Part 1. An Autobiographical Journey Towards God

All of our lives are rich tapestries worthy of the most careful archival preservation. Each of our lives contains a vivid story of God’s grace and provision worth sharing with those around us and with those yet to come before us.

The stories and essays here are from a several-year season of my life in which God showed Himself richly and abundantly to me in diverse ways. These unique aspects of God’s provision and teaching in my life are provided to convince you the reader that God can and wants to do the same thing in your own life. I am an ordinary guy who has been granted unmerited favor. So may it be for you.

In the Episcopal and Catholic Churches a four-day retreat experience is offered for those seeking a deeper walk with their God. “A Quantum Journey Towards God” reveals my stunning experience with total immersion in God’s love for four days. It was epic.

“A Dog Day in March” describes the abundant joy that comes when a vanload of playful children and puppies suddenly pours out into one’s Saturday morning.

“Cathedrals and Blue Algae” contains a musing about the possible ways God built the world around us. My teacher was a metaphor inspired by the common clay brick used to build small planters or grand cathedrals.

“So Far” is an attempt to be transparent about my spiritual journeys through several dark nights of the soul and the strength to be derived from a life-long Christian faith.

“The Other Mother Church” describes a happy and expansive literal journey to the Cathedral of Canterbury, the highest place in my religious tradition. I was able to find a real sense of connection and belonging to my own church during my day there.

“Palm Sunday” describes a sublime one-day pilgrimage in London. I was part of life at its very best, watching athletes participate in the Florala Marathon, participating in a morning Eucharist in the grand St. Mary’s Chapel, gawking my way through a two-hour service under the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, then hearing sublime music at an evening organ recital in Westminster Abbey.

“Benedictine Images” describes a profoundly moving journey into friendship with a dear friend while we toured the great Wells Cathedral in Somerset, England. It is hard to decide which images are most valuable to me – those of the largest collection (267) of medieval figures in the world or the single image of my dear friend over a pint of good ale. Fortunately I don’t have to choose.

“Fast Forward Learning” was inspired by the prospect of impending death with the explosion of a jet engine six feet from my seat and with a later journey to the mother house of the Sisters of Charity near Pittsburgh.



A Quantum Journey Towards God

A hundred years into the search for the grand unified field of the universe that transcends the four known forces, quantum mechanics is able to safely say “nothing is as it seems.” Some of those few gifted individuals in the world with the capacity to understand the requisite mathematics are suggesting the only thing that makes sense is a universe with ten dimensions. The only thing that makes sense to the rest of us Newtonian types is a three-dimensional universe with perhaps time being called a forth dimension. In one of the classic early quantum physical experiments, it was proven that a single photon could go through two side-by-side apertures at the same time. This is absolutely counterintuitive to our three dimensional experience.

While physicists attempt to make sense of the universe, some of us are trying to make sense of God and His relationship to humankind. Countless spiritual traditions of every kind for some sixty centuries or more claim to have found some sort of unifying theological precept to explain the nature of God – The Way. What we are finding from both the spiritual and physical domains is a growing awareness that nothing is as it seems. There is a growing mutual respect for both domains, to the degree that I have a thousand-page mathematical text produced by a particle physicist that claims to mathematically prove the existence of God. It is a substantial number of physicists who have found God at the far end of their experiments.

The Cursillo spiritual retreat experience is an aperture through which fortunate individuals are able to pass on their search for deeper understanding. As one who has recently passed through this luminous aperture, I learned that even down here in our three simple dimensions, things are not as they seem. Like most other Cursillistas, my photons of expectation proved to be disrupted, both positively and negatively during the time/space continuum of the first three days. Fabulous elements of visual surprise cast each of us into a higher state of Numinous wonder. For some of us with critical spirits and rigid thinking, some of the structures of the Cursillo aperture were discomfiting, to say the least. Several times I was ready to abandon the experiment and go back to my old Newtonian ways of life. Just in time, the One who was really running the experiments, and is Himself outside of time, injected His Love into my tiny bit of the universe. I stayed for the duration of the experiment.

It was during the Closura ceremony at the end of the retreat that I was compelled to make the hardest journey of my life, to stand before all present and admit that things were not at all as they had seemed to me. I had been so absolutely positive about the nature of things around me. It is exceedingly difficult to admit to hundreds that one really is, in fact, clueless. The reality is that God has a better idea than I about anything, especially those things at variance with my expectations. I only wish the Cursillo experience was like the early quantum experiments in that I could go through it again for the first time, with a different attitude.

The take-home message of the Cursillo experiment is that God’s Love is indeed the unifying force of the universe. In fact, I was just given a pre-publication manuscript of a serious work called Grace: The Fifth Fundamental Force of Nature to review. We simply have to trust this Love and have faith that the Creator of the known and unknown universe has our best interests at heart, especially during those times when the star in our sky has gone super nova and collapsed into a black hole, leaving us in apparent total darkness. It is in the dark times we are at risk of forgetting His Love. It is in these times we have to fly by faith. After all, He tells us in the sacred writings that “eyes have not seen, ears have not heard, and the hearts of man have not even imagined the things I have prepared for you.”

Here on the backside of the aperture of Cursillo, I find the universe continuously defying my expectations everyday. The folds and hairpins in daily life can be more challenging than the most extreme of amusement park rides. Since my Cursillo of only six week ago, I have stood at three open caskets, and said the final farewell to three of our fellow travellers. Since then, financial markets around the world have in some cases lost 35% of their value. Since my Cursillo, yet another war has been added to the litany of violence than spans the human experiment. Next week, I will have to trust pilots, security personnel, and hundreds of other strangers to carry me safely halfway around a world at war. What Cursillo does is remind us that there is a greater force than death, war, or even our own insecurities, expectations and critical attitudes.

It is out here in the daily world of chaos that we really do have the opportunity to demonstrate this greater force of God’s love and grace to those who are struggling to find their way home in an often very scary universe. Each day we are free to inject acts of love and kindness into the aperture of the lives around us. They really need it, almost as much as we need to give it.

Gravatt Conference Center, South Carolina


A Dog Day In March

It has been bright and clear for some days with sublime gentle spring breezes and air temperature about 72 degrees. Today it began clouding up and the sky is beginning to look much like the one I will fly into next week in England – gray and leaden. I was contemplating whether I should make a hurried journey to the local gas dispensary so that I could cut the grass before it reverted to the swamp of two weeks ago. I have deliberately delayed cutting the ‘grass’ because in reality what I have is a wildflower meadow of no less than six varieties of wild violets and several kinds of yellow botanicals, including the well-known dandelion. There are several flowering white and pink species of things as well. A botanist I am not. A hearty stand of wild onion gives the whole of it a textured look, if an unkempt one.

Context is a curious thing. If this acre of ground covering were located in an alpine meadow in the Swiss Alps or in a local park, people would flock to it and admire its beauty. Since it is in an American suburb with carefully clipped yards around it, it is viewed as a neglected weed patch. I am certain my neighbors must lie awake nights wondering if those little magical globes of dandelion seeds in my spontaneous paradise will get caught in the gentle night breezes to covertly find new life in their carefully tended turf.

A sudden pounding on the door is a context-specific thing as well, open to wide interpretation. In much of the world, a loud pounding on the door in the night has long been a rather dreaded thing, a harbinger of harsh interrogation, separation, or worse. Here in America, a loud pounding is usually much less threatening; burglars, rapists, and the like don’t often knock first. So far, American police knock gently and they do this only very rarely. Usually Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and mentally challenged kids selling light bulbs for $10 apiece are about it these days as far as door-knockers go. Yet, there are exceptions.

Last year I had a loud pounding that proved to be the messenger of death – neighbors and police interrupted the five-course dinner I was giving to tell me that a fellow who called me his “chosen father” has just used a shotgun to end his tortured twenty-one years in this troubled world. My interpretation of loud poundings on the door has been uncertain since then, especially after having just carefully installed a nice new melodious doorbell last week.

Thus it was that I was quite startled and let out a muttered expletive today when I heard a very loud pounding at 3 PM. I had been engrossed in quiet work on my computer when this sonic disruption reverberated through the house. I went to the door to find no police or messengers of doom. What I found was nine-year old Theresa standing there, very eager to show me something her family had just gotten. Theresa was, in fact, spearheading a family project to show me the newest member of the family. Once it was determined that I was home and accounted for, a significant portion of the chaos in the quantum universe poured out of that white mini-van and emptied itself onto my ‘wild-flower’ garden.

The newest member of the family proved to be a six-week old puppy that is a cross of a bloodhound and a St. Bernard. Wanna guess how big this thing is going to be? I suggested a nearby tack shop that sells fine western-style saddles. At six weeks, this puppy probably already weighs twelve pounds. One hundred fifty pounds is probably not an unreasonable end point for its accumulation of body mass. I suggested the kids would not be carrying this puppy around like a cat for but perhaps two or three more weeks.

Some things in the universe really are universal – the truly delightful inner feeling of well being that comes from puppies must be included in these. I bought one of Stephen Hawking’s physics books perhaps an hour before this disruption of my small suburban universe. I will have to look and see if he mentions puppies in his descriptions of the universe.

Unexpectedly, I found myself lying face up in my naturally occurring wildflower garden with this soon-to-be-huge canine horse in complete repose on my chest. It occurred to me that the leaden sky was actually pleasing, reminding me of my imminent embarkation to my favorite region of Earth. It also occurred to me that installing sleeping puppies on the chests of anxious people could do much for the mental health of our world. I found myself in a genuinely splendid state of complete serenity while three absolutely wild kids and their mother created chaos all about me. I was truly serene in the eye of the storm, just myself and that brown canine angel of peace. It is astounding how infectious the serenity of a sleepy puppy can be.

The puppy had been in chaos night and day with those kids and had come to the limits of its nearly boundless puppy energy. I know Hawking talks about bounded states in his mathematical essays. I wonder if this has anything to do with tired dogs. Anyway, this grand one found refuge on my chest a splendid alternative to the kinetic storms of special needs children. I was happy to accommodate his search for equanimity in the chaos. In the process, I basked in peace myself in my wildflower meadow.

In a time of truly frightening geo-political disintegration where small nations are trying to be like the big dogs and come off the front porch with nuclear bombs and where others proclaim they will be masters of the universe, it would do well for us to offer peaceful refuge to the refugees of our human challenges. Listen to puppies. We just might find peace ourselves.

“The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul; He guides me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.”

Anderson, South Carolina


Cathedrals and Blue Algae

Bricks are a useful metaphor for a life of faith. Bricks are perfectly dumb and have little to say for themselves. Yet, one can find entire castles built of them, magnificent terra cotta structures complete with towers, drawbridges, and magnificent halls for opulent dining and celebration. With very little effort one can also find spectacular cathedrals built entirely out of these innocuous non-thinking little blocks of burnt clay, grand structures that seem to reach to the sky and inspire us to transcendent thinking.

I recently built a small planter in my front yard out of these same little bits of fired earth. My project involved mortaring perhaps 120 common bricks together onto a tiny foundation of concrete. I didn’t need much of a structure, as my only objective was to prevent mulch from washing away from the bases of three modest plants. Even as minuscule as my project was, it did require a plan of some sort and a bit of preparation. It was necessary to dig a tiny trench and use a level to adjust for the slope of the ground. It was essential to be sure I had enough mortar, concrete, bricks, water to complete the project and to have the right tools to accomplish a result the neighbors would not find offensive.

Now imagine a cathedral that has ten million bricks in it, reaching heights of hundreds of feet and providing a clear pillar-free floor of 50,000 square feet that will require a century or two to complete. Plan? You better, and give it your best thinking.

It is commonly known throughout the world that bricks are made, are created, and are not accidents of nature. No one has ever refuted this because they are found in both cathedrals and microscopic projects such as my planter. This is a rational response to the widely observed phenomenon of brick making and their subsequent use in all manner of structures.

Infinitely, more complex that all the cathedrals of the world with their millions of bricks and stones is a single living cell. A single living cell is a biochemical factory that puts the entirety of our chemical industry to shame. Within a single cell are structures complex beyond imagination, endoplasmic reticulum, cellular matrix, de-oxy-ribose-nucleic acid helixes, and mitochondria. It so happens that, like bricks, these structures are combined into different forms of cells and the cells are then combined into different species of life. Like bricks, one can use them to make simple things like phytoplankton or grand inspiring things like a stargazer lily or a peregrine falcon.

During the past several decades it has become possible with the development of modern biochemistry to clearly demonstrate that the simplest single cell life forms and the highest orders of life contain many of the same building blocks. Because this is so, a lot of highly educated people believe that the higher life forms are random results generated by some very stupid non-thinking single cell blue algae. These academic scientists actually believe that random stochastic processes can take the common bricks of life and combine them into structures, orders of magnitude more complex than the cathedrals that point us to God. It is a far greater stretch scientifically to believe that primordial soup can ‘come up with’ blue algae or that blue algae can ‘come up with’ peregrine falcons.

It is more than curious that intelligent educated people are willing to acknowledge the creators of simple easily described things like red bricks but refuse to acknowledge even the existence of the Architect and Creator of things so complex that their educated brains cannot grasp them.

One has to be profoundly intelligent and well educated to do some very stupid thinking. The wisdom of man is but foolishness in the sight of God. God said one finds the Kingdom of Heaven by coming with the faith of a child.

Anderson, South Carolina


So Far

So far my life has taken me through 18,825 days, thirty-nine countries, fifty-eight places of residence, seventeen years of university, six careers, and five dark nights of the soul. Like the writer of Ecclesiastes, I am often inclined to say, “Is this it?” “This is not what I signed up for.” “Isn’t there something else?” I often feel like I got assigned to the wrong planet. This one doesn’t seem to work right.

Life is so very different from what I ever would have dreamed at age seventeen or twenty-two. I had this idea that somehow the world, my family, myself, and humanity would get better, more humane, gentler, enlightened, selfless. The changes we have experienced collectively and as individuals are more than our design specifications were ever meant to handle. Every time I have ever taken one of those stress surveys I have scored in a critical range suggesting I am risk for a total system failure, which I have gone through several times. Don’t wish this on your worst enemy. It is worse than hell. I see system failure in many of the lives around me and many of those that haven’t failed yet are getting close. I find myself fearful for so many of the people around me.

My history is speckled at best, probably more so than most in different ways. I have no concept of ‘home.’ It is a just a four-letter word, the real meaning of which eludes me. Several times I have thought I might be getting close to finding the definition of it – only to be corrected very strongly that I was wrong about it. I but remain clueless as to what it would feel like to be in a place called “home”. I live in a fourteen room house with Rembrandts and Van Dykes and back lit-oil paintings in every room, but it isn’t ‘home.” It’s just a collection of sheet rock, #2 yellow pine, a few thousand brick, some tile, canvas, artist pigments, and some very old expensive paper. It’s also a place where I have known many night terrors and experiences of profound loneliness.

I find great irritation when realtors call a structure a home instead of a house. I don’t think home is a widely understood concept anymore. We all want it but few of us know what it is – a lot like love or romance. And we often look for a lover to create home for us and when he or she fails to do so we head for the nearest divorce court. I think home is a place of spiritual refuge, quiet, absolute refreshment, and profound total acceptance of our beings. So far I have not found this. And I know it is not on the multiple listing service or in the nearest home improvement place.

It would be profoundly easy to spiral down into a vast vortex of depression and throw in the towel because as has been crassly said many times by others, “Life sucks, and then we die.” BUT, I am not willing to accept that what I have seen thus far is all there is. I am not willing to go where the writer of Ecclesiastes went in saying “it would have been better to have never been born”. Even quantum physics suggests we Newtonian types don’t have it right. There are some ancient writings that suggest we don’t have it right.

I do know that humans have a desperate emotional life-giving need to belong, to connect, to have significance. Their core fears derive from abandonment and rejection. Most of the hideous behavior ever seen on this planet derives from defense mechanisms to avoid being ‘put out’, conversely to be accepted, respected, wanted. We were created with high levels of socialization needs. Just watch what happens to a newborn infant that is not held and nurtured. It will physically die from what we medical types call “failure to thrive.”

I know that my core fear is of being ‘put out’. I literally was put out of the house five times by the time I was eight. I ended up in some hideous places with lots of pain and evil in them. I learned early on that being ‘put out’ was to be my lot in life and I have acted out that reality dozens of times since. As recently as yesterday I came up against this issue. I have been put out of people’s house literally within the past months; have been put out of many lives.

I know that my personality structure and my life experiences are such that many people do not really enjoy being around me for a variety of reasons. My life has been ultra intense and that has made me an intense person and in American culture intense people do not get onto short lists. It has often made me feel like ET wondering if those old phonograph parts can be made to work to tell ‘them’ to come get me and take me back “home” to a safe place.

I have found that the only chance I will ever have of belonging, connecting, finding emotional stability is at a profoundly spiritual level. I have used the word ‘spiritual’ very advisedly. I am not talking about the New Age babble of finding some sort of inner power or God within or reframing my reality with the likes of “A Course in Miracles”. I speak strictly in the orthodox Christian sense. I have an essential need to know that there is a sentient benevolent being that takes an interest in my life, someone who is bigger than me, smarter than me, faithful and reliable, and offers a chance to get home, once and for all. An amorphous universal ‘power’ or ether doesn’t cut it for me. Nothing inside of me is going to be big enough to do that.

I have taken formal study in Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and most of the ‘isms’ and been to their holy sites throughout the world. I have read all manner of New Age books. Buddhism does not even teach of the existence of deity in any form. Hinduism is littered with 300 million man-made Gods that cannot show me a true way. The blocks of poly-chromed wood and stone in hundreds of earth-based religions don’t help me find anything to hang my hat on either. The Middle Length Sayings and the Mahayana texts tell me the world is on the backs of elephants. My downloads from NASA didn’t show that to be so. The sacrifice-demanding stone gods of the Incas, Aztecs, and Mayans only caused the death of millions and the extinction of several vast empires. Standing on those ruins only reminded me that stone Gods offer nothing but death.

For thirty years or more I have struggled to find a connection within the orthodox Christian pathway. Most of the journey has been littered with religiosity, hypocrisy, churchianity, and little evidence of anything more real than the cold stone Gods I photographed at length. Most of my experiences with churches, religious people, and those who call themselves Christians have been quite unfulfilling and frustrating. I have had those few rare glimpses of a reality that transcends the bleak one described in Ecclesiastes or the one I have lived nearly nineteen thousand days. I KNOW that there is something foundational underneath it all. I also know that without a stronger connection to it I am going to fall into another dark night of the soul from which there will be no exit. I KNOW that I must be as possessive of my orthodox Christian faith and belief and practice as a diabetic would be of his vial of insulin.

I am not saying that Christianity is or is not the only way to maintain emotional health or equilibrium for everyone on this planet. I am saying that for this one human it is. As the world, and especially the American culture have become more secular and cynical, Christianity is seen almost as a farcical fairy tale. For me, it is my lifeline and I am not talking about church attendance or any of that religious rubbish. It is about finding a sense of worth, purpose, being, love, and connection that cannot be provided by another human or an organization. I have longed for profound connection to other humans and this always seems to elude me yet I know that I must find the true connection deep in God (the one that sent Jesus to show Himself to us).

Henri Nouwen was a Catholic priest tormented much of his life in his quest for community and connection and he also concluded that the love we truly crave can only be found in God. His last book, Many Voices of Love was published after his death and so magnificently and eloquently captures the thirst of his soul. He was widely known by millions, published forty books, and was nearly revered, yet had this vast inner void he knew could only be filled by God. I find the same void in myself, perhaps bigger than most people, because of my hellatious early years. But I am beginning to get a glimpse of that which will fill it.

Anderson, South Carolina


The Other Mother Church

It was clearly a transitional day. The climate was bright and clear and I decided to make the three-hour journey via four trains to visit Canterbury Cathedral. It proved an exceedingly good decision. The Canterbury town center is car free and the buildings are half-timbered and rather pleasing. It is the first time I have been in the Kent (southeast) region of England, other than passing through to Dover one time by train to catch the jet foil to Oostende.

The Cathedral proved to be an easy walk of a half mile from the station along the top of a 1,700-year-old town wall laid down in the Roman occupation. The Cathedral proved to be mind numbing in scale and certainly is one of the oldest by far in England, or anywhere in the world for that matter. There has been a cathedral at the present site for 1,400 years and the continual additions have resulted in a vast edifice that rivals any other for size and grandeur. Its age also gives it a darker more Romanesque feeling than some of the newer slender ‘gothic’ ones erected several centuries later, yet the bright afternoon sunlight turned the west transept and aisles into multi-colored fire.

As my time progressed in the cathedral, I felt like I was beginning to make progression from a vacation entertainment mode to the real purpose of this journey – some kind of numinous encounter. My architectural curiosity was replaced by a more ecclesiastical experience during the evensong sung by a rather fine boys choir from the adjacent Kings College. Fortunately, I showed up on a Thursday when Evensong is offered and on the one Thursday a month where an evening fellowship is presented.

Several of the docents were especially friendly and eager to tell me about the structure after learning that I give lectures on church architecture. Following the evensong there was a communion in a chapel, which proved to be a grand space with fan vaulted ceilings and ancient walls of medieval glass. Of the hundreds of people that had been in the building there were exactly six of us in this service. Alas, for most the building is but a tourist trap and a chance to hear some free music.

One of the officiants at the service was a woman. It occurred to me that she was exceedingly attractive and that much of her attractiveness came from her spiritual commitment to the life of the church. I got a sense of profound depth in her. I am certain a soul mate would have to at least measure up to this sort of standard. I have this feeling I was supposed to see this woman in this role. I am reminded of the devotion I saw in a woman in a cathedral in the south of France ten years ago.

I met an elderly church widow, Margaret, in my hours of wandering about the cathedral and she was again one of the mere six of us in the Eucharist. I bought her dinner down the street before we attended a fellowship meeting which proved to be an especially well done lecture on the early Ethiopian Christian experience. The Ethiopian orthodox Christianity is exceedingly colorful and ritualized in a way I found especially pleasing. The quality of the projections was the best I have yet seen with digital processing. Alas, I had to leave early to catch the late train back to London.

I arrived back in London before midnight and feel like this day was much more valuable to me than the one I had yesterday. I was reading last night in Henry Nouwen’s writings Many Voices of Love about how we have a choice to close off certain doors as we go into an ever-narrower funnel leading us to the fullness of God. The play “Chicago” certainly did not lead me into a greater fullness of God. The nine-hour journey to Canterbury did. I think I will need to go back there at some time. It makes me certain that I need to visit several additional cathedrals rather than hunting up more castles. I shall journey to Exeter, Gloucester, and Salisbury, all easy to reach from Peace Haven.

The numinous experiences possible in these grand structures is more important than developing further knowledge about the defensive architecture of castles. I feel quite ready and inclined to embark tomorrow on a three-week journey to a retreat center in Devon and leave tourist mode. I think I will get much more than a Kodak moment there.

Canterbury, England


Palm Sunday

For those who embrace Christianity, Holy week is regarded as beginning with Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Palm Sunday is called such as it is has long been recorded that those welcoming Jesus into town threw down palm branches as he came on into the city. In reality, Jerusalem was a patch in a dusty road of about thirty thousand, and Jesus got into town on a borrowed donkey.

What I experienced of Palm Sunday today could not have been more contradictory in every respect to Jesus’ borrowing a donkey and coming into a little town and then borrowing someone else’s little upper back room for a last meal later in the week. Palm Sunday started for me in the beautiful St. Mary’s chapel next to the imposing Westminster Abbey with an Anglican service at 9:30. As is usually the case on this side of the Atlantic, the word ‘chapel’ is misleading. St. Mary’s is much older and grander than the word lets on.

With a full hour between the end of the service at St. Mary’s and the beginning of my next observation of the day, I hopped two subway trains and made it over to Christopher Wren’s ultimate building project. Christopher Wren is regarded as the greatest English architect of all time and after the great fire that wiped out much of London in the mid 17th century, Wren was commissioned to design and rebuild the vast St. Paul’s Cathedral, which was lost in the fire. St. Paul’s cathedral is a rare case of a vast ecclesiastical structure being designed, built, and completed within the lifetime of the architect. Wren actually saw this vision through to its completion.

In fourteen journeys to London, I only just today even saw it from the outside or the inside for the first time. I can’t say why it took so long to get to this umpteenth wander of the world. That it survived the 1940 fire bombing of London is even more amazing, nothing short of miraculous. To go into such a place is like going back into the peak of the opulence of massive Greek/Romanesque architecture. It simply overloaded the senses and made one numb. I had a sense that I had walked into one of the great JMW Turner’s grand epic landscape paintings in which he often depicted vast Roman edifices.

The service itself was commensurate with the building and it lasted a full two hours with a twenty-page order of service, most of it spent standing, along with several thousand other equally numb people. To go to this service alone was a bit like going on a pilgrimage of some sort, I am certain. For those who appreciate ultimate liturgical experiences, to take the wine from a gold chalice standing under the two hundred foot open dome of the cathedral was the sin quinon of Eucharistic experience.


In the evening, an organ recital was offered in the vast expanse of Westminster Abbey with its opulent organ, which probably could microwave dinner if called on to do so. The chief music director from Westminster Cathedral presented “A Symphony for Palm Sunday” and he blew that organ out. I wondered how those hundreds of thousands of bits of medieval stain glass did not come raining down to the floor.
Somewhere during the day I managed to wander three hours in the vast Natural History museum. It has hundreds of galleries and I think I did perhaps five or six of them at most. With absolute clear skies and near sixty degrees and a fine moon, I went out and did some night filming of Parliament, Big Ben, the cathedrals, and the city in general.

I’m tired, but it is the kind of tiredness that comes from stretching and reaching for things new. I never know when the bell is going to ring and my opportunities for learning and searching will cease. I would rather collapse on my bed in tiredness than uninspired indolence.

London, England


Benedictine Images

It’s is stunning just how much life can be compressed into one twenty-four hour period, more precisely about fourteen hours. I suppose my receptors and neurons would all burn out if given so much input everyday, even if it is of such a grand nature.

The day’s journey was spent with a gracious retired diplomat, Tony, and his elegant wife, Gill. You can imagine the stories to be told by an attaché who has live three years in each of India, Australia, Germany, Ecuador, Washington DC, and Africa. He also spent forty years in the Royal Air Force earning his first wings in a gypsy Moth (a small canvas covered biplane with open cockpit). He progressed to the hot shot jets as they were invented.

Besides their interesting and gracious nature, Tony and Jill are deeply committed to their spiritual journeys and this gives them a depth that far transcends their travel and diplomatic experiences. I have had the good fortune to enjoy Tony’s company for the better part of two weeks and anticipate a fine luncheon with him on Friday and what has proven to be a new family that has sprung up around me.
More immediately, our journey of the day began with a drive to the cathedral city of Wells in Somerset, a delightful region to the north of Devon where I have been hanging my hat the past weeks.

When one turns a corner and enters into the cathedral precinct of the Cathedral Church of St. Andrews in Wells and has a full-on view of the West Front with its 293 life size medieval figures, the only appropriate response is a breathless gasp. It represents the single greatest array of medieval statuary in all of Europe, carved between 1235-43. Once one has caught his breath and finished taking thirty images of this Numinous West Front and goes inside, one starts all over.

Wells Cathedral is absolutely unique in having a scissors arch at the main crossing supporting a vast tower above the crossing. It is visually stunning beyond words. This serpentine structure was actually retrofitted a hundred years later (1340) to prevent the imminent collapse of the vast central crossing tower that was sinking. It has been rock solid for the 650 years since. This cathedral has the most astounding octagonal chapter house reached via a set of vast grand spiral stairs ascending from the most ordinary of doors set in the north wall of the quire aisle. It is truly a cathedral of grand surprises.

After our breathless journey we went to a profoundly quaint tea room and had a tomato soup with rolls to tide us over until dinner time. It was quintessential British and delightful as was the walk down the narrow streets to find it. Like so many small cities this side of the Atlantic, this one is pedestrian friendly.
As we were walking back to the car park a total stranger saw me taking pictures of magnificent daffodils in a churchyard. She told me the church was unlocked and that we simply must go into the church and view the ceiling. We were compliant and the three of went in, and again were short on air. Again, the creative genius of long-deceased artisans caught us off center.

The Parish Church of Wells St. Cuthberts turns out to be the largest in all of Somerset and Somerset is known for its vast legacy of churches built in the Perpendicular Period. The present church dates from the 1200s and rather than having a stone vaulted ceiling, it has an open raftered wood ceiling that has been completely polychromed. I think reclining chairs would be better suited than pews for viewing the ceiling. Even looking down we noticed the center aisle is a most pleasing mosaic inlay, quite in contrast with the usual natural stone color found in cathedrals.

One should note that many of the grand European cathedrals do not generally have fixed pews and the center aisle is not demarcated as such. St. Cuthberts being a church, it has fixed pews with a demarcated center aisle. It is hard to put into words how profoundly different each of these grand ecclesiastical wonders can be. After having been in many dozens of them one would expect them to start looking alike – not!!

After filling up our short and long term memories with images of these two grand structures, we drove back into County Dorset, a bucolic enclave wedged between Devon and Somerset. There I enjoyed hospitality with Tony and Jill in their splendid house with its rather fine garden for several hours but not before we went to the nearby Forde Abbey and Gardens.

This former Cistercian Abbey was dissolved by Henry the 8th, along with hundreds of others. At one point it fell into ruin and was abandoned for more than a century. 350 years ago it was acquired by a family that still resides in it and has fully restored the whole of it along with the gardens of many hundreds of acres. It is a botanical wonderland graced by a fine example of a Cistercian community.

Back at Tony’s house I managed to eat the better half of a crockery pot filled with cookies and sweets, easily washing it down with orange mango tea. Tony finally put it out of reach on top of the fridge, lest I make myself ill.

Dinner was in a picture-perfect half-timbered pub with a most gracious barman and absolutely pleasing young women waiting on us at the carvery. Even very conservative Christian people here do not have hang-ups about enjoying a good pint, and I did rather enjoy a pint of Worthington’s with a fine dinner. Tony had a Guinness. Ya can’t do England right with outta good pint, mate.

County Dorset, England


Fast Forward Learning

When one is facing the prospect of violent death about ninety seconds in the future, it has a way of making one think very fast, conducting a personal assessment, and determining if one has spent his or her life well. One even finds the time to consider matters of faith, even after allowing it to lie dormant for decades. So it was on a fine spring morning in late May this year that I found myself in such a state of fast forward introspection and learning. Over the North Sea just after takeoff, the jet turbine engine six feet outside my triple-paned Lexan window blew up. One can think amazingly fast and with great clarity in suspended states of, “Is this it?”

I learned we all share an inner secret we really don’t want anyone else to know about. We dread being alone. We dread dying alone. Our culture having been built on the merits of individuality and self-sufficiency; we have been conditioned and entrained to desperately want to distinguish ourselves by being different from the masses, yet underneath all the myriad trappings, we are all just about alike and want exactly the same thing, a sense of connection, a sense of belonging, a sense of value, and ultimately purpose and significance. We don’t want to travel solo. We want to touch the soul of another, reach out, and find out we are travelling the same path. When this happens, there is that delicious sensation of discovery; finding we are reading from the same page, finishing each other’s sentences. It is the stuff of epic historical romance novels and entrancing romantic comedies. The number of marriages erupting out of such an overwhelming encounter is stunning.

More stunning is the number of divorces that arise from the same entrancing encounters that suddenly blow up, just like that turbine did outside my window. Alas, while finishing each other’s sentences and falling into exquisite romantic reverie, we forget to check in with each other on whether we routinely remember to put down the lid, roll the tooth paste from the bottom, or bother to balance the check book. Rarely do we develop the skills to negotiate the choppy challenging waters of building a lasting relationship in a complex part of human history, which is moving at nearly the speed of light. The things that worked yesterday in life just might not work today; it is changing that fast.

The glitter eventually gets washed off and we are left with unplanned children, dirty diapers, repairs to the mini-van, doctor’s bills, catastrophic illness, and difficult in-laws. Tantalizing and beautiful as it can be, glitter does not make the best of foundations for something that is meant to stand against the storms of life. Millions exit the premises every year at the first hint of foul weather, making another desperate bid to find peaceful bliss beyond another distant mountain. Those left behind become heroes living lives of quiet desperation just to maintain the infrastructure of daily life.

In a couples-oriented, experience-oriented world we have been duped into thinking that is enough: Find the glitter and head for Nirvana. Those who have heard the judge pound his or her gavel and firmly pronounce, “decree of divorce granted” learn in a fraction of a second that something doesn’t compute, that Nirvana proves to be no more real than the illusion of Shangri-La on the other side of the mountain of diapers. Ten, twenty, or thirty years of history, family relationships, and self-worth are shattered before the gavel’s impact finishes echoing off the paneling on the back wall of the courtroom. Everything is called into question. The bang of a judge’s gavel can have the same stunning impact as the bang that come from a disintegrating jet turbine.

Most of us who have, for whatever reasons, not scaled the mountain of marriage are still living in the illusion that out there somewhere is the right one who can show us how to reach Shangri-La. Lots of people are making mountains of money publishing magazines, maintaining on-line dating services, keeping clubs open until 4 AM every night, just so we can keep moving towards the mirage on the other side of the hot sands of our discontent. Most eventually find what they think they are looking for, only to find out the illusion is just that, an image with no substance.

I’ve done my share of hunting for ‘it’ in all the wrong places: online, in the next book, with the next woman, traversing the next country, spending the next million dollars. I’ve been to thirty-nine countries looking for ‘it’, signed onto half a dozen dating databases looking for ‘it’, read a couple thousand books, lived in a penthouse, and had more women than I am willing to admit here. “It” is not and was not to be found in any of those places. I can’t honestly say I even really knew what ‘it’ was. It may be just now that I am getting the barest inkling of what ‘it’ is.

Right relationships are good, profoundly essential to our well being, and provide safety to a great degree, but most of us are settling for way to little and not taking the time to get it right. We don’t do the homework or studying needed to pass the final exam. We settle for paste rather than diamonds. Yet relational richness far exceeds the value of cold hard diamonds with their deceptive glitter.

We don’t want to let on that most of us often spend big chunks of our lives wondering what the point is to all of what we do. It gets to the degree that one wonders if it is worth even going on with life. Suicide is now the number one cause of death besides accidents in the very age groups that ought to be embracing life most fully. One could call it the post-modern blahs. One could call it burnout. One can call it depression. Others call it mid-life crisis. All are correct.

We run ever faster, yet feel we are losing ground in our quest to reach the things we presently think or once thought matter. A friend of mine, a multi-millionaire, one afternoon mentioned that he had seen his son born and then suddenly watched him graduate from university. He lost his only son’s childhood because he spent six days a week for thirty-seven years in a windowless cell chasing the American Dream of more is better. This son followed the same dream and died of alcoholic poisoning at age thirty-two, having found nothing worth living for at the top. It is hard to describe the coldness that soaks through one’s soul and being on a blustery winter day when standing with a desolate father at the grave of his only son who thought he had it all only to find out he had nothing.

There is a smaller number of people that has discovered the profoundly rich journey of embracing and sharing true community, that rare abundant experience when a group of people is reading off the same page, speaking the same language, and seeking the same goals. Perhaps the most intoxicating relational experience I have known is the esprit de corps that derives from a community group joining together to do the impossible on behalf of those who cannot do for themselves. At the risk of being called relationally phobic, I have found it even more fulfilling than even the most intense of romantic ascensions. It is my guess that most of us have never really experienced this joining together of a group to do the impossible. The closest many of us get is watching our favorite football teams pull off the big come back in the fourth quarter from the La-z-Boy recliner. We were meant for far far more than that.

For reasons having nothing to do with my personal merits I have found myself experiencing esprit des corps three times in my life and three times I have experienced the great angst that comes from its tumultuous disruption. As wondrous as it is, the fragility of it is profoundly disquieting. Each time the disintegration of these experiences was not unlike the shattering of the magnificent crystal and porcelain on the pavements of Germany during the darkest hours of Krystallnacht during the Second World War. The pain can be beyond description.
Most of us have known that glorious sensation of meeting someone and finding he or she has a history and values similar to our own. The experience can be beyond intoxicating, the ‘chemistry’ electrifying. Finding a group, a community can be even more so. Yet there is an “It” far more transcendent and fulfilling to one-on-one relationship or even esprit des corps. It was to manifest itself to me the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

It is so appropriate that on this first day of Advent I would be given a gift of the highest order, a gift of grace that only confirms my budding conception of what we are all looking for – the resonance of our souls with the Heart of the One who before the foundations of time created all that is. I almost missed this incredible gift, having been thinking of a different plan for the day. My dear friend, Joanne, now confined to a wheelchair and unable to drive, wished to have a reunion with her academic mentor of more than twenty five years ago, one who has stood by her as she saw her marriage crumble, her health destroyed, all things precious taken away excepting for one – her resonance with the One that came before the advent of Time. Joanne learned decades ago what I am only just now starting to get a glimmer of.

So it was I found myself driving yet further north in winter on the first Sunday of Advent not looking for anything in particular, rather merely acting as a facilitator for this reunion that would bring a quarter century full circle in several lives. As it was, I was to be far more than a mere chauffeur. I would be a privileged observer and beneficiary of the closing of this circle. Our destination proved to be the mother house of the Sisters of Charity in North America. It was there that Joanne entered into a sacred reunion with Grace, a Sister Of Charity, one who has for more than three decades prayed her across an ocean of storms. It was there that I received another lesson in what “It” is and where to find “It”. I suddenly found myself a pilgrim and mere first-year student in a place of stunning inner and outer beauty, absolutely transfixed. I encountered the manifest love of God in His creation and in His faithful servants.

Being invited into the staggering beauty of the Chapel Caritas Christi, a shimmering cube of crystalline rainbows, I was presented with a holographic image of what “It’ is. Some ninety Sisters of Charity lifted their voices in interwoven strands of praise to the cerulean heavens, knowing the One who is ‘It’. The resonance of their voices between the inner faces of those crystalline panels reflected the resonance of their souls with the Heart of the One who had created all that is. It was with these ninety followers of the One from before time that we shared the bread and wine, those continual reminders of the ultimate gift of the One Himself, given on our behalf.

Love is overwhelming and profoundly gracious in a way I simply cannot even describe. In a world of car jackings, daily terrorist bombings, thrill seeking adolescence snipers, and narcissistic consumption of the Creation in its every form, it is hard to assimilate that one could actually reach a place by car where all other things have passed away except love. The Mother House is actually a place of waiting and preparation for selfless women who have separated their lives from the world and subordinated their own wants in order to be available to the One who could really fulfill their every desire.

For decades each of them has gone out into the world to serve, often in conditions of privation beyond our imagination. These platinum-haired angels of charity are more aptly named than they can even imagine. Collectively these messengers of love have given some 5,000 years of service to others and at the same time given up 5,000 years of frenzied searching for their own fulfillment. In this stunning place of concentrated love, these septuagenarian and octogenarian faithful wait in worshipful anticipation of that final journey to a place where there shall no longer be any night, where they shall not have need of a lamp or even the sun, because the Lord shall illumine them forever. In the meantime they keep praying for us out here, driving the wedge of love further into the growing darkness around us. Such a concentration of intercessory love is acting as a vast prism, shattering the hatred and meanness of a fallen world, reminding us that in the end the only thing that will remain is love.

As the magnificent panels in Chapel Caritas Christi fracture the brilliance of clarified winter sunshine into every conceivable color, I am renewed inside a multi-faceted metaphor of the multi-hued love of the One Who was before time. The physical and emotional feeling of this quiet refuge on a hill reminds me of the promise that one day a new city will descend on earth, the New Jerusalem, a place where there will no more tears, mourning or crying. The gavel will no longer fall. Swords will have been turned into plowshares.

In a way beyond words I felt as a small child in a place of absolute safety. The horrors of daily life and war in our world were forgotten. Love and beauty are simply incompatible with what have become the hideous distractions of desperately alone people on hapless searches for belonging and beauty in all the wrong places. I spent more than half a century not knowing this is what I was looking for – the immersion of self in the only One who can provide love and safety in a way that allows our restless nervous searching to finally cease.

"Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all of these things will be added unto you."

The First Sunday in Advent
Greensberg, Pennsylvania