A few Olympics ago, there was a remarkable bio portrayal done on Shaun White, who at that time had lit up the world of skateboarding and snowboarding just as the two had become new events. There were home videos of him doing backflips off the roof of his one-story home when he was about ten, and then, of course of him attempting acrobatics on his skateboard, many leading to scary failures. Still, he kept on. As his mother said, he was a daredevil who would never stop pushing the edge. The grown-up Shaun explained it this way: everything felt boring unless he was risking injury to himself. There is no doubt that he was telling the truth.
I have cousins on my mother’s side who are the same way. One became a drug user and dealer who was prosecuted for tying up a delinquent customer to a tree and leaving him over night. Because of his age and his first-time status, he did not go to jail, but he never stopped pushing the edge. At one time, he obtained the official record of time in the air with his hang glider in the state, jumping off of sheer 500-foot cliffs to get aloft. He said he stopped gliding because it got too boring. His brother had no fear either, and worked cleaning and painting suspension bridges while hanging from a wire over distant rivers. Good pay, he said, with not a shake or quake in him. He needed the money anyway for his coke habit, which gave him the heart attack that killed him when he was in his mid-40’s.
The list goes on and on of these remarkable people. This need for risk even had a grip on me, although not to the degree of my cousins and maternal uncles. I was reminded of how this insanity had infected me in adolescence and early adulthood just a few days ago when I happened upon a favorite old album from the 60’s, “Who Do You Love” by Quicksilver Messenger Service. The base and rhythm were surprisingly simple, even garage-bandish, but the lead had the same scintillating sound for me as it once had. It had come out of 1969 San Francisco at the height of the Haight- Ashbury LSD scene. This was about the time I started taking the stuff at the age of 15. I, too, had broken many bones and suffered many cuts and bruises as a daredevil in my childhood, and then I, too, chose to jump into the scariest thing I could find for the thrill. And boy howdy, did it deliver; so much so that after a few semesters of all-out tripping at college, I felt a need to hit the road, hitching often without a dime in my pocket for months and months at a time.
Life on the road was one big pot-fest back then, with an occasional peyote or mushroom trip thrown in – along with an occasional encounter with some very dangerous hombres (much of this is in my book, Dream Weaver). In retrospect, it seems obvious what was driving me to danger: the need for the ultimate, aka, God. The hitchhiking voyages had been leaps of faith as outlandish as jumping off of cliffs with a hang glider, and I understood even then that the goal was eternal paradise. Of course I did not find it. One cannot jump into paradise; one has to be gifted with it internally. But the reason for the drive to insanity that had run through my family had been exposed.
This was made evident when the hang glider and drug pusher cousin laid all that aside shortly after his involvement with the law to become a Jesus freak. It was not a temporary turn for him in an attempt to save his life. Rather, it became his sole and soul passion, his career and hobbies reduced to side issues. It is still his primary concern today.
How many of the saints were bad boys and risk takers throughout the centuries? All the Apostles had to have been, but many had become so AFTER the dispensation of the Holy Spirit. Of those before? Certainly Saul, who later became Paul, was one; and Joan of Arc and St Francis (a former soldier who came into court naked to defy his father) and probably Mother Teresa and maybe even Pope John Paul 11. Most would become “insane” risk takers after the work of the Spirit, but the story of spiritual people who burned with undefined passion before and those with holy passion after is the same: God wants people, as Jesus said, who will “set the world on fire” (Luke 12:49). Of others, of those of lukewarm faith or passions, these Jesus would “spit [you] out of my mouth” (Rev 3:16) While this does not mean that all the saints were manic maniacs – many were quiet people whose fire burned silently within – it does show what this craziness is for.
Think of that then: a world where the passions that are now spent on self-gain and self-destruction are instead directed towards the passion of the Spirit. Echoing Jesus, St Catherine of Sienna was certain that those - meaning everyone – who follow the path set for them by God would, again, “light the world on fire.” For those of a quieter persuasion, that would mean bursting out of the “life of quiet desperation” into the world as one who, in some fashion, has become a person of passion. For those of a more wild and untamed nature, this energy would be redirected, as it was for my cousin, who was several notches crazier than I.
His energy was not taken away and replaced by something lukewarm. That is what wild people think, which makes them rebel against the “Man” who they believe is trying to restrict them. As we see by the lives of the saints and those who are caught up in spirit, this is simply not true. Instead, courage is bolstered even further and the limit, once contained within the things of this world, now becomes limitless. Jumping off a cliff? Easy compared with jumping into an unfathomable universe. Tripping out on ‘shrooms? Small potatoes compared with communing with the infinite intelligence.
Hey, I know. That is why, since about 2015, I write. That’s when the miracle of Spirit began to pour it on. Not all at once, mind you, but instead with small and calm tidbits of miracles that began to make a trail that led deeper and deeper into the mystery until the realization came that, Holy Shit, this is for real! This new wilderness that was revealed is so much farther, so much beyond the playgrounds of the world that all the standard crazy stuff is like a lunch break with the naughty kids smoking in the boys’ room.
Not that I’m not impressed with those who climb El Capitan without ropes, but truly, if I had the faith I should, that would also be possible for me, at least in courage. The point being, that this crazy courage is merely a doorway to the most courageous act of all - to put one’s life in the hands of The Way, the persistent, mysterious wind of the Holy Spirit. Once there, time will not be boredom interspersed with terror, but meaning and purpose interspersed with meaningful terror. For when we stand before the ultimate power, we are on a cliff of impossible height. It is then that we should tremble in terror – and in this we should delight. Life does not suck, and then we die; rather, life takes us through doors and passages that reveal greater and greater traces of purpose, until at last we come before the ultimate purpose, our reason and the reason for being. Bolstered by the impossible courage of Spirit, it is then that, with the greatest rush of terror and joy, we cast ourselves into its bottomless depths. Geronimo!
RSS Feed