My Journey is the Spirit

When I was 10 years old I was suggested, by my father, to be an altar boy at Our Lady of Fatima (http://www.ourladyoffatimanj.org/) in North Bergen, NJ where I grew up. When you're young those types of things aren't meant or taken as suggestions, so I signed up. I will say it was a pain to leave my friends or the TV a little earlier than everyone else to get donned up in my Altar piece, and kneeling on marble is a Medieval practice best reserved for criminals, but over all I liked being an alter boy (insert disgusting priest joke here).


Being an altar boy offered a certain amount of spiritual solitude that kids at that age aren't even aware of, let alone, nowadays especially, allow into their digitally run minds. I walked nine blocks by myself to get there. I was introverted as a kid so this was more relieving and welcoming than it was boring or lonely. I dressed behind the altar where all the spiritual garments hung or were being made ready to serve the lord. Dressing was always quiet, and Mass to me was a truly spiritual experience. I felt important holding The Bible, as the priest sang passages to the people, and the bells I rang during Midnight Mass at Christmas time will always resound in my heart. 


This, more than anything else, laid the foundation for my restless spiritual heart and mind to make sense of God and Godlessness, love and hate, good and evil, and Jesus, Buddha, and Mother Nature, the nihilism I would come to embrace, to the deep spiritual river that entered my heart and almost turned me to become an Episcopal Priest about 6 years ago, and then back to the searing vehement stance I would take against all things God.


The one spiritual constant since I turned about 19 has been literature. Literature could offer solace when I stood with or against God or whether I just didn't give a shit or think about God at all. Whether I loved God or wanted to piss on God, in Literature I would find allies. 


Even in my darkest days the Catholic Monk Thomas Merton's books Thoughts In Solitude, The New Man, No Man Is an Island, and The Seven Storey Mountain always, and always will, offer hope in a cold world. He was a man dedicated to the cloth, yet tormented by darkness, always seeming to be running further and further into himself, away from and closer to God both at once: until he was electrocuted to death in a shower on a spiritual conference with Buddhist monks in Thailand.


But when I'm dark and truly want to kick God to curb I grab On the Heights of Despair by E.M. Cioran and read it like The Bible of emptiness. Cioran proclaims "since there is no salvation either in existence or in nothingness, let this world with it's eternal laws be smashed to pieces," and "how I wish I did not know anything about myself or this world." If I am riding a spiritual high I pull out "The Heights" to check myself, as to not fool myself with God again.


But I kid myself like a fool time and time again, because as I write to this blog, and fear I am boring my readers, I feel God in my home, which is filled with joy and beauty. I see God ride the breeze of Autumn out my window, and yet I see the falling leaves fall slowly and they offer me no hope. I see God in my children, yet not in the medical condition he did or din't give Owen.  


So I turn to my coffee. If gives me something I can count on. I look at the art of Alex Grey. He is the epitome of artist as prophet, full of God and Despair, a triumph beyond God, a sort Ubermensch, or Super Human. To me he has accomplished in art what Michelangelo, Dante, Dali, and all before or since have failed to do. 


But I am not him and can't do what he has done, with either keypad, pen, or brush, and for all the beauty Alex Grey can create he probably still eats potato chips, has diarrhea, and hopes what he believes isn't a sick joke on him as 2012 twelve or something not so ridiculous looms over us, as God sneers like The Joker in The Dark Knight. Who can I really trust: God and Merton or Nothingness and Cioran? And I just find the idea of the devil ridiculous and dumb, and only dumb people believe in the devil. If there is a devil it resides in the hearts of men. Who side are you on? 


I vote we say fuck it today and lounge out with our PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 and blow a Russians head of on Call of Duty 2, or fuck the shit out of a baseball on MLB 10 The Show with the bat of A-Rod or some jacked up juiced out version of yourself in create a player mode and eat pizza and shit your brains out from too much soda. That's today. Tomorrow I want a babysitter to lay in bed all day with beautiful Holly. And Saturday I'm going to church to plug this blog and see if I set the parish ablaze!


I offer this poem today:


     The Parallel of My Life

I walk outside to piss under New Jersey's night sky.

Light from New York drowns the stars,

but toilet bowls don't smell like fresh grass.

I’m reminded of my own past in the light of stars,

a past a life I have but one vivid memory of

that has followed me through every life

I’ve ever had since the memory began.

The scene, Middle Eastern without question,

sand and dry air, my mouth and dry skin.

I recall the heavy breathing from the mule I rode

into town, flanked on both sides by two other men

riding mules, all of us thirsty, all of us dirty,

feeling the edge of the precipice of what lay ahead,

just not sure what, or more accurately how it came to be.

Why this town, these people waiting our return,

why the laurels, the cheers, why the sea of smiling faces

and hands wanting to touch my hands, so much bread

at our feet, water they can't afford to give,

yet enough for my cohorts and I to bath.

We refused it all save a sip here and a nibble there,

we accepted smiles with graciousness and a smile back,

every hand come to touch mine I grabbed, as if I knew why,

I held each hand with all the empathy I had in me,

despite my absolute and utter confusion

as to what I, starving I, half naked and fully ragged I,

I who left this town a beggar and returned hardly anything more,

If not even a little more hungry…maybe it was my huger they sensed.

It is the strangest ghost to follow me in any event.

I wouldn’t give reincarnation a second thought otherwise,

Yet I, who have no God, who carries around a weighted bag

of no reality, but weighted none-the-less by a spiritless life,

has one small, very vivid memory, with no end to shadowing my life.

And after we three rode through town on our mules

we succumbed to a blanket of comfort we never knew

And never found anywhere in all our travels,

travels in which we searched for so much, yet

found so little. We were numb in the beating sun,

when the mules walked us straight into the quicksand.

We didn’t bat an eye, or shiver. We didn’t attempt

to save our lives, as we sank with the mules,

who also seemed to take it in stride with ease and peace.

And when our mouths and eyes filled with sand,

we breathed no more to a peaceful death.

I’m no Christ nor do I claim to have been,

but this memory is the sole reason I show up in church

though I feel no God in my heart.

I don’t help the needy and I don’t volunteer

my time, though I’ve plenty to give.

I give nothing, because for no reason

at all, no call from history, no enlightened sense of being,

and no one asked of me…I gave everything all at once…

The one parallel of my life to Christ’s life

left me empty, with nothing left to give…