48: This Journey of Service

48

This Journey of Service

Justin Trudeau’s Call to Destiny

          “All destiny leads down the same path—growth, love, and service,” said Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in her autobiography The Wheel of Life, a Memoir of Living and Dying, a courageous doctor who pioneered the study of death and dying and gave us the five stages of grieving—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, and who also pioneered the study of NDEs—near-death experiences.

When I read that comment at the end of her autobiography, I felt that it summed up the philosophy of her long life of service to humanity; and I knew in my heart that it was true.

I knew, because I had been brought to this point of understanding by my own quest for the meaning and purpose of life; and it made such good sense to me that I embraced it implicitly. But not until I saw this truth in action, as I did the other night while watching Lisa LaFlamme interview Justin Trudeau on W5 upon winning the federal election and becoming Canada’s 23^rd Prime Minister and heard what the son of Pierre Elliot Trudeau had to say about his victory, did Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s wisdom hit home with me.

“Take me to the moment you heard the words majority Liberal government,” Lisa LaFlamme asked Justin; and Justin replied: “I had a group of friends watching in a lounge downstairs in the hotel. I was with them for a bit and that’s where they declared the Liberal government. I was with all my best friends and it was a really nice moment. Then I went up to put the final touches on my speech. And at one point Sophie came into the room as we were working and she sort of looked over and said, ‘Can I say it?’ And we said what? She says they’re calling it a majority. And it was just this moment of, first of all, just deep gratitude. Like, ‘Oh my god,’ you know? This connection that we’ve been building for three years with Canadians is real. And the responsibility that we have to live up to it is real—”

Lisa excitedly interrupted: “So do you jump up? What do you do?”

And Justin replied, his clear, warm eyes shining: “I got up and held her, because I know that yes, it’s a good and big moment; but I also know that it’s a significant shift in our lives, a significant moment, and an emotional step along this journey of service.”

“Along this journey of service,” I repeated to myself, to impress his words upon my mind because I knew that Justin had just been called to his highest purpose that Dr. Kubler-Ross spoke to in The Wheel of Life; and I needed no further confirmation for my own belief that when we have brought our personal destiny into agreement with our inherent spiritual purpose the next stage of our evolution is service to life, be it with whatever talent we have acquired over our many lifetimes in this schoolroom we call life—Justin’s instinctive talent for politics, for example; which was why Lisa LaFlamme observed on the CTV news panel on the night of the election that the son of the 15^th Prime Minister of Canada may not have his father’s incisive Jesuitical mind, but he has “emotional intelligence,” little realizing that she was speaking about Justin’s inherent wisdom and natural goodness that define his balanced character and radiates his easy, charming smile.

But why a life of service? Why did Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross come to this conclusion about all destiny leading to the same path of growth, love and service? That’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing…

Truth be told, I cannot work out the answer to this question without calling upon my Muse (handing it over to my creative unconscious, if you will); and the moment I did so, I heard what St. Padre Pio said to me in Healing with Padre Pio—the autobiographical story of my ten spiritual healing sessions with a psychic medium who channeled St. Padre Pio for my autobiographical novel: “Life is about growth and understanding.” And in another session he said something else that confirmed my own quest for life’s purpose: “Life is a journey of the self.” And when I put Padre Pio’s two comments together, I have the answer to why all destiny leads down the same path of growth, love and service; because the purpose of our life is to grow in understanding and love until we are ready to serve life.

This of course presupposes the concepts of karma and reincarnation, which for me are not concepts at all but the reality of our existence; and it is only within this larger paradigm of our purpose in life that we can make sense of the human condition—which Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who began as an unbeliever in reincarnation, made central to her philosophy.

 “Death is simply a shedding of the physical body like a butterfly shedding its cocoon,” she said, as she grew into the realization that life is “a transition to a higher state of consciousness where you continue to perceive, to understand, to laugh, and to be able to grow,” but grow into what? That’s the question that we must answer.

Carl Jung, the eminent Swiss psychologist and co-founder with Sigmund Freud of depth psychology, was practical in his understanding of life, believing that “as each plant grows from a seed and becomes in the end an oak tree, so man must become what he is meant to be,” implying that we all have the same destiny of growing in our own individual identity until we achieve wholeness and singleness of self; and upon this realization Jung founded his psychology of individuation to help man realize his destiny. But how can we be certain that our destiny in life is to become what we are meant to be, which is our own true self?

I spent the best years of my life looking for my true self, which I wrote about in my own memoir The Summoning of Noman, so I know that our greatest need in life is to become what we are meant to be; but how was I to prove that this is everyone’s destiny? I didn’t know, and I paused for thought…

That’s the conundrum that my spiritual musing had brought me to this morning; but, as coincidence would have it (again, I never cease to marvel at how synchronicity kicks in whenever I need guidance), I took a break from my musing and went downstairs and turned on the TV, because I have found that the best way to let my unconscious work out a problem is not to think about it, and to my surprise I just “happened” to catch a program on the documentary channel called Two of a Kind—an intensive study of identical twins who are biologically the same but who have distinctly separate identities.

To make this point, one set of identical twins, two young ladies, remembered a high school dance and a “pimply-faced boy” coming up to them and asking for a dance. “It doesn’t matter which one of you dances with me because you’re both the same,” said the boy; which got the girls’ dander up, because in one blind stroke that pimply-faced teenager had negated their separate individual self—which is the core of our being and fundamental purpose of our becoming. This is what St. Padre Pio meant by saying that life is a journey of the self.

“Being a twin can be very difficult,” said one of the young ladies. “We’re lumped together and treated as one and the same, but we’re not.”

Another set of identical twins, two men in their thirties, both athletic and very fit, but one was gay and one straight, and both with their own distinct identity, one married to a woman and with one child, and the other married to a man and childless, which went a long way to proving the point that we become what we are meant to be; but the most convincing proof of our own individuality was provided by a set of identical twins who were so different that one could not have asked for better proof to illustrate our distinctness.

In their mid-fifties, both men were identical in appearance; but one man pursued the good life of the American dream, living in a gated community, enjoying golfing daily and travelling, and extremely secular in his beliefs. His twin brother on the other hand was very religious, going back to his Jewish roots and moving to Israel. These men were so extremely different in their lifestyles that one would never know they were related were they not identical twins; and when the program was over I came back to finish my musing.

“No two sets of twins are the same just as no two individuals are the same,” said one elderly lady as she looked at her identical twin sister, making my point that we are all destined to become the person we are meant to be; which brings me back to Justin Trudeau who was called to his destiny by the Canadian people who voted him into power, which in his innocence he alluded to when he said that he and his family had just taken “an emotional step along this journey of service.” It touched my heart to hear him say that.

Justin Trudeau may be his illustrious father’s son, but he’s certainly his own man who has  embarked upon the greatest journey of his life as the 23^rd Prime Minister of Canada; and I wish him and his family the best of luck on his journey to wholeness through service.

───

47: A Sign of Things to Come

47

 

A Sign of Things to Come

Reflections on Justin Trudeau’s Sunny Ways

 

“A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.”

Justin Trudeau

On Monday, October 19, 2015 Penny and I drove to the Wyevale Public School in Tiny Township, Georgian Bay to vote in our Canadian federal election; and Monday evening, to our delight, young Justin Trudeau, the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and son of the flamboyant Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau who served four successful mandates in his fifteen year reign, won the election with a startling majority and swept out Stephen Harper’s Conservative government of divisiveness and fear and ushered in the new wave of his platform promises— a politics of inclusiveness, openness, hope, and heart.

“Canada is back,” Justin Trudeau proclaimed, with his beautiful wife Sophie by his side smiling like an angel; and my heart went out to them, because after a decade of Harper’s brand of politics—“He’s a spent force,” I said to the volunteer who phoned a week or so earlier to solicit my vote for the Conservative party. “I’m sorry, Harper has to go”—it was time for our country to elect a Prime Minister who was in sync with our country’s true spirit; and young Justin Trudeau (he’s 43, and the second youngest Prime Minister of Canada) symbolized our hopes and dreams and gave us a vision of what this country needs.

Harper’s government tried to belittle Justin Trudeau with negative adds like “Nice hair, but he’s just not ready,” but the more they tried to pull him down, the higher he rose in the poles; and by the end of the longest campaign in Canadian history Justin Trudeau’s numbers rose high enough for the pollsters to predict a minority Liberal government, which Justin exceeded brilliantly by winning a resounding majority; but I knew he was going to win.

I couldn’t make book on it, because it was a personal insight for my benefit only; but I have to share it in today’s spiritual musing, because it speaks to something much bigger than our federal election. It speaks to a sign of things to come… 

I’m not a fatalist by any means, because I believe we all have free will and can change the course of our destiny with free choice; but life is much more complicated than that, and it took me years to reconcile free will with our destined purpose—and I believe we all do have a destined purpose that we are called to serve from the day we are born.

Short of writing a whole book, which I’ve done, the simplest explanation that I can offer to reconcile the paradox of free will and destined purpose is simply this: we are called to our destiny by the choices we make; and Justin Trudeau was called to lead the Liberal Party of Canada out of the decimated state that the former leader Michael Ignatieff left the party in and build it up again and lead it to victory, which he did magisterially last Monday.

Justin didn’t have to heed the call to lead the Liberal Party of Canada when Michael Ignatieff stepped down in ignominy and went back to teaching with his bushy academic tail between his legs, he had a choice; and I’m quite sure he agonized over it for days and weeks, discussing it with his wife (and perhaps with his mother Margaret and close friends) before heeding the call to his destiny of becoming the Prime Minister of Canada; like his father, he sought his own counsel in the end and finally accepted his fate, and the rest remains to be seen. But as strange as it may seem, I believe I caught a glimpse of what’s coming… 

The cycles of life puzzle people, and during the post-election analysis our sapient political pundits made reference to cycles in politics; saying things like the cycle of Stephen Harper’s government is over and a new cycle is about to begin with Justin Trudeau’s victory, giving us a pundit’s proffer of what’s to come—but why cycles, anyway?

“To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven,” said the Preacher in Ecclesiastes, pointing to the cycles of life that evolve ineluctably out of the enantiodromiac dynamic of natural evolution. “A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace,” continues the Preacher; and then he asks the fateful question that has mystified theologians and philosophers for centuries: “What profit hath he that worketh in that wherein he laboreth?” And that’s the mystery of cycles, and our personal destiny.

My answer to this haunting questions presupposes a lifetime of relentless questing, but it satisfied my need to know; and the best response that I can give was hinted at by something that the eminent psychologist C. G. Jung said in an interview late in his life: “As each plant grows from a seed and becomes in the end an oak tree, so man must become what he is meant to be. He ought to get there, but most get stuck.” Implying that man, like the acorn seed, is teleologically driven to realize his destined purpose, and will do so if he makes choices that coincide with what he is meant to be; and I believe Justin’s destined purpose was to become Prime Minister of Canada and usher in a new zeitgeist. But, as I said, how I came by this perspective was meant for me alone, and I risk incredulity sharing it.

Nonetheless...

 

Stephen Harper ran a negative campaign, using attack adds to belittle Justin Trudeau and the leader of the official opposition Thomas Mulcair, but then focussing on Justin as he began to rise in the polls and Mulcair’s New Democratic party slipped into third place; but Justin took the high road and ran a respectful and positive campaign, which was dubbed “sunny ways,” and the impression that the long and protracted campaign had upon me came to a head while watching one of the leaders’ debates on TV.

Both Harper and Mulcair attacked Justin, saying that he was only there on the strength of Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s name and not on his own merit, which they disparaged by saying that he was naïve and just not ready; but when Harper attacked Justin’s father with an animus intended to mortify the son, I witnessed something that sent a chill up my spine, because when Justin rose to his father’s defence I “saw” (it was as much a feeling as it was seeing) the spirit of a new zeitgeist of positive politics flow into and possess young Justin, and whether it was a vision or my imagination, I saw him grow in stature and Harper and Mulcair diminish, and the look in their eyes was one of awe and fear, and I knew in that moment that Justin had just been ensouled by the spirit of his destiny and would become the Prime Minister of Canada; and as I watched him shaking hands and snapping selfies with his fellow Canadians at the Montreal Jarry metro station the morning after the election to thank them for his victory, I knew in my heart that his brand of politics was a sign of things to come.         

───

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

         

 

 

 

         

 

         

46: The Quandary of Our Modern World

46

The Quandary of Our Modern World

Unquestionably, the pace of life has quickened with the onslaught of the Internet and Social Media; but are we any closer to where we want, or ought to be? That’s the quandary of our modern world that came to me as I reflected upon our purpose in life as I re-read half a dozen or so books on the Edgar Cayce literature that I chanced upon in my basement library last week when I went downstairs to look for one book in particular, which I couldn’t find, and I took that as a sign that I was meant to re-acquaint myself with the literature on reincarnation; but why? That’s the subject of today’s spiritual musing…

I make no pretense to the fact that I believe in reincarnation, which given the copious amounts of information that we have today on the subject makes me wonder why society is still so resistant to the ancient concept of rebirth—reminding me of a letter that Carl Gustav Jung wrote on his startling insight on man’s resistance to understanding, which I will refer to later as I approach a solution to the quandary of our modern world; but it was Jess Stearn’s book The Search for a Soul: Taylor Caldwell’s Psychic Lives that inspired my re-reading of the Edgar Cayce literature, because it gave me the perspective that I needed to make sense of our modern dilemma—and by dilemma I mean the paradoxical fact that the quicker the pace of our modern world gets (and it seems to be speeding up exponentially with the advances we make in digital technology), the greater the distance we seem to be from where we want, or ought to be. It’s a whirlwind of activity out there, but where are we going?

I read an article in one of my weekend papers a month or so ago about a ritzy resort hotel that offered luxury suites at exorbitant rates because they were architecturally designed so the occupants could not access the outside world with their laptops and mobile units, thereby offering them a box of time for disconnected rest and relaxation. How ironic, that our modern world has become so obsessed and self-indulgent that we can no longer say no to our addiction to smart phones and our need to be connected with what’s going on out there.

I chuckled at the irony, because it’s not what’s going on out there that has our modern world in a schizophrenic frenzy, but what’s going on in here—in the little universe of our own private lives; and that’s the crux of our dilemma, because what’s going on out there can’t seem to satisfy the longing in our soul, and we’re always left wanting.

As synchronicity would have it (I just love it when the synchronicity principle kicks in to assist me in my writing), just to confirm my point about our modern world’s need to be connected with what’s going on out there, I just happened to check my email a moment ago as I took a break from this musing, and a friend had just posted a cartoon depicting a bunch of children sitting on the front steps of a house and others walking on the sidewalk all with their heads bent and eyes locked onto their smart phones and a yellow caution road sign with the warning: SLOW, CHILDREN TEXTING. And the caption read: “PLAYING OUTSIDE” THESE DAYS. What more proof does one need for our need to be connected?

This is the “disease” of our modern world that has infected the next generation—the need to be connected with what’s going on out there, whatever out there may be for each afflicted person—be it one’s friends, one’s email, Facebook, Twitter, or whatever window onto the world that one may be locked into; and time fritters by as we hungrily try to satisfy that indefinable longing in our soul with the empty social calories of what’s going on out there. No wonder some enterprising individual has offered exorbitantly priced weekend retreats for those who can afford to pay to get away from what’s going on out there!

I had read Jess Stearn’s book The Search for a Soul, Taylor Caldwell’s Psychic Lives many years ago, which was the inspiration for my own seven past-life regressions many years later that became the foundational basis for my novel Cathedral of My Past Lives;  but I was strongly nudged to read Stearn’s book  again because I felt a need to re-acquaint myself with how our current life is unconsciously affected by our past lives, as Taylor Caldwell’s life certainly was because many of her novels were drawn from those ancient times in which she lived and where she drew her information from for her unbelievably knowledgeable novels—like Dear and Glorious Physician, a novel about St. Luke, and Great Lion of God, a fascinating novel about St. Paul and the life and times of the Jews.

Taylor Caldwell was regressed to some of her past lives, and it was enlightening to see how many of the people that she met in her current lifetime, like her husband, had played a vital role in her past lives; all of which points to a karmic purpose to our life. And that’s what’s missing in today’s modern world, the stubborn resistance to our karmic need for self-fulfillment which is displaced by our obsessive need for self-indulgence and social attention.

I wrote a spiritual musing a while back alluding to this obsessive need, which I titled “I’m On Facebook, Therefore I Am,” and as ironic as I was in my musing, the point I wanted to make was that Social Media cannot satisfy our longing for self-fulfillment; but very few people make the connection between what’s going on out there and what’s going on in here, and our world today suffers the malaise of spiritual emptiness more than any other age.

Doctor Jung, the founder of Analytical Psychology, foresaw this in his practice, and in his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul he tells us what the problem is: “During the past thirty years, people from all the civilized countries of the earth have consulted me. I have treated many hundreds of patient, the larger number being Protestants, a smaller number Jews, and not more than five or six believing Catholics. Among all of my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of not finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has really been healed who did not regain his religious outlook” (Modern Man in Search of a Soul, C. G. Jung, p. 229, bold italics mine).

Jung said that most people who came to him for therapy suffered from a sense of meaninglessness, and it was his duty to help them find a sense of purpose; this is how he developed his psychology of individuation—because the more one grew in the consciousness of his own identity, the more fulfilled he would be. “As each plant grows from a seed and becomes in the end an oak tree, so man becomes what he is meant to be. He ought to get there, but most get stuck,” said Jung in an interview that I came across on the Internet; and that’s the problem of our modern world—we ought to get there, but we’re stuck.

As I see it, modern man is stuck out there somewhere; and until we come to the realization that in the final analysis where it’s really at is in here, in the little universe of our own private world, we will never satisfy that longing in our soul to be what we are meant to be—which is why I was drawn to re-read my Edgar Cayce literature.

Edgar Cayce was America’s greatest living psychic who would go into a trance state and do past-life readings as well as health readings; and Jess Stearn helped to bring Edgar Cayce to the public’s attention with his books Edgar Cayce: The Sleeping Prophet and Intimates Through Time: Edgar Cayce’s Mysteries of Reincarnation. And then I re-read Stearn’s book Soul Mates, because I enjoyed reading about people who found their soul mate, quite often serendipitously, to fulfill their past-life karmic relationships—which is precisely how I met my soul mate Penny Lynn, because we had unresolved karma from our past life together in Genoa, Italy when I broke her heart by cheating on her with my mistress.

We’re all born with karmic purpose, which is why I felt compelled to write today’s spiritual musing; because the only solution that I can see to the quandary of our modern world is to embrace a philosophy of life that will connect us to our inner purpose. But to do that, we have to take a pause from what’s going on out there and pay more attention to what’s going in in here in the little universe of our own private world.

This brings me back to Jung’s insight into man’s resistance to understanding—which, when push comes to shove, is born of man’s fear of knowing himself; and I can vouchsafe Jung’s insight, because it’s also been my experience that when one is made conscious of their purpose in life, which is to become what we are meant to be, the responsibility is often too great to bear, and one flees into the world out there to escape their karmic responsibility—an insight which was confirmed for me with a dream I had on the night of my open heart surgery when I was chased from one lifetime to the next by Nazi-like soldiers, which I discerned to be my own karma hunting me from one life to the next—the spiritual crisis of our modern world, because our chickens have come home to roost; and not until we connect with our karmic purpose will we ever hope of resolving our dilemma.

───

45: "A Walk in the Woods"

45 

“A Walk in the Woods”

Redford, Nolte, and Old Age         

“Today’s a courtesy day,” I said to Penny, implying that the merciful law of divine synchronicity was working in my favor as I picked up a perfectly useable pen on the pavement by my feet as I stepped out of Bewell (that’s what our license plate reads and what we call our new Honda Civic LX, a synchronicity story in itself which I wrote about in another musing), because we just “happened” to find a parking spot directly in front of the theatre, and with my free pen I knew that the omniscient guiding force of life was telling me to take notes on the movie we were about to watch across the street in the Uptown Theatre in Barrie last Sunday.

The movie we were going to watch was “A Walk in the Woods,” starring two tried and true veteran actors—Robert Redford and Nick Nolte; and although it was based on the travel writer Bill Bryson’s book by the same title of his actual walk on the Appalachian Trail with his old friend Stephen Katz, both in their mid-forties, the movie version was about two men in their seventies (Redford, who plays Bryson is 79; and Nolte, who plays Katz is 74), so the movie takes on a completely different turn as the two aging men take stock of their life as they’re forced to confront the physical limitations of their body and inevitable mortality.

I hadn’t read Bryson’s book A Walk in the Woods, but I did read his book In A Sunburned Country a number of years ago when I had a real yen to go to Australia. In fact, I had even thought of immigrating to Australia at one time, but apparently that wasn’t written in my sacred contract and I stayed in Canada to fulfill my destiny; but I do remember that Bryson had an odd sense of humor, which I loved—and which, I’m happy to say, came through in the movie version as Nolte plays the unkempt raunchy “loser” to Redford’s well-ordered successful life and deliciously ironic, but pedantically dry wit.

Penny and I loved the movie, but on our drive home after we did some grocery shopping to pick up our Thanksgiving turkey at Food Basics (we went to the Sunday matinee and did not go out for dinner after the movie, which we usually do, because we had a chicken stew simmering in the slow cooker), Penny said something that inspired the thought for today’s spiritual musing: “I enjoyed the movie, but there was something sad about it.”

And I agreed, because it was obvious to me that Bryson and Katz were taking the measure of their life as they faced the physical challenges of walking the Appalachian Trail at their advanced age, especially Katz who was so overweight and out of shape that it was painful watching him negotiate every step with the heavy packsack on his back, and it was a foregone conclusion that they would never complete the 2,200 mile trek.

It was fun watching them try, though; and as much as Bryson tried to make his story about the walk itself, one couldn’t help but become aware of mortality closing in on them—almost as though Bill Bryson and his friend Stephen Katz had morphed into the aging actors Redford and Nolte—another example proving one of my pet theories that the role chooses the actor and not the actor the role, because the septuagenarian thespians were called by the Hollywood script of A Walk in the Woods to take account of their life to see if they measured up. But measure up to what?

The movie left Penny with a feeling of sadness, because she felt sorry for the aging men struggling on the Appalachian Trail, especially when they clumsily fell off the trail onto the ledge overlooking the steep gorge and water below (reminiscent of Redford’s role with Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), but it wasn’t so much their inability to negotiate the trail at their advanced age that made Penny sad, it was the feeling of regret that Bryson and Katz felt that their life could have added up to more than it had as they stared into the face of their own mortality sitting on the ledge overlooking the gorge below.

But luckily two young strapping hikers saved them from their peril, and Bryson and Katz felt very thankful for the life they still had left to live; and they decided to end their walk and go back to their normal life, and gratitude for what we have became the saving grace of a movie whose underlying theme could have made it very tragic.

“I’d give it a 7 out of 10,” Penny said.

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” I said; but I couldn’t shake the idea that came to me in the theatre before the movie started as I listened to a man and woman sitting behind us talking; an idea for a short story called “Tourette’s.”

I took my new pen that life had provided me out of my pocket and asked Penny if she had a piece of paper in her purse. She gave me her address book and I jotted down the idea for my story that had just come to me, which basically went like this: Penny and I are comfortably seated in the reclining leather chairs (which we were when watching “A Walk in the Woods”), when suddenly the woman behind us starts spouting foul obscenities.

Shocked, Penny looks at me; but I stand up and look at the man sitting with the woman who had just spouted the foul obscenities, and I say to him, “Tourette’s?”

Embarrassed, but relieved, he replies, “Yes.”

And then I say, “Have she ever considered past-life regression therapy?”

They both look at me with a blank expression on their face, and I add that they should look into it. “This could be something from a past lifetime. You’ve got nothing to lose,” and I turned around and sat down again because the movie was just starting.

And that, to be very honest, is why I feel I was given the pen that I found on the road as I stepped out of our car last Sunday afternoon; because as I watched Bryson/Redford and Katz/Nolte taking stock of their life as they walked the Appalachian Trail, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for how impoverished their perspective was when it was confined to one solitary life; but that’s an irony I can only share in my fiction, and in today’s spiritual musing. I jotted my story idea down in Penny’s address book, and then sat back to watch the movie. 

───

 

 

44: Willful Direction and Purpose

44 

Willful Direction and Purpose 

“Discovery itself is not enough. It’s not enough to find out what things are.

You’ve also got to find out where they come from,

where each piece fits in the wall.”

 

You Can’t Go Home Again

Thomas Wolfe 

Thank God that God is merciful, or we’d all be in big trouble; that’s the thought that came to me as I sat in our friend’s reclining armchair in Thunder Bay on our Labor Day weekend holiday visit as I read several short stories from The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, Richard Ford’s “Rock Springs” and Joyce Carol Oates’s “Ghost Girls,” two starkly disquieting stories about people living on the edge of life without willful direction and purpose; and that’s what has inspired today’s spiritual musing.

Although the seed for today’s musing sprouted with the two stories that I read, the seed was planted in the fertile soil of my creative unconscious with something that Thomas Wolfe said in his novel You Can’t Go Home Again that I had just finished reading the day before. I read You Can’t Go Home Again for personal reasons, because like Wolfe I had also written a novel that alienated me from my hometown of Nipigon, Ontario like Wolfe’s novel Look Homeward, Angel had alienated him from his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina; and in You Can’t Go Home Again Wolfe explained to his friend Randy Sheperton that what he feared as a writer was not drying up and becoming like a camel “living on my hump,” but something far deeper and infinitely enticing.

“No, that’s not what bothers me. The thing I’ve got to find is the way!” exclaimed Wolfe. “The way! The way! Do you understand?”

“But how?” Randy asked.

George Weber (Thomas Wolfe’s fictional self) fell silent for a moment, and then replied: “I’m looking for the way. I think it may be something like what people vaguely mean when they speak of fiction. A kind of legend, perhaps. Something—a story—composed of all the knowledge I have, of all the living I’ve seen. Not the facts, you understand—not just the record of my life—but something distilled out of my experiences and transmitted into a form of universal application. That’s the best of fiction, isn’t it?”

What Thomas Wolfe implied with his creative dilemma was what all writers seek with their fiction—the truth that the bare facts of life add up to (the “wall”); or, as I came to see this morning in our friend’s cozy recliner, “willful direction and purpose.”

In other words, the “why” of life, which Wolfe presciently called the “way” and which I spent the best years of my life looking for and found in what Carl Jung called the “secret way” that lies buried deep in the human condition that only the most gifted writer can discern and which in his creative genius Thomas Wolfe finally sensed and spent the rest of his short incandescent life (he died at 38) trying to capture in his fiction.

Coincidentally (not to my surprise, because this is how the synchronicity principle of life works), our friend’s thirty year old bachelor son (who has a twelve year old son of his own) was floundering in the spiritually desiccating quandary of his rudderless life when, magically, his spiritual need for willful direction and purpose engaged my transcendent function; and out of my mouth poured the necessary wisdom that he was looking for to shift his center of gravity from his irresponsible puer aeternus self to his responsible adult self, because that was the only way he could transcend the irresponsible pattern of his fun boy life and willfully synchronize with his destined purpose. A tall order; but that’s the moral imperative of the secret way of life which in God’s mercy always finds us when we are ready to take the next step on our journey to wholeness and completeness.  

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