted correctly, few of the “elect” will be around at the Second Coming.  Is it this, then, what the moving sands are pointing to in human history?
 
It is the same with us.  We simply don’t know our fate, or when or if our prayers will be answered, at least as we might understand it.  The puzzle of our universe has an infinite number of parts, and the time limit for assembly extends farther than we can understand.  I must constantly remind myself that it is not my puzzle, and that I am only a small part of it.  I might enjoy my part by acknowledging the ability and wisdom of the maker, or I might fret and fume that life stinks because I do not always get my way when I want it, or anytime at all.  I simply cannot understand how it all fits together, but must have faith that it does fit together.  This even the Oracle at Delphi understood. 
 
“Vicisti, Galilaee” could also be, “viscisti Deus - you have won, God.”  Of course He has.  When one makes the rules and is the only one who knows them, what else should we expect?  Wonder and joy would be an appropriate response for us in life, not bitterness and antagonism.  We must not try to rebuild the Temple before its time, and, of course, I should not try to get my way with anything without patience.  No matter how powerful the gods, whether I include Zeus or myself among them, we are still just shifting sands flowing in the infinite, churning sea.   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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            It was not all fun and mosquito bites up north.  The two story cabin needed another coat of preservative stain, and standing on ladders on tiptoes while the sticky chemicals ran down our arms and spattered our hair wasn’t what memories are made of.  But we finally gave up for the season and headed down to do the “lighthouse walk,” a stroll of 3.5 miles along a nice gravel path to the old light house that is now manned by no man at all, but rather a computerized machine.   It was Labor Day weekend and of course the parking lot was filled with cars and SUV’s and campers and one lone bicyclist with long-distance gear attached to the front and back.  I noticed him with passing interest, a guy of about thirty dressed in spandex who couldn’t have had less fat on him if he had been flame cured.  I pointed out the biker to my son and would have continued on had my son not seen a small license plate attached to the back of his seat that said “Washington.”  With that I had to stop for a small chat, whether the biker wanted one or not.
 
            “You come all the way from Washington (state – a good 2,000 miles from the UP)?”
 
            “Yeah,” he said with no small pride, “and all the way to the east coast.” 
 
            “Holy cow!  And you’re heading back to Washington against the wind?”
 
            Of course he was.  He had gone all the way to Bar Harbor, Maine, tooled around Acadia National Park, and was now on his way back against the continental west-east wind just in time to beat the snows in the Rockies and Cascades. 
 
            “I bet you’ve had some adventures, huh?”
 
            “It’s been a good ride.”  And with that, the conversation ended.   He was not annoyed and would have continued, but we had a time constraint ourselves, and more to the point, it seemed to me (maybe incorrectly) that his adventures – or at least the ones he would talk about – all had to do with the challenges of biking.  I was looking for my kind of adventures – being taken in by some fanatical religious family in the Green Mountains for a week, or a single woman lonely for some anonymous company, or escaping a half-crazed pot grower in Michigan after being sky-high for three days straight.  Those are the kind of things that had happened to me in my travels (I will plug my hitching book here, Dream Weaver), but it was apparent to me that this would not be the case with this man.  With him, it seemed to be all about the biking.  What he was doing was an amazing feat, but that was it.  Climb the mountain and come down.  Courageous and undoubtedly moral, but limited. 
 
            Perhaps I jumped to such a conclusion so quickly because of an uncle of mine who recently died at the age of 97, only his last year spent as somewhat of an invalid.  He had lived an astounding life of adventure.  Growing up on the Connecticut shore, he had rowed across Long Island Sound in a home-made boat as a boy, climbed the vertical faces of several large cliffs in the area without gear, and in his late teens had competed to be a diver for the US Olympic team.  When the Big War came up, he served as a pilot for the B-17 bombers out of England, then again as a jet pilot in the Korean War.  He became a math teacher so that he could spend those long vacation days sailing and mountain climbing and scuba diving and who- knows- what.  He even ran marathons into his 70’s until his knees gave and his kidneys bled.  He was one tough and fearless guy.  And yet when my wife met him, knowing of his many adventures, she said, “I never met a guy who has done so many things who is so boring.”  This was no disrespect to my uncle, who was not any more boring than many of us.   Rather, she presumed he would have been fascinating, a Sir Richard Burton of America, not some math teacher who happened to have done some things. 
 
            His two sons were cut from the same cloth.  One was flying hang-gliders back in the early seventies when they were even more unsafe than now, jumping off sheer cliffs for updrafts.  He held the state record for staying aloft, which he kept breaking again and again until he stopped flying.  When I asked about his record flights and why he had stopped, he said, “At a certain point I learned how to stay up as long as I wanted.  It got boring.”  His brother had no fear of heights either, or of anything else as far as I know, and made big  bucks hanging from wires repairing really big and tall bridges.  But he, too, had little to say about it.  For him, a job was a job. 
 
            There are others too, remarkable people who strike one as unremarkable.  They may be that way because of humility, which is a virtue that I could better learn, but in the cases I know of, that is not likely.  Rather, these people seem boring to us because – and I am presuming here – life seems boring to them.  That is why they do remarkable stuff. 
 
My mother, the sister of the fearless math teacher, was precisely the opposite.  A walk around the block for her was an adventure, sometimes one of wonder and sometimes one of fright.  Colorful flowers and sun and shade literally sang to her, but stray sounds could be those of women or children in danger.  Nothing was a simple as it seemed to the rest of us, and she was in almost constant amazement.  She would NOT have made a good bomber pilot, and it would have been an adventure itself to see her work up the nerve to approach a cliff’s edge, let alone jump off it with a hang-glider. 
 
            The point is, she didn’t need additional excitement.  Life itself provided more than enough excitement as it was.  I am sure that heaven for my mother is color and light, without a stray sound of potential danger or discord. 
 
            Most of us aren’t as fearless as my uncle, or as replete with adventures as my mother, but most of us need at least a little more than what we have to keep the juices flowing.  Life as it is is simply not enough, and there is no objective measuring stick for us in what constitutes “enough.” Some men are satisfied with one wife, while others need an endless array of women, or men, or children or whatever, seeking satisfaction in a certain lane where it is never fully achievable.  The mother of the red-headed skate border, Shawn White, tells us that her son was always pushing the limits, doing back-flips off the house and racing recklessly down steep paths because he could never sit still and could never be satisfied for long with the last thrill.  The pain he often had to endure could not deter him.   Then there are the alcoholics and the drug addicts and the billionaires and the professional soldiers and on and on, people obsessed with finding completion that can never be found in behaviors and things. 
 
The above are the special ones that we all see and shake our heads at or sometimes envy, but I think we all have our little obsessions that we think will bring us ultimate satisfaction: chocolate; ski trips or Hawaiian beaches; fishing; mountains or wilderness or a Buddhist monastery; and of course the ever-popular desire for lots and lots of money to complete a host of other obsessions.  Many of these work for a while, but we are often surprised when none of them work forever. 
 
            It is obvious from this that we were built for completion but often have to learn at great cost what the completion is.  Of course it is God, the truth of which is so elusive because that is not how we ordinarily role.  We learn that we must accomplish tasks or own things to be admired by others and ourselves.  Many of us are told that it is God we are after, but how can we be satisfied with an abstraction when a solid act or possession is so much more real?  In time, it becomes obvious to anyone who observes that this “hard” reality is not the real reality, but this truth slips away far more easily than it came.  How is it that we can we hang onto this idea when everything else in our ordinary society and personal nature tells us otherwise? 
 
            The biker was fulfilling his own need for the time being, which was definitely not mine.  But even had I had the additional adventures, I would have been left flat and disappointed not long after, in need of another adventure, another fix.  I know this because it has happened again and again, as all things eventually pass back to the standard unsatisfactory reality of the present. 
 
My uncle had no religion or spiritual nature that I know of, and he made it explicit that no memorial or anything at all be made at his death.  Ashes to ashes, and that was it.  Until now, I have thought that he himself was flat, needing the thrill of death to even feel alive, but maybe there was something to his dangerous obsessions after all.  Many paths sincerely taken can lead to the truth.  In the end, he could no longer defy death because of his age, precisely when death was not only at his door but finally inevitable.  Maybe then he had gotten his needed “hallelujah” moment and his fearlessness had served him well.  Maybe then as he looked ahead to the final adventure that would truly lead to no-thing, he had calmly nodded and finally understood: so this is it.  After so many struggles, at last I am here.  Thank God.