Joe,
Regarding your essay In Praise of Holy Madness, I congratulate you on finding one of our brothers. Which brings me to the point. The GOP will never be able to annihilate our race, since the Lord will not leave the earth without someone preaching His Word on it. We are all born of immaculate conception sometime after our earthly birth. Though we often recognize each other on the street, we usually need only nod to each other, as we each have our own gig. Jesus went one way, John another.
Some of us have even manage to maintain our sinecure within 'straight' society, due to blinders on those around us. They subconciously recognize our value and leave milk on the stoop; they may be forgiven for publicly tsk-tsking us. The game, of course, must go on. And besides, we provide amusement. I myself act as translator, explaining filth, Diet Coke, and tooth decay to WASPs with good intentions but who suffer from a failure-to-identify language barrier. Sometimes, I'm called a preacher.
Rant on, Brother
Conner
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Dear Conner,
Thank you for writing. The Holy Madmen essay was personally one of the most important to me, although readers didn't seem to like it much, preferring instead, more overtly political writing.
Though I in no way consider myself the equal of the occasional truly spiritual man or woman I meet, both the holy man and the quiet seers among us, I am deeply moved when I do encounter one. And I never forget them and they always leave me with more than I could ever repay.
The truth always looks like madness to self-absorbed sleepwalkers like myself and most Americans. And the more the truth the more it appears like madness, such is the armor of personality and the crust of materialism our system not only encourages, but must maintain for us to survive and accept its obvious cruelty and meaninglessness. It takes a lot of diversion to keep people from asking life's few important questions, such as "Why is there so much suffering in the world?" Or my own most important question, one I have pose in several essays, "What is the question to which my life is the answer?" (By the way, I found the answer to that question, only to discover that, like most universal questions, the answer is not comforting in any way, and assures only more inner suffering. But it is sustaining in the ultimate way, unpredictable and misery inducing as such sustenance is.)
Most of us are probably born with with life's important questions regarding justice, humanity and the alleviation of suffering, nestled within us like seeds. I've seen six-year olds ask them in their own way. And it takes a helluva lot to trivialize and smother these questions to death before we reach adulthood. But it gets done.
I find it rather paradoxical that true spirituality gets snuffed in people at both ends of the social and material spectrum. Here in America it is trivialized out of existence, to be replaced with a deluge of entertainments, goods, and cheap fleeting pleasures, so the great financial, corporate and political monoliths can continue to maintain control. Yet, in the poorest and most wretched places on earth, where the lust for earthly justice and the alleviation of human misery is strongest and the insight into the true nature of man's suffering is deepest, that understanding is beaten out of people by sheer poverty and need.
Nevertheless, there seems to be more universal truth and seers coming out of the smoking dumps of India and Sao Paulo and the indigenous peoples of Latin America and Africa, than all the well-heeled seminaries and universities in America put together. Which is why, of course, we must mount great armies against them, impose dictators upon them, blast their desert villages out of existence and wipe out their native agriculture, forcing them to grow money instead of corn. We must forcefully carry off their very sustenance, which we call mere resources. Otherwise, how could the university professor afford his California wine? How would the American ministers or priests be able to build ever bigger churches? How would you and I sit here on expensive computers on a complex Internet communicating about "meaning" and "spirituality" within the great technological illusion that passes for life here within the self-imposed hologram, which we prefer over actual engagement with the real world and its truth?
The subject of the Holy Madmen essay, Bob DeLay, who, incidentally, is related to Tom DeLay, has vanished from contact. Yet he and a few others like him in my life remain constantly on my mind. They come wandering or ranting out of the darkness waving their lantern, illuminating various truths written on the walls of our inner prisons, then recede into the darkness. They rant, they cry, they embarrass, they make fools of themselves before the world, they do everything but preach, for actually they are talking to themselves only. They do so because they have given themselves over to something they know is higher than the mundane existence of man. Often as not, they were swept away by the truth and had no choice in the matter.
I am certainly not fortunate enough to be one of them, though I do try to cling to any scrap of real awareness I manage to stumble upon. I am no William Blake. But I like to think that if William Blake came careening out of the darkness into my life, I would at least recognize him.
In brotherhood,
Joe
