Introduction

…Stream, sand, white, white sand; boulders and sycamore in the Fall. Clear, clean crystal clear air; the Fall– wonderful Fall days: but the night; I am freezing and alone, I am terrified by everything, each falling pebble from the cliffs above… Sleep… but I am awakened to the moonless night by the cold.

… a voice calls my name again and again in the dark. I hide behind the brush.

His writings, like that above, the images; his experiences more than his ideas, haunt me…

Leave me curious. It’s different than what I’m used to. I don’t believe him. But in order to comprehend these things, you almost have to believe. Well, I pretend to believe. It is almost a sexual high, sometimes. Let me be perfectly clear here. I’m not, you know, gay. Don’t miss the point.

He feels himself “called.” But to what? That’s what I have to figure out. For several reasons.

The following quote from one of the last chapters in this story takes us right to the heart of the whole thing. It’s how we get there that matters here. So, I’m not giving anything away. But this next bit is of great significance according to him. My main character, Adam, thinks that he can work miracles. Claims to be able to transmute poison, turn poison into… well, I don’t know what. But, something that he thinks is good… somehow.

“Shit. It’ s my fault. The baby is beautiful. The only beautiful thing in my life… What do you really think? Do you think I’m shit? Please!” After an awkward silence,

“I don’t know.”

Silence. Then after a while we separate again. He went back behind the mesquite. Not much later, I got a ride away from that place with so many stars and dry, hot wind.

Narrator:

That’s from some purloined papers we have from his studio. Weird, don’t you think? Oh well, conventional thought only leads to conventional products. But, from his perspective, it kind of makes sense, what happens afterward–about turning poison into healing of some kind. You’ll see… Plenty of poison in the world. Occasionally I feel that I am just beginning to see– that I … Then it all slips away. I resent this assignment. But I’m too close to the end now. I don’t like these mountains that I’m in either, because this is where he is. I don’t like him. I don’t like you… Hell, I’m getting as screwy as he is. I don’t care…

Soon, I will tell you more about his beginning. But let me take time here to tell you about some of the research I’ve done. …so that I could understand what this man is doing. In this little detour I want to talk about one of the images in this first passage. The snake.

What one has to understand is the impact that nature has had on this man. He was raised in near solitude on his family’s ranch in California. His only company besides family and a few far-flung neighbors was the surrounding nature and animals. He claims an intimate connection to the land and its flora and fauna. But then, he had plenty of time and opportunity in the isolation of his youth to develop the connection. He is also a trained “religious” and has studied all the world’s religions. More than studied, taken them in and been changed by them. So, when he talks about a “snake” for instance, he is accessing religious imagery, positive and negative, from 40,000 years of human evolution as well as the scriptural references of his own religion.

It guarded the Tree of Life. The snake in the past, represented wisdom and renewal of life as it changed its skin every year and came out of holes in the earth, the Mother deity. It represented resurrection. Since it comes up from the dark into the light. The snake was thus connected with the ‘feminine’ energies: The Goddess in the matriarchal religions (prevailing perhaps) before the patriarchal take-over 5,000 years ago. According to some… The Greek pantheon, with Zeus on top instead of Hera; Apollo, etc., and the Abrahamic religions; Judaism, Christianity and Islam, are all part of this patriarchal development across the world. So, the snake represents both enlightenment (see kundalini) and resurrection as well as the workings of the dark powers: fertility, fecundity, birth and death, dissolution, rebirth and healing, wisdom (the caduceus of the American Medical Association and the brazen serpent from Exodus). In Genesis the snake is the threat of false progress. A very real threat from Adam’s perspective now fully manifested as nuclear or environmental danger. Knowledge, power, knowledge of good and evil. Perhaps the metaphor of human genius. There is more according to our man in the story of the Fall than just political and cultural evolution of a “hunter-gatherer people” to agriculture and empire in Mesopotamia; a time frame spanning hundreds of thousands of years as some anthropologists would have it. Contained therein is a warning. We have to look past the human rights issue of the wrong done to women in such a patriarchal set up. Such a bloody history. The price of progress, I’d say. Even though the wrong of it is undeniable. But our man Adam’s interest is along a different, and for him a more vital (and dangerous), track.

The theological language is Original Sin. The urge to power. The resultant loss of innocence, the betrayal of our relationship and dependence on God in the natural set up, in what was then a lush part of the world around the Persian Gulf. Very different than now. But, perhaps due to some change in climate, and politics… came the development of agriculture. Thus, the beginning of serious technology leading to the birth of civilization in Mesopotamia (or Egypt). And the bloody warfare of empire building on a grand scale. The scriptures complain about this “aberration” civilization: The development of technology, as well of formal religion, architecture on a grand scale, everything, according to the human genius.

But the dark side of that, and here is the warning of concern to Adam: this bright genius of humanity also has a capacity for self destruction. And so we find ourselves at the other end of the spectrum from that difficult beginning. Now we can destroy life on this planet. Corporate suicide. Rapidly if we do it nuclear fashion. Bit by bit if we continue the exploitation of resources of the planet. Over- population being perhaps as destructive as the atomic bomb. I don’t know, something seems to be missing. It makes better sense when he explains it…

This story and these characters, operating sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, as is the case with all of us, face this problem and resolve it.

Her mouth opened to his, as his opened to devour. But he pulled back, slowed, then, all the rapacious cruelty of the past, and more than just theirs, catalyzed into a swift and almost desperate union. The first nudge strangely terrified her. She gave a long gasp and then her whole body opened up. His, hard, thick and pounding; she moved with it. For an instant they were bound together. He stopped. He stopped and held it. Just inside. His face agonized.

Chris and Agnes in this quote from Chapter One are beginning to discover underlying truths about certain hidden possibilities in this affair. Adam understands this process as dangerous and necessary because of the desperate issue of his concern. So, he is willing to experiment with otherwise forbidden alchemies. For him as a celibate, it is an internal process. But, for Chris and Agnes, it is external and physical. At least, at first.

So let us begin again. Adam thinks he can help people. But in a different way than some bleeding heart might have been able to help that pervert, the pedophile above. Anyway, I don’t care about that.

There have been many “other projects.” The Vietnam war was one of my more successful. Oh, not me by myself! But it was a ripe opportunity. My clients made hundreds of billions of dollars. Suppliers, munitions makers, drugs and guns. Not very nice. Neither my family nor friends know what I really do. They all think I’m a nice guy. I don’t care. Easy to fool people if you are good at what they admire; sports, wit, money, success. It doesn’t take much. Three hundred million isn’t much. But my current clients want it bad enough. I wonder sometimes if there is not something else they’re after.

…What I would like to display for you about our main character is what he begins to discover about some very, well, shall we say, peculiar relationships with nature.

He was already ordained a priest and working in a parish in Southern California. His pastor, or superior is on vacation. It is after Easter about a week. He plans this ritual for Friday evening. He has already explored such esoteric disciplines as Shamanism, Buddhism, and the Hesychasm of eastern Christianity while he was working on a Master’s in the seminary along with theological and pastoral studies. He found that shamanism “resonated deeply” in his personality. It is Friday night, about midnight. He goes out on the patio off the suite of rooms used by the pastor of this parish. There in that patio, he sets up a “mesa.” That is, a shamanistic altar in the manner of certain South American shamans. With what is called “campo del recho” for the good “objects” and “campo del esquino” for the evil objects and “campo medio” for the crucifix. Then he begins to work: Indescribable. Except for a few superficial aspects; the real workings are within him and his gift; The relationship to these objects of power, and the way that it all communicates with the world around him, and the beings and powers that dwell there. He says he is offering this whole experience as a form of prayer and has no other intentions. There was a fire and objects were transmuted, transformed, melted, reformed into another object of power… (as he relates in some of his notes that I’ve purloined). When the ritual seemed to reach its own maturity and conclude itself, he extinguished the fire. It was around dawn. He cleaned up the articles of this working. Returned to his room to sleep for a couple of hours before he had to be up to perform a wedding in the Church. Before the wedding began, the church was struck by a tempest. Not just a storm, a completely unexpected squall. What the news reports called a freak storm. The winds were of such force that they ripped a huge banner off the front of the church. The banner had been secured against the mighty Santa Ana winds of southern California and had survived those for several months. But this storm and its strength simply ripped the banner off the front of the church as if it were a kitchen curtain. Hail and huge rain drops. Buckets. Fr. Adam was amazed and surprised by this. After a while, it dawned on him that there might be some connection between his ritual and the storm.

After that, in the following months, Adam decided that he must test this new found “relationship.” There were seven like occurrences by the end of the following summer!

I’m semi-retired. I’m a businessman. And I find him interesting. He’s an artist and he writes. Getting copies of his writings have helped me very much to chart his development as well as to figure him out. The following describes one of the ‘tests’ mentioned above and is the beginning of his most important project to date. Or, so he seemed to think.

MONTANA RITUAL (Alaap)

My name is Adam and I am a Catholic priest. But like others of my generation, I have been influenced by the study of many religions. As well, I have a certain bent, a talent if you like, for things that seem to some… well, magical. But really they are about the human heart– transmutations of human personality. The following story will provide a good example of what I mean.

The wife (I assumed marriage) turned to me and said, “I just feel moved to talk to you about the Lord.” “Oh”, I said. My first and several other rides on this trip had been with born-again Christians or ex-Catholics who told me about their religious experience. “I want to ask you if you know the Lord.”

I didn’t want to say that I was into rain-making and raising elemental dragons at that moment. So, I talked about the Lord for a while, somewhat professionally. We, all three it turns out, were professional evangelists. I, a Catholic priest on leave; they worked with a Protestant guru in Michigan and were on their summer break from their mission.

They planned to start a new mission in a rich Virginia suburb at the end of the summer. I told them that they should avoid being a pseudo-Gospel stamp of approval to the values of the rich and powerful as so many other Christian apologists had been. I felt pretentious about saying such things but what did I have to lose? I’d be back on the road soon anyway.

When we got past that, they told me about their plan to found a chain of houses for unwed, pregnant, teenage girls. That seemed to be a good idea as well as being profitable. In the midst of this conversation, I found out that their summer was being spent driving recreational vehicles and new cars from coast to coast for dealers who wanted to help them through the financial rough spots of their lives in ministry. They were apparently in just such a rough spot until they were to start this new mission in Virginia. All they owned was in the trunk of that new car. The wife was enthusiastic about the value of fasting and hardship. The husband was less enthused and generally resented the experience if not the idea of poverty.

They dropped me off near a town as sunset illumined a silhouette of roadside landscape. We were then in a part of the state that seldom, if ever, I was told, got rain that time of year. And that was a year of drought. It was dry– from the parched sheaves of wild oats along the road, to the cracked earth where I chose to lay for rest. I could not rest for long though. Some strange disturbing energy urged me on. After several hours of walking through the night, I found a place of refuge, near a hill that seemed to have a special energy about it. I rested and waited for the storm that hit the next day; lightning, hail, wind and torrential downpour.

I didn’t like the way those Christians used language when they talked about the “Lord.” It seemed fake. It seemed to me that each word stepped away from the vital experience of a spiritually enlivened being. Yet, I liked them somehow. The surprising point that I want to make is that they helped me effect that rain ritual. They might be chagrined to know that. But the expression of their real aspirations added to mine has left me with a sense of quiet, washed-clean, effective enchantment.

Narrator:

In such a ritual as above, as I have recently learned, a ‘connection’ is made with nature through the psychic medium of archetypal gods; sexually perhaps or using spirit animal messengers or sacrifice or other asceticism to effect one’s intention. A Tibetan Lama, a high Geshe, once told me that, though certain yogis perform secret mandala rituals, that is, a form of sexual Tantra, with a human partner, a monk must only do it in his well developed imagination to effect its high and pure purpose. The point here is to use these powerful, natural motivations as vehicles to effect one’s own intention.

Adam relates further, though certain religious traditions like the Tibetans’ claim full use of these practices because of their ancient wisdoms and lore, both the development of these powers and their use are really available for all people. Certainly are the proper subject of study for any interested scholar. Even for a committed Christian since Christ is the heart of all things. According to Adam: All things are originally good. All things can be used in His service, as they say. Our second chapter treats the affair of Agnes and Chris and is intended to illustrate this point. They are his closest associates who exemplify the principles of his approach.