It is the day before Halloween as I start this, and I have not even gotten our pumpkins.  We have had so much going on lately that this little holiday, which is only big because it starts off the holiday season, had almost been forgotten.  So it was with a jolt when Halloween, with all its spookiness and tales of evil and the dead, came into my kitchen yesterday through the voice of none other than Relevant Radio, an official network of the Roman Catholic Church.  It’s an interesting station even for non-believers, if you pass over the “what is a sin?” sections, but when we, or at least I, think of the Catholic Church and Halloween, I think of staid bishops telling us that this is “All Saints or Souls’ Day,” intended for the remembrance of the saints and of the departed ones who may need our prayers to be relieved of the cleansing pains of Purgatory.  Which means it is a serious day NOT meant for spooky tales of ghosts and goblins.
 
How wrong the afternoon program proved me.    Instead, this two hour show was all about hauntings and ghosts, and what the official opinion was on such things.  The bottom line was that such things, yes indeed, do exist.  What was in question is only what we should do about them. 
 
Let’s start with the Ouija board.  It was just a gimmick to sell for Hasbro, I think, back in the days when mediums were all the rage, but it has become a big deal to the Church.  To tell the truth, I have never liked it either.  Back in my college days, a couple of co-eds styled themselves experts, and predicted through the board that I would die of cancer by the age of 42.  It kind of made me nervous for the better part of 20 years.  As it turned out, my roommate, Mike (in my book Dream Weaver) did die of cancer at age 36.  Not a very striking coincidence, but not pretty, either.
 
Maybe it was only this factor of dark news that turned me against the board, but our local priest also had a story about Ouija boards.  A mother called a priest in Oshkosh to help with her daughter, and our priest was asked to go along because of the severity of the case.  When they arrived, she was doing almost the full Linda Blair, with icy cold winds and demonic voices, all brought about, they agreed after the exorcism, by playing with the board.  On the radio show they talked of how a house burned down, leaving only a misplaced Ouija board as the creepy survivor.  Many other illnesses and ugly things were traced to the board.  The show host and his PhD guest advised that, should we come across one in our basement or attic, we should burn it rather than let it lose into the public.
 
On to a haunted house:
A good Catholic man who was not known for lying told a tale of his haunted house – of how blood appeared on the walls throughout the house as if spattered “like a priest sprinkling holy water,” of his Rosary beads gnarled each morning, of shrieks and moving things and flying things and on and on, with some being life-threatening.  Although it seemed a little too much, he even found that his house had been built on an Indian burial mound.  Others before him had left the house because of the haunting, but he and his wife decided they would defeat the devil.  He said it did strain their marriage (holy crap, it would strain my sanity!), but after two years of prayers and holy water and so on, the demon did vacate the lot.  Please, not me.
 
Ghosts:
Here is a great story, backed up by the sworn testimony of the priest involved:
In the late 19th century in England, a priest was roused by a knock on the door well after bedtime.  A woman in an outdoor cloak was at the door insistent that he come to take the confession and bless a man who was very ill.  The good priest donned his priestly outfit and followed her to the house.   There she left him to enter, and when he did, he found a very ill man who had not been to church or confession and all that for years.  In his anxious state, he was relieved by the priest’s presence and went on to confess and take Holy Communion. 
 
The following day, the priest was informed (by whom I cannot recall) that the man had died during the night, and so he went back to bless the soul the departed soul.  On entering the house, he saw a picture of the woman who had come to him the night before, hanging over the mantel.  “Who is that?” he asked someone there.  “Why, that’s his mother,” she replied.  Said the priest, “Is she about the house so that I might comfort her in this time of mourning?”  “No Father,” the woman replied, “she died many years ago.” 
 
After this, a woman called into the show to state that her father, a life-long abusive alcoholic, had come back from the dead in ghostly form seeking her forgiveness, which she gave.  “Yes”, said the program director, “this is sometimes a part of the purgation process, for ghosts to return to acknowledge their sins and ask pardon from the living.”
 
We return to a story of seminarians.  Two were fast friends, and took a vow that the first to die would attempt to tell the other (God permitting) if he had gone to heaven.  So it was that a few days after the death of one, a bright light appeared before his friend’s door, which then sketched out (as if in neon) the message, “Bosco (the other’s name), I am saved!” This was witnessed by others in the dormitory, and was the talk of the seminary for weeks to come.
 
The program then had another caller, who said that her father had returned to give her a message of encouragement, which the hosts stated was another reason why departed souls might reappear – to return briefly from heaven to help those on earth, like human angels – which reminded me of my own experience: 
 
My father had died a few months before, and in a dream, I was hitching back to the University of Connecticut in the best colors of fall on the winding country road that used to be the only connection to UConn.  It was then that my dad drove up and stopped before me in his old MG, a sports car that he had owned as a perk when he was still in his 30’s or early 40’s when his business had first taken off.  I got in and we drove along chatting, until reality occurred to me: “Dad, you’re dead, aren’t you?”  This had happened to me a few times before when relatives had died, and before I had been frightened, but not this time.  It all seemed very natural.  “Yes, I am.  I just want to tell you that everything is alright.  Now, I have to go.” And with this, I was outside the car, watching him drive up a hill past the fall glory of trees into a bright sun that hung just beyond the crest of the hill.
 
That was wonderful, one of those different, meaningful dreams, and it still gives me a lump in my throat, but it might – it must – be true.  It might or must be, that and other marvels and horrors from the spiritual world, based on some of the finest minds that have experienced such things and thought about them over many centuries.  For Catholics, these incidences are placed into their overall belief system which probably confine them more than they should be, but such beliefs – and experiences – are not just the province of Hollywood and Wiccans.  They are, for hundreds of millions, real.  Which should come as no surprise in a world that apparently has popped into existence out of nowhere, equipped with predictable physical laws which allow its continued existence, along with other pieces of integrated matter that somehow can contemplate the whole, big mystery. 
 
 So, if you are making merry tonight and you step out for a breath of fresh air, do not be too surprised if something not quite of this world greets you.  Pray to the forces of good that they might drive out evil, then if it, or they, remain, see what you can learn. You never know.  But for God’s sake, keep away from the Ouija board!
 
 
   
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
It is surprising that we live thinking the way we do at all.  We have in our history events – really big events, not finding a penny on the sidewalk when we are thinking of money – that defy our current world view.  The list of such events is large, but here I want to focus on the fulfillment of myth.  This list, too, is large, but I have four, or maybe five, that come immediately to mind.  I have mentioned most or all of them before in these pages, but I have never brought them together, and I am called to do so because of a realization I had yesterday, which I will explain towards the end.
 
First: the legend of Quetzalcoatl.  This became better known to the general public when the Aztec calendar came to the end of its cycle in (our calendar year) 2012.  Chances are that the reader has forgotten about this, as I did until now, but it briefly was a big deal among some New Agers as signifying the End Times, which was a focus of great mirth in the standard news media, to which cynicism is a state of grace.  Anyway, as we can see, the end of the world did not happen (which was not prophesized by the calendar; rather, it spoke of the ending of the old era and the beginning of a new, coinciding with the time line given by the Old World astrologers) but we were entreated to the Aztec legend of Quetzalcoatl along with it.  “Q” was the major god of knowledge and enlightenment who was represented by the winged or feathered serpent.  He gave culture to the Aztecs and then left over the seas to the East.  He was to return some day, with white skin and a beard, and would come in the year I Reed.  In 1509, the sister of the emperor of the Aztecs, Montezuma, fell ill and was entombed on her supposed death.  She did not die, however, and was removed from the tomb after again showing signs of life.  It was then that she told the lords of her dream during the coma: that many ships would come from the east bearing black crosses.  The men in them would conquer the Aztecs.   This was all as it came to pass when Cortes and his caravels landed at what is now Vera Cruz (True Cross) with about six hundred men on Good Thursday 1519, in the Aztec year I Reed, the masts of the boats forming large black crosses against the white sails. 
 
They conquered a nation of about 8 million people with less than a thousand men and the help of about 100,000 conquered subjects of the Aztecs.  Some modern revisionist scholars conjecture that much of this legend was made up – which I think only shows their hostility to non-material reality – but even so, the triumph of the Conquest was nothing short of miraculous, and some of the elements of the legend, such as the date of return and the white skin and beard of Q, are still chiseled in the old stone of the Aztec empire.   Myth come true.
 
Another myth that became known to us anthropologist through another anthropologist is a doozy:  the myth of the return of Lono, another culture god, but this time of the Hawaiians.  He, too, was to come again and circle the islands from (I think) right to left, stopping at certain points along the way.  After the circumnavigation, he was to be sacrificed by the chiefs, his blood and death signifying the beginning of a new era.  When Captain Cook arrived there as the first European, he circumnavigated in the right direction and stopped at the right places.  They gave him and his men great feasts, and the women swarmed the boats to give them the pleasures they desired.  This was all in line with how they should behave with the return of Lono - as was the murder of Captain Cook, as the sacrificed Lono, when he finally arrived at the right place at the right time.  Subsequently, the Hawaiian chiefs quickly lost power to the whalers and new European settlers, the islands as a whole becoming, in a matter of decades, a part of an entirely different culture.  Prophecy fulfilled.    
 
I do not have the book with me on this one, but the outline as I remember it is this:
 
Towards the end of WWII, a US Airforce transport from Australia carrying several civilian personnel crashed in the interior highlands of New Guinea.  There, several tribes lived in a large valley unaware of Europeans and almost unaware of anyone else even in New Guinea.  They, too, had a culture god who left them, this time to the sky, who would someday return from the clouds, with the god and his divine people shimmying down on vines.  They would bring marvelous new magic and cause the end of the old culture and the beginning of a new.  Thus, when the plane came down, the villages, all at war or in alliance with each other, attempted to hold the survivors in their own camp to gain power.  I forget much of the rest, but when the Airforce finally arrived with the rescuers – coming down on “vines attached to clouds”- parachutes – a new era began for those people.  Myth fulfilled.
 
There are many other myths of a similar nature, so many that even the materialist revisionists would have a hard time proving them all made-up, but I do want to mention one that radiates sadness: the Ghost Dance revival of the Plains Indians.  Here, many of the tribes of the American Plains, on their last legs in the late 1870’s and early 1880’s, fashioned a magical dance calling forth the appearance of the White Buffalo.  This was to bring back all the herds and send the white (and black) people back to somewhere else, leaving the Indians with their old culture and lands intact once more.  It did come about that a white buffalo was born somewhere, sometime in the 1990’s (as I recall), but not only are white and black people still here, but so is everyone else from every corner of the globe.  This prophecy was not one from old times, but one made on the spot to bring hope to a subjugated people.  It did not come to pass.  It probably will never come to pass.  I believe that it was made from wishful thinking, born out of pain and need rather than from real prophecy.  In any case: prophecy unfulfilled.
 
All these came to mind the other day while in a class studying one of the works of Luke the Apostle, in his “Acts of the Apostles” in the New Testament.   Luke was a Greek physician who came into the Apostle crowd after the Resurrection – that is, he was not one of the 12 Apostles (or one of the other 500 people) mentioned in the Bible who saw the risen Christ.  However, he became Paul’s steadfast companion shortly after the Resurrection, and, to be honest, he is the best writer in the New Testament.  His account of the days after the death of Jesus are fascinating.  According to his testimony, Jesus came back from death to give witness to his divinity and to continue his teachings.  He ascended into heaven after 40 days (a magic number in the Bible), telling them to stay in Jerusalem to be baptized by the Holy Spirit.  On the Feast of Pentecost (50 days after the Resurrection), the spirit came to them ‘as a roaring wind and descended upon them as tongues of fire’ (my abbreviation of the quote), and they got the power: the power to speak in tongues, to heal, to prophesy, and to preach.  They were, Luke says, to spread the news unto the entire world, for this would be the course that God would take, or command, to obtain for Israel the long-promised New Jerusalem. Luke reiterates Genesis 26: 4 when he says “In your offspring, all the families of the earth shall be blessed,” (Acts 3:25).  As was said, again, in the Old Testament (Habakkuk, 2:14), “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the water covers the sea.”   
 
And so it was.  From the beginning - since the time of Abraham, the founding father of Israel, some 1800 years BC – the one god of the Jews promised that His (God’s) kingdom would spread throughout the world via the Jews.  What this kingdom was to be was naturally misconstrued, for to the Jews, the promise could only be kept if Israel were to become the dominant nation among the world.  Christ told them otherwise, although they would not believe it until after Pentecost, when, as Luke recalls, the Holy Spirit descended on Cornelius and his retinue, who were Gentiles (Acts, 10 – 11).  Thus Paul was later able to state, “…that the Gentles are coheirs, members of the same body…” (Eph. 3: 6)  That is, that all of humankind could now become an heir of Abraham through the Holy Spirit.  Now, the world can clearly see that the message (the Promise) of Jehovah to Abraham has come through the promised one, Jesus Christ: the Word is in all the nations, as “the water covers the sea.”
 
This is not fudging, as it might seem, making of the promised Kingdom an abstract thing so that it might look true.  The Apostles found that the Holy Spirit was intended for everyone shortly after the death of Christ, when He had only a few hundred true followers, led by the Twelve (Apostles).  There was no way that any of the authors of the New Testament, written in the first century, should believe that a universal church would arise from Christ and spread throughout the world.  In those times they were not only few in number, but persecuted by the Romans, the Jews, or both at once.  It would not have looked promising to a modern PR man.  Yet, the Holy Spirit insisted and the Twelve believed.  And so it came to be.  Myth fulfilled.    
 
That is, almost.  I will add here, as an aside, that the other myths of a coming new age were ultimately predicated on the ascendency of Christianity in Europe.  Colonialization did not always look pretty, but the Word was spread and the other cultures did irrevocably change.  We could say that the other myths were subsumed by the Christian myth (with the exception of the Ghost Dance, at least as far as we now know, but that, as explained, was a cult of desperation rather than a myth from old).  But the Christian myth has not been fully fulfilled.  As Luke reported in Acts, after Christ suddenly ascended into heaven, two men dressed in white came to stand beside them.  “‘Men of Galilee,’ they said, ‘why do you stand here looking up at the skies?  This Jesus who has been taken from you will return, just as you saw him go up into heaven.’ ” (Acts 1:10-11) Jesus, says the Christian myth, will return again.  (As usual, I use the word “myth” objectively, not derisively.  Myths are, simply, cultural stories that explain that which cannot be explained through ordinary means.  This might run the gamut from ‘how the leopard got its spots’ to how and why the world and humans were created.)  Nothing says this more than the final book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, but it, too, is inherent in the Old Testament: not only can we now go to Heaven thanks to the forgiveness of sins, as the New Testament says, but also, as the Old Testament says, there will come a day when Jehovah will rule the earth as well – that is, that Heaven will come to us. 
 
We all know of the prophecy, but here’s the thing: the other myths of old have come true, including the impossible promise made by Jehovah to Abraham nearly 4, 000 years ago, that the God of the Jews would be set before the entire world – as it has, literally.  So what of the New Age, of the Millennium of Christ’s rule on earth, as many Protestant denominations interpret the return of Christ (or of the Parousia, or eternal rule of Christ on earth, as the Catholics would have it)?   If the other myths defied our common laws of cause and effect and told of great, even impossible, happenings of the future that came true, why not Revelation?  We do not, as usual with all the myths, know the time, but what of the new age predicted by the Aztecs?  What of the new age, Aquarius, predicted by both the ancient old world seers as well as the medieval alchemists?  Isn’t it likely that they speak of one and the same thing, which would now be at its beginning? 
 
I don’t know – I am not a prophet, which is a good thing, because bad things often happen to prophets.  But these things, these strange things…sometimes the “holy spirit” comes upon one person or a group and things impossible to predict are revealed, and what is revealed comes true.  What we can say with a fair degree of circumstantial certainty is this: the human race is destined by forces beyond our comprehension.  We may tuck those forces (or force) into the subconscious or some other social science construct, but these never adequately explain how such things can happen.  Instead, the source – what the myth-makers say, as maddeningly incomprehensible as that may be – is probably the truest account. 
 
Which should give us pause, to say the least.  I would lay odds against that “final coming” coming in my life time or in yours, as it has not yet come during other lives over the last two thousand years, but we should keep in mind what began this essay: that we should not believe in the way we ordinarily think if we wish to understand the big picture.  The way of Truth must be told necessarily in another way.  The second coming, or the beginning of a radically different reality, has been foretold in this 'other way' by the prophets.  As Peter told the Jews in the Temple after he cured the cripple by calling down the name of Jesus, “Fellow Israelites, why does this surprise you?  Why do you stare at us as if we had made this man walk by some power of holiness of our own?”  (Acts 3:12)  He tells them that all of this, this power of the Son of Man that was promised to Abraham, has already come to them in the man named Jesus.  It had been prophesied.  Why do you wonder?   
 
Because, of course, our thinking is limited and flawed.  But we have been warned.   When the prophecy is fulfilled, we should not, as Peter admonishes, be surprised. 

[Note: next new essay this coming Thursday or Friday.  FK]
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When we started out in late morning from Wisconsin for Mississippi, it was in the low 50’s; when we camped for the night in our little trailer at Rend Lake, about two thirds the way towards the southern tip of Illinois, it was 6:30 PM and in the upper 80’s.  Don’t ask about the humidity.   It was sweltering and the mosquitoes were still having their happy little party although it was almost October.  Although we traveled as modern Man, Homo comfortable-is, we were camping as our ancestors had in the era of the Conestoga wagon over one hundred years before.   And although they were of sterner stuff than us, they still must have felt uncomfortable as they ate beneath a sky shared with the insects and the elements.  They were in the process of becoming us, busily and relentlessly redefining their relationship with nature, and must have felt, even then, the reason why.  They were also re-defining their relationships with their fellow man in a process that often made nature look positively gentle and benign. 
 
We were to see part of that process the following day, as we detoured through Shiloh, Tennessee, at the national monument that was the site of the first major battle of the civil war (so we were told) in the spring of 1862.  It was here that both sides realized that they were not in a tidy little scrap that would be settled by a few black eyes.  It was here that they realized the hell that they had unleashed in the struggle over the sanctity of the union and the inalienable rights of all people, regardless.      
 
The stories of the three day battle were heart-pumping as well as heart-breaking.   After visiting the museum, we saw the movie that precisely depicted in words, maps, and actual photos just what happened at the battle and why.  Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of the cause, it was immediately apparent that most of the casualties were young men with no dog in the hunt other than a sense of regional pride and a false sense of battlefield heroics.  Again and again, words written home or in personal journals by young survivors stated that nowhere in any book or tale was the impact of all-out battle even remotely captured.  It was chaos, and much more: men prayed deeply between the skirmishes in realization of their possible death, and while in life, many marveled at how sharp everything seemed – how the colors of early spring shined forth, how the songs of the birds were so sweet or chilling, how life itself was so intensely experienced just as it was so much closer to ending.  
 
We walked the cemetery and some of the nearer grounds that clung to the shores of the Tennessee River, the area as a whole decked with woods and farmlands little changed from the year of the battle except for blacktop on the roads.  No hotels, no condos, no trinket shops, nothing more had been added outside the immediate area of the museum.  Returning to the parking lot, we ran into the curator of the museum, who was leaving the building to take down the American flag before sunset.  Even as he spoke in the accent of the South, he wore his US Government suit well, and knew the facts of the battle and of the war itself cold.  A shame, we all agreed, that all these young men – 2,700 of them – had to die, buried together in gruesome group trenches before the Union could return to bury its own scattered remains in mostly unmarked graves.   The Rebel bodies still remained somewhere in the woods, piled together in the same postures of haste, only bones and brass buttons and belt buckles and lead balls and cartridges left from their lives.  It was me who mentioned in this context the current War Between the States – now the Red versus the Blue, marked at that time by the Battle of the Supreme Court.  We did not mention sides, but we knew; and in this, he swore that he would never vote for the other side again.  Just as many on the other side no doubt would never vote for his side again. 
 
And so we understood almost without words in this most hallowed of grounds how wars started – not how they began in embryo with ideas and moral posturing, but how they actually started: with unbridgeable rancor.   It was with this understanding, sitting on us like silent tombstones on earth, that we left the site in silence. 
 
But not for long.  I knew that Shiloh was a name from the Bible, and soon had my wife clicking away on her palm computer to find what this place had been named for.  Yes, we found, it had been the site of a battle, but the battle was of small importance compared to what was being fought over in ancient times: the Ark of the Covenant.   
 
The Ark of the Covenant: I had first heard of it, heathen that I was, when the Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, came out in the early 1980’s.  Even after the movie, I didn’t really know what it was.  An ark is a boat, right?  I did not see a holy, early Hebrew boat anywhere in the entire movie.  Rather, I saw something like a box or coffin that was finally shelved in some massive government storage unit in Washington, DC.  Here, the Ark was lost again, now buried under red tape rather than earth and stone.  Funny and sadly possible, but still, what was it? 
 
Coincidence, that tying together of meaningful odds and ends in our lives, never sleeps, for it just so happened that one of the books-on-CD’s I had gotten for our trip was The Lost Ark of the Covenant, by Tudor Parfitt.  Yes, you have that name right, and he is as pompous as one might expect for an Oxford scholar with such a name.  In fact, this Oxford professor plays on this stereotype, slipping sly jokes and silly, high-handed attitudes to us as if he were a member of Monte Python’s Flying Circus.  Hilarious.  But the information he gives us in his study, and pursuit of, the Ark of the Covenant, is as thorough as one might expect from an English Scholar.
 
We learn that even the experts – even the Jewish experts – disagree on exactly what, physically, the Ark was (and perhaps still is).  “Ark” can mean both boat on the one hand and cupboard or container or coffin on the other, but it is most probably simply a container, given its context.  It was built after Mosses came down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments – and after he broke the original tablets and remade them – to give the tablets a permanent home.  Even then, though, it was described in two ways: one, as a fancy and large box filigreed with gold, and two, as a smaller crate made simply from the wood of the desert tree, the acacia.   In either case, it also somehow (in its rather small dimensions) contained the staff of Aaron, the brother of Moses who caused the staff to turn into a snake that ate the staff-turned-into-snake of the Pharaonic priest.  More importantly, it contained the essence of the power of Yahweh, the unspeakable and only True God of Israel.  From that time, the Ark was carried everywhere with the people by poles on either side, the crate itself covered by a canapé that was not to be removed, even by a priest, on pain of death.  Not death from the people, mind you, but death from the power of the box itself.
 
Thus, for the war-like Jews, the Ark became a holy but fully serviceable weapon of war, clearing away enemies in battle like a sci-fi laser gun.  It was carried into actual combat, but was otherwise housed in a temple.  For the first several hundred years (or so) after the Jews had taken the Promised Land, the city of that temple had been called Shiloh.   
 
               I forget the exact chronology, but at one point, before the reign of David, the Philistines raided Shiloh and stole the Ark.  They held it for a year, a year that was filled with plague and pestilence and death, so much so that they willingly returned it to the Jews with fear and trembling.  The Ark was then moved about some more before King David held a procession that took the Ark to Jerusalem, during which a man who touched it to keep it from falling fell dead on the spot, where later the great Temple of Israel was built, complete with the Holy of the Holies, the place of the Ark.  There it remained, even as the 10 northern tribes of Israel – the “Lost Tribes”- were removed and scattered to the winds by the Assyrians 700 plus years BC; there it remained until the Babylonians conquered the southern tribes in 587 BC.  It was then that the temple was destroyed and the world, as far as we know, never knew of the survival, let alone the location, of the Ark again. 
 
            Many Jews have long thought that the return of the Ark will mean the end of the old times and the beginning of the Kingdom they thought was promised them since ancient times.  Christians, on the other hand, believe the Ark was indeed returned – in the person of the Virgin Mary.  It was she who housed the God of Israel and delivered him to the world to start the New Kingdom, which is, or at least has been, not of this world, although Christians, too, await another time here in this world.  Still, we wonder – what of the original Ark?  What of its power?
 
            In the book, what impresses most is exactly the power of the Ark.  It is not startling to learn that the Ark was used by Israel to smite enemies: such is the story of the Jewish relationship with God in the Old Testament.  What is startling, at least to me, is the apparent indiscriminate nature of this power, how even innocent people who touch or handle the Ark wrongly, even with good intentions, were instantly killed.  The Ark, then, is less like a thinking God than nature itself, a source of raw power that does not care about intentions, but only how it is handled.  Yet, such, too, was the law of the Old Testament, where common compassion could be overridden.  Think of Abraham with his son Isaac, tied up for slaughter simply because Yahweh demanded it.  Think of Job and his afflictions. 
 
But we might see that the God of the old law was such because the people were such.  For instance, the women who were stoned for adultery were more often than not integral parts of their small agrarian community - and yet the men, who were also guilty (as it takes two to tango), stoned them with fervid abandon.  It was not about compassion with their God, because they had no compassion themselves.  It was, in the end, about power and unbending law, just as it was with the Ark.
 
Such it is that we see Jesus shame the men when they go to stone the woman adulterer as they always had, according to the old law.  Such it is, then, that the new Ark is in the frame of a woman of compassion, the mother of God who wept at the torture and death of her son.  This son was the man who had, in the mind of the Pharisees, broken the law by proclaiming a new law, a law written not on stone, but in the heart. 
 
Perhaps it is that we do not want to find the old Ark of the Covenant.  Perhaps it is that Shiloh, Tennessee was rightly named after the first Keep of the Ark.  Perhaps it is that when the law is written not in our hearts but in stone, the power of the Ark returns to punish all those, innocent and guilty alike, who violate that chiseled law: Though Shalt Not Kill.  Certainly, the fury of war that was fully unleashed at Shiloh sent a swath of destruction greater than any natural tornado or monsoon through the settled lands of the United States.  The ancient Ark, we might say, is the terrible swift sword whose truth, whose wrath, goes marching on.  Such it is if we close to the greater part of the law and choose the easier, the older path of blind righteousness.  
 
Regardless, the power does not end.  On our way back from Mississippi, we hit that same divide of weather that separated cold from hot in central Illinois.  The winds increased so that the trailer swayed dangerously on its tether, just as a wall of clouds rose from the edges of the hazy heat and the blue sky.  It was a scene that could have been from the movie “Moses” starring Charlton Hesston.  The power and glory that creates and destroys universes on a whim does not end with the coming of the new Ark.  Rather, it seeks to bring us in, trembling as we are, from the cold of Mount Sinai.  Here, Justice is leavened, and sins are forgiven, not in weakness but in wisdom. 
 
I do not know which side of the stormy wall we now live in, and perhaps, as with the people of the old law, it is not our conscious choice.  Shiloh and the thousands of largely innocent young men buried there are a testament to that.  We can try to choose the intent rather than the letter of the law by not picking up that first stone, but sometimes it is out of our hands.  We are still a people of a flock, and sometimes, as in the days of old, power strikes and we are like lost sheep scattered by the storm.     
 
 
    
 
 

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            So many ideas have popped up recently that it is hard to choose where to begin.  Last week, we took a trip down south to help move my wife’s mother from a retirement complex to a full-care facility.  For those who have been through this, you probably know the pathos and misery involved.  It is a heavy subject that exposes the basis of humanity in one of its most gut-wrenching guises.  It provides the most meaningful avenue for an essay, but because it has been an exhausting trip, I will not begin there.  Rather, I will begin with the comparatively light subject brought about by one of our “on the road” books concerning the origins of Man.
 
It is only in lieu of our own personal angst that the subject of human origins can be considered light, because it, too, causes us to consider the basic elements of humanity.  In sum, what makes us different from the animals?  Are we a breed apart, or only another somewhat more complex gadget in the great power grid of life?
 
Back in the heady days of my graduate education in anthropology, the professors loved to tease the students with this question.  They would raise the standard distinctions  between animals and humans made over the decades by earlier academics: is it tool use, or language, or compassion or organization that makes us fundamentally different?  To all of these, they would point to animals who also had such characteristics, albeit often in primitive form.  Chimps fashion leaves to gather ants and also can learn to speak and understand a limited number of human words; many mammals exhibit what looks to be compassion; and many classes of animals from insects to birds to mammals organize themselves to cooperate in groups very efficiently.  No, they would say, we are not distinct from the animals in kind, but only in quality.  We may have a greater ability to verbally communicate or to show signs of affection, but we are not alone in having these traits.  Rather, we are just another species on a continuum of increasing complexity. 
 
Such is the subject – what is human? - that the book, Prophet of Bones, brought to light in this excellent science fiction thriller by Ted Kosmatka.  He starts us off in the near-present on a dig on the isle of Flores in Indonesia where they are excavating the perfectly preserved and relatively recent remains of a pigmy-like humanoid.  Bio anthropologists who work in genetics are anxiously awaiting the remains to tease out the time at which Flores Man and modern Man may have diverged from a common ancestor.  There is an understanding that genetic change happens at a certain pace, and thus the date of divergence is of crucial importance.
 
At this point in the story, the author is following a factual study: Homo florensis is an actually postulated species that was found on the isle of Flores ten or so years ago.  As far as I know, its designation as a different species is still under heated discussion because so much rides on this for so many anthropologists.  In my own department at Michigan in the 1980’s, it was of critical importance that all of us came from one common ancestor (which was embodied fairly recently in the Eve hypothesis that suggests through genetic data that we all came from one woman in Africa, “Eve,” about 100,000 years ago) because racial theories in the bad old days of the early 20th century speculated that races were separated by evolutionary divergence or by intermingling with different divergent species.  This gave fodder for those who believed that races had different gifts – primarily intelligence – based on these divergences.  My department was radically against this, and some in the department would not even give any contradictory evidence a glancing look. 
 
So it is that science, which is supposed to be based on the objective gathering and analysis of data, can be heavily biased.  In this work of fiction, however, the contested point in evolution is different. 
 
This imaginary world is one just like ours except for one critical difference: the theory of evolution was debunked, rather than buttressed, through modern science, much in the same way that speciation was denied out of hand in our own recent past.  So it is that, in this imaginary world, religion came to have greater power internationally, and in this, was able to use its power to suppress any evidence that showed that the world was more than the biblically-inspired age of 6, 000 years.
 
In a certain murky lab in a murky area of the Florida Everglades, a research institute run by an eccentric billionaire learns the truth -  that the world is much, much older than 6,000 years - from samples taken from the island of Flores by our hero, Paul (among others), and hides it  from the world.  Earlier in the book, Paul was on the run with his sample, but when he is finally caught, he is offered a position in the institute to shut him up.  The position for someone fascinated with human genetics is alluring.  Here in the hidden lab, forbidden experiments are carried out without fear of political meddling because of a web of money and power and information.  Anything is permissible, including the hybridization of anthropoids – primarily humans with gorillas and chimps.  But with this, horrible monsters were created that disgust Peter and the woman (of course there is a woman) he has pulled into the mess.  In an attempt to placate Paul, the eccentric founder, Marshall, explains his actions in this church-run world:
 
(my paraphrase): “I have been fascinated with what makes a human a human from an early age.  When I entered science, I delved into the 23 and 24 genetic pairs of humans and chimps (respectively).  There I found that the two species had a 97% correlation – except for that 24th pair in the chimp” (this is mostly true).  “This extra pair, I discovered, was merely the result of a human pair that had been snipped in half to make two ineffectual pairs.  In other words, what separates humans from chimps is one snip of the scissors on a chromosomal pair.  It is as if God were merely experimenting, with one half of his experiment going off to make humans, and the other half, the modern chimps.”  
 
(He continues) “If we can read the difference in humans in the genome, I cannot see it.  Behaviorally there is also little difference.  We are primates, and like all primates, we are characterized by our competitive nature.  Even among chimps, dominant behavior occurs even when it has little or nothing to do with physical need.  In humans, we might even say that all of civilization is built upon this simian trait.   Where in all of this is the soul?  Where is the difference that gives humans a soul but not others?  Where in my chimp-human hybrids, in these monsters, do you find soul?  We are only one of the animals, and God is only a researcher with no goal, no morals, with nothing more in mind than any other experimental scientist.”
 
Phew.   Heavy stuff for a world ruled by religion, but heavy enough for us as well, as we in the real world have also asked these questions.  The first is fairly easy to answer – no, you cannot find soul in genes, just as you cannot find it in, say, the nose or the foot.  This is apples and oranges.  Second, that genes affect us behaviorally is more subtle, but with the same caveat: chemically –affected behavior is not the stuff of soul. Rather, I would argue, it is the stuff that soul works upon.  Which points to the next question: exactly what in the human shows that we have souls that transcend biological conformity with the animals? 
 
Animals.  In the world of Traditional, or Primitive Man, many groups believed that each animal species came from a “master” spirit that made each of its kind and sent it forth with certain indelible characteristics.  From this we can see that animals in general were not seen as individuals, but as certain physical types, just as, say, a Toyota Corolla is a type of car.  We might say, then, that it is individuality which separates humans from the animals, for in individuality we have individual will.  With individual will, we can make moral choices that are informed by soul.  However, we have seen from anthropological observations and experiments that some animals are capable of some sort of individualistic behavior through language and other human-like traits.  Human-chimp hybrids might have a much greater sense of self, and thus of will – which gives rise to the possibility of choice and moral direction.  Would they, too, have souls, even though so much more of their behavior would be controlled by genetic influences that are beyond the power of their will?  
 
It is probable that all of this has been dealt with by theologians in the past, and that my forthcoming theory is heretical, but in this case, I plead ignorance.  Anyway, this is what occurred to me as we listened to the CD’s while driving through the vast flat fields of the Heartland:
 
Soul is based on free will, which gives us the possibility of deciding between two or more actions.  Soul is that element in us that is directly related to God, and which informs us of the choices we should make to be in line with God.  We cannot dig out soul or test it in a lab.  Rather, its existence is evident in our conscience – in our innate sense of right and wrong.  (Socio-biologists would argue that the conscience is merely a program for group survival, but to dig that up here would make a long essay much, much longer.)   The degree to which we have a soul, then, is dependent on the degree to which we have a choice over our actions.
 
How much choice over its actions does a dog have?  Or a chimp?  I would say that the quality of an animal’s soul, if it has one, would be measured in the choices it makes within its ability to make a choice.  For instance, a dog may not be capable of sharing a dish of food with another dog, but it might have a choice as to whether or not it kills the family cat.  This would work for the human-chimp hybrid as well.  But does this limited set of choices echo real soul?
 
Because of mentally damaged or malformed humans, I cannot fully answer this here.  Surely, these people still have souls.  But for the rest of us, I think “soul”, or at least full soul, is based on our ability to overcome our pre-determined genetic predispositions.  We might, in fact, think of these genetic (animal) pre-dispositions as another definition for original sin.  Animals cannot fully deny the dictates of their kind; their soul, if they have one, would be smaller, or incomplete.  Humans, on the other hand, can fully deny the dictates of their “kind.”  It is rare that this happens, but it is what makes up the saint.  And what makes up the saint is not a genetic pre-disposition, but a decision to follow a certain course in life. 
 
All sorts of things can flow from this idea – that this, this ability to dominate the body with the will, is the meaning of “made in the image of God;” that “original sin” is so embedded that we need grace to finally overcome our animal dispositions; that this grace might indeed come from, or be aided by, a messiah; that perhaps certain animals have a kind of soul as well (all good dogs might indeed go to heaven); that existence as we know it is actually a reflection of a choice made by humans in the beginning, be that in the biblical Garden or at conception; and so on. 
 
Heavy stuff on the road to Mississippi, but still not like real life itself.  Ideas are ideas, but reality hits at times like a baseball bat.  Still, they give us pause.  What separates us from the animals might appear small, but if it is full soul, it is as big a difference as that between time and eternity.  Between limited life and the Power and the Glory.  There is a reason, then, for stepping out of this real world, this world of test tubes and corruption and dying.  It is there in the soft ether of our thoughts where we can see things from other perspectives, from angles which might act as real-life guide posts for the rest of our natural lives.