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FINDING
YOUR OWN TRUE MYTH: What I Learned
from Joseph Campbell: The
Myth
of the
Great Secret
III
GAY
SPIRITUALITY:
The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness
GAY PERSPECTIVE:
Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature of God and the
Universe
SECRET MATTER, a sci-fi novel with
wonderful "aliens" with an
Afterword by Mark Jordan
GETTING
LIFE IN PERSPECTIVE:
A
Fantastical Gay Romance set in two different time periods
THE FOURTH QUILL, a
novel about attitudinal healing and the problem of evil
TWO SPIRITS: A Story of Life with
the
Navajo, a collaboration with Walter L. Williams
CHARMED
LIVES: Spinning Straw into
Gold: GaySpirit in Storytelling, a collaboration with
Steve Berman and some 30 other writers
THE MYTH OF THE GREAT
SECRET:
An
Appreciation of Joseph Campbell
IN SEARCH OF GOD IN THE
SEXUAL UNDERWORLD: A Mystical Journey
Unpublished manuscripts
About ordering
Books on
Gay Spirituality:
White
Crane Gay Spirituality Series
Articles
and Excerpts:
Review of
Samuel
Avery's The
Dimensional Structure of Consciousness
Funny
Coincidence: "Aliens Settle in San Francisco"
About Liberty Books, the
Lesbian/Gay Bookstore for Austin, 1986-1996
The Simple Answer to the Gay Marriage Debate
A
Bifurcation of Gay Spirituality
Why gay people should NOT Marry
The Scriptural Basis for
Same Sex Marriage
Toby and Kip Get Married
Wedding Cake Liberation
Gay Marriage in Texas
What's ironic
Shame on the American People
The "highest form of love"
Gay
Consciousness
Why homosexuality is a sin
The cause of homosexuality
The
origins of homophobia
Q&A
about Jungian ideas in gay consciousness
What
is homosexuality?
What
is Gay Spirituality?
My three
messages
What
Jesus said about Gay
Rights
Queering
religion
Common
Experiences Unique to Gay
Men
Is there a "uniquely gay
perspective"?
The
purpose of homosexuality
Interview on the Nature of
Homosexuality
What the Bible Says about
Homosexuality
Mesosexual
Ideal for Straight Men
Varieties
of Gay Spirituality
Waves
of Gay Liberation Activity
The Gay Succession
Wouldn’t You Like to Be Uranian?
The Reincarnation of
Edward Carpenter
Was I (or you) at
Stonewall?
Why Gay Spirituality: Spirituality
as Artistic Medium
Easton Mountain Retreat Center
Andrew Harvey &
Spiritual Activism
The Mysticism of
Andrew Harvey
The
upsidedown book on MSNBC
Enlightenment
"It's
Always About You"
The myth of the Bodhisattva
Avalokitesvara
Joseph
Campbell's description of
Avalokiteshvara
You're
Not A Wave
Joseph Campbell Talks
about Aging
Toby's Experience of
Zen
What is Enlightenment?
What is reincarnation?
How many lifetimes in an
ego?
Emptiness & Religious Ideas
Experiencing experiencing experiencing
Going into the Light
Meditations for a Funeral
Meditation Practice
The way to get to heaven
Buddha's father was right
What Anatman means
Advice to Travelers to India
& Nepal
The Danda Nata
& goddess Kalika
Nate Berkus is a bodhisattva
John Boswell was Immanuel Kant
Cutting
edge realization
The Myth of the
Wanderer
Change: Source of
Suffering & of Bliss
World Navel
What the Vows Really
Mean
Manifesting
from the Subtle Realms
The Three-layer
Cake
& the Multiverse
The
est Training and Personal Intention
Effective
Dreaming in Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven
Gay
Spirituality
Curious
Bodies
What
Toby Johnson Believes
The
Joseph Campbell Connection
The
Mann Ranch (& Rich Gabrielson)
Campbell
& The Pre/Trans Fallacy
The
Two Loves
The
Nature of Religion
What's true about
Religion
Being
Gay is a Blessing
Drawing Long Straws
Freedom
of Religion
The
Gay Agenda
Gay
Saintliness
Gay
Spiritual Functions
The subtle workings of the spirit
in gay men's lives.
The Sinfulness of
Homosexuality
Proposal
for a study of gay nondualism
Priestly Sexuality
Having a Church to
Leave
Harold Cole on Beauty
Marian Doctrines:
Immaculate Conception & Assumption
Not lashed to the
prayer-post
Monastic or Chaste
Homosexuality
The Monastic Schedule: a whimsy
Is It Time to Grow
Up? Confronting
the Aging Process
Notes on Licking
(July, 1984)
Redeem Orlando
Gay Consciousness changing
the
world by Shokti LoveStar
Alexander Renault
interviews Toby
Johnson
Mystical
Vision
"The
Evolution of Gay Identity"
"St. John of the
Cross & the Dark Night of
the Soul."
Avalokiteshvara
at the Baths
Eckhart's Eye
Let Me
Tell You a Secret
Religious
Articulations of the
Secret
The
Collective Unconscious
Driving as
Spiritual Practice
Meditation
Historicity
as Myth
Pilgrimage
No
Stealing
Next
Step in Evolution
The
New Myth
The Moulting of the Holy Ghost
Gaia
is a Bodhisattva
Sex with God
Merging Religion and Sex
Revolution
Through
Consciousness Change: GSV 2019
The
Hero's
Journey
The
Hero's Journey as archetype -- GSV 2016
The Gay Hero Journey
(shortened)
You're
On Your Own
Superheroes
Seeing
Differently
Teenage
Prostitution and the Nature of Evil
Allah
Hu: "God is present here"
Adam
and Steve
The Life is
in the Blood
Gay retirement and the "freelance
monastery"
Seeing with
Different Eyes
Facing
the Edge: AIDS as an occasion for spiritual wisdom
What
are you looking for in a gay science fiction novel?
The Vision
The
mystical experience at the Servites' Castle in Riverside
A Most Remarkable
Synchronicity in
Riverside
The
Great Dance according to C.S.Lewis
The Techniques Of The
World Saviors
Part 1: Brer Rabbit and the
Tar-Baby
Part 2: The
Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara
Part 3: Jesus
and the Resurrection
Part 4: A
Course in Miracles
The
Secret of the Clear Light
Understanding
the Clear Light
Mobius
Strip
Finding
Your
Tiger Face
How Gay Souls Get Reincarnated
Joseph
Campbell, the Hero's Journey, and the modern Gay Hero-- a five part
presentation on YouTube
About Alien Abduction
In
honor of Sir Arthur C Clarke
Karellen was a homosexual
The
D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance
Intersections
with the movie When We Rise
More
about Gay Mental Health
Psych
Tech Training
Toby
at the California Institute
The
Rainbow Flag
Ideas for gay
mythic stories
People
Kip and Toby,
Activists
Toby's
friend and nicknamesake Toby Marotta.
Harry
Hay, Founder of the gay movement
About Hay and The New Myth
About
Karl
Heinrich Ulrichs, the first
man to really "come out"
About Michael Talbot, gay mystic
About Fr. Bernard Lynch
About Richard Baltzell
About Guy Mannheimer
About David Weyrauch
About
Dennis Paddie
About Ask the Fire
About
Arthur Evans
About
Christopher Larkin
About Mark Thompson
About Sterling Houston
About Michael Stevens
The Alamo Business
Council
Our friend Tom Nash
Second March on
Washington
The
Gay
Spirituality Summit in May 2004 and the "Statement
of Spirituality"
Book
Reviews
Be Done on Earth by Howard
E. Cook
Pay Me What I'm Worth by
Souldancer
The Way Out by Christopher
L Nutter
The Gay Disciple by John Henson
Art That Dares by Kittredge Cherry
Coming Out, Coming Home by Kennth
A. Burr
Extinguishing
the Light by B. Alan Bourgeois
Over Coffee: A conversation
For Gay
Partnership & Conservative Faith by D.a. Thompson
Dark Knowledge
by
Kenneth Low
Janet Planet by
Eleanor
Lerman
The
Kairos by Paul E. Hartman
Wrestling
with Jesus by D.K.Maylor
Kali Rising by Rudolph
Ballentine
The
Missing Myth by Gilles Herrada
The
Secret of the Second Coming by Howard E. Cook
The Scar Letters: A
Novel
by Richard Alther
The
Future is Queer by Labonte & Schimel
Missing Mary
by Charlene Spretnak
Gay
Spirituality 101 by Joe Perez
Cut Hand: A
Nineteeth Century Love Story on the American Frontier by Mark Wildyr
Radiomen
by Eleanor Lerman
Nights
at
Rizzoli by Felice Picano
The Key
to Unlocking the Closet Door by Chelsea Griffo
The Door
of the Heart by Diana Finfrock Farrar
Occam’s
Razor by David Duncan
Grace
and
Demion by Mel White
Gay Men and The New Way Forward by Raymond L.
Rigoglioso
The
Dimensional Stucture of Consciousness by Samuel Avery
The
Manly Pursuit of Desire and Love by Perry Brass
Love
Together: Longtime Male Couples on Healthy Intimacy and Communication
by Tim Clausen
War
Between Materialism and Spiritual by Jean-Michel Bitar
The
Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion by
Jeffrey J. Kripal
Esalen:
America and the Religion of No Religion by Jeffrey J. Kripal
The
Invitation to Love by
Darren Pierre
Brain,
Consciousness, and God: A Lonerganian Integration by Daniel A
Helminiak
A
Walk with Four Spiritual Guides by Andrew Harvey
Can Christians Be Saved? by Stephenson & Rhodes
The
Lost Secrets of the Ancient Mystery Schools by Stephenson &
Rhodes
Keys to
Spiritual
Being: Energy Meditation and Synchronization Exercises by Adrian
Ravarour
In
Walt We
Trust by John Marsh
Solomon's
Tantric Song by Rollan McCleary
A Special Illumination by Rollan McCleary
Aelred's
Sin
by Lawrence Scott
Fruit
Basket
by Payam Ghassemlou
Internal
Landscapes by John Ollom
Princes
& Pumpkins by David Hatfield Sparks
Yes by Brad
Boney
Blood of the Goddess by William Schindler
Roads of Excess,
Palaces of
Wisdom by Jeffrey Kripal
Evolving
Dharma by Jay Michaelson
Jesus
in Salome's Lot by Brett W. Gillette
The Man Who Loved Birds by Fenton Johnson
The
Vatican Murders by Lucien Gregoire
"Sex Camp"
by
Brian McNaught
Out
& About with Brewer & Berg
Episode One: Searching for a New Mythology
The
Soul Beneath the Skin by David Nimmons
Out
on
Holy Ground by Donald Boisvert
The
Revotutionary Psychology of Gay-Centeredness by Mitch Walker
Out There
by Perry Brass
The Crucifixion of Hyacinth by Geoff Puterbaugh
The
Silence of Sodom by Mark D Jordan
It's
Never About What It's About by Krandall Kraus and Paul Borja
ReCreations,
edited by Catherine Lake
Gospel: A
Novel
by WIlton Barnhard
Keeping
Faith: A Skeptic’s Journey by Fenton Johnson
Dating the Greek Gods by Brad Gooch
Telling
Truths in Church by Mark D. Jordan
The
Substance of God by Perry Brass
The
Tomcat Chronicles by Jack Nichols
10
Smart
Things Gay Men Can Do to Improve Their Lives by Joe Kort
Jesus and the Shamanic Tradition of Same Sex Love
by Will Roscoe
The
Third Appearance by Walter Starcke
The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight by Thom Hartmann
Surviving
and Thriving After a Life-Threatening Diagnosis by Bev Hall
Men,
Homosexuality, and the Gods by Ronald Long
An Interview
with Ron Long
Queering Creole Spiritual Traditons by Randy
Conner & David Sparks
An Interview with
Randy Conner
Pain,
Sex
and Time by Gerald Heard
Sex
and the Sacred by Daniel Helminiak
Blessing Same-Sex Unions by Mark Jordan
Rising Up
by
Joe Perez
Soulfully
Gay
by Joe Perez
That
Undeniable Longing by Mark Tedesco
Vintage: A
Ghost
Story by
Steve Berman
Wisdom
for the Soul by Larry Chang
MM4M a DVD
by Bruce Grether
Double
Cross
by David Ranan
The
Transcended Christian by Daniel Helminiak
Jesus
in Love by Kittredge Cherry
In
the Eye of the Storm by Gene Robinson
The
Starry Dynamo by Sven Davisson
Life
in
Paradox by Fr Paul Murray
Spirituality for Our Global Community by Daniel
Helminiak
Gay & Healthy in a Sick Society by Robert A.
Minor
Coming Out: Irish Gay Experiences by Glen O'Brien
Queering
Christ
by Robert Goss
Skipping
Towards Gomorrah by Dan Savage
The
Flesh of the Word by Richard A Rosato
Catland by
David Garrett Izzo
Tantra
for Gay Men by Bruce Anderson
Yoga
&
the Path of the Urban Mystic by Darren Main
Simple
Grace
by Malcolm Boyd
Seventy
Times Seven by Salvatore Sapienza
What
Does "Queer" Mean Anyway? by Chris Bartlett
Critique of Patriarchal Reasoning by Arthur Evans
Gift
of
the Soul by Dale Colclasure & David Jensen
Legend of the Raibow Warriors by Steven McFadden
The
Liar's
Prayer by Gregory Flood
Lovely
are the Messengers by Daniel Plasman
The Human Core of Spirituality by Daniel Helminiak
3001:
The Final Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
Religion and the Human Sciences by Daniel Helminiak
Only
the
Good Parts by Daniel Curzon
Four
Short
Reviews of Books with a Message
Life
Interrupted by Michael Parise
Confessions of a Murdered Pope by Lucien Gregoire
The
Stargazer's Embassy by Eleanor Lerman
Conscious
Living, Conscious Aging by Ron Pevny
Footprints Through the Desert by Joshua Kauffman
True
Religion by J.L. Weinberg
The Mediterranean Universe by John Newmeyer
Everything
is God by Jay Michaelson
Reflection
by Dennis Merritt
Everywhere
Home by Fenton Johnson
Hard Lesson by James
Gaston
God
vs Gay?
by Jay Michaelson
The
Gate
of Tears: Sadness and the Spiritual Path by Jay Michaelson
Roxie
&
Fred by Richard Alther
Not
the Son He Expected by Tim Clausen
The
9 Realities of Stardust by Bruce P. Grether
The
Afterlife Revolution by Anne & Whitley Strieber
AIDS
Shaman:
Queer Spirit Awakening by Shokti Lovestar
Facing the Truth of Your Life by Merle Yost
The
Super Natural by Whitley Strieber & Jeffrey J Kripal
Secret
Body by
Jeffrey J Kripal
In
Hitler's
House by Jonathan Lane
Walking on Glory by Edward Swift
The
Paradox
of Porn by Don Shewey
Is Heaven for Real? by Lucien Gregoire
In Search of Lost Lives by Michael Goddart
Queer
Magic by Tomas Prower
God
in Your Body by Jay Michaelson
Science Whispering Spirit by Gary Preuss
Friends
of Dorothy by Dee Michel
New by
Whitley Strieber
Developing Supersensible Perception by Shelli
Renee Joye
Sage
Sapien by Johnson Chong
Tarot
of the Future by Arthur Rosengarten
Brothers
Across Time by Brad Boney
Impresario of Castro Street by Marc Huestis
Deathless
by Andrew Ramer
The Pagan Heart of the West, Vol 1 by
Randy P. Conner
Practical
Tantra by William Schindler
The Flip
by Jeffrey J. Kripal
Scissors,
Paper, Rock by Fenton Johnson
Toby
Johnson's
Books on Gay Men's Spiritualities:
Gay Perspective
Things Our [Homo]sexuality
Tells Us
about the
Nature of God and
the Universe
Gay
Perspective is available as an audiobook narrated
by Matthew Whitfield. Click
here
Gay Spirituality
Gay Identity and
the Transformation of
Human Consciousness
Gay
Spirituality is now
available as an audiobook, beautifully narrated by John Sipple. Click here
Charmed
Lives: Gay Spirit in Storytelling
edited by
Toby Johnson
& Steve Berman
Secret
Matter
Lammy Award Winner for Gay
Science Fiction
updated
Getting Life in
Perspective
A Fantastical Romance
Getting
Life in Perspective is available as an
audiobook narrated by Alex Beckham. Click
here
The Fourth Quill
originally published
as
PLAGUE
The Fourth
Quill is
available
as an audiobook, narrated by Jimmie
Moreland. Click here
Two Spirits: A Story of
Life
with the Navajo
with Walter L. Williams
 Two
Spirits is available as an
audiobook narrated by Arthur Raymond. Click
here
Finding
Your Own True Myth: What I Learned from Joseph
Campbell
The
Myth
of the
Great Secret III
In Search of God in the Sexual Underworld
The Myth of the Great
Secret: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell.
This
was the second edition of this book.
Toby Johnson's
titles are
available in other ebook formats from Smashwords.
|
Marynook Novitiate of the Marianists
The
first
year of religious life is novitiate,
a year of monastic training
outside the formal educational system. It is focused on spiritual
development and initiation into the styles and lore of religious life.
After high school, I joined
the Brothers of Mary (Marianist), the order of teaching brothers who
taught at my high school in San Antonio, Texas. The school, Central
Catholic, is loosely connected with St. Mary's
University which the Marianists also run in San Antonio.
For my novitiate year with the Society of Mary, I lived on a farm in
the Mississippi River bluffs of
Wisconsin, a life wonderfully monastic, prayerful, and peaceful. The
novitiate was called Marynook, a Catholic pun on the name of the lake
in the town of Galesville,
Lake Marinuka, named for an American Indian
“princess,” granddaughter of Winnebago Chief Dakora.
We rose early to spend a couple of hours at prayer before breakfast and
housework chores each day. During the morning
we attended classes in
theology, scripture, prayer, and asceticism (the practice of religious
discipline). After lunch we played soccer or softball for an hour or
two and then worked around the property, picking apples in the orchard,
bringing in bales of hay from the fields, clearing brush, or inside,
doing laundry, making apple sauce from the orchard harvest, preparing
dinner.
The late afternoon was taken up with spiritual reading and
prayer. The recitation of the rosary was followed by dinner. Most of
our meals were eaten in silence while one of the novices read to the
rest of us. Over breakfast we were usually read the life of some
saintly character; over lunch, news and social commentary; over dinner,
a religious but often entertaining novel. To celebrate special
occasions the rule of silence was dispensed and we were allowed to
talk.
And at any rate, every evening after dinner we’d always have an hour or
two of recreation when we could do as we wanted and talk as we pleased.
Usually every
week or two we’d get an all-day recreation to go on an
outing, climb a mountain, swim in the Mississippi, or ice-skate on the
lake. While the Marianist novitiate was definitely “monastic,” we were
teenagers and a kind of summer camp quality was programmed in to keep
us entertained.
After recreation the evening generally consisted of
meditation, study period, night prayers, and bed. Except during the
recreation periods, we were supposed to maintain silence and at night
we were bound under a strict Grand Silence, which was not to be broken
for any but the most extreme emergency.
The conclusion of night prayers, called Compline in the Catholic Divine
Office of Hours, was especially spiritually touching. Most nights
Compline ended with the prayer Hail, Holy Queen. It’s a familiar
Catholic prayer. We did our prayers alternating daily between English
and Latin. The Latin version of this prayer has a beautiful and
haunting Gregorian melody, Salve Regina.
 On special feasts of the
Blessed Mother, they’d turn out all the lights in the chapel except the
spotlight on the statue of Mary (on the left in the photo) and we would sing this poignant melody
in the dark. It was magical. Then as the ritual ended and we would
stand up from our places in the pews, we would begin to recite under
our breath Psalm 51, Miserere Mei.
We’d whisper this aloud to ourselves
as we walked down the two flights of stairs, then out into the
courtyard and over to the dormitory buildings and up the stairs there
to our rooms. “Have mercy on me, O God, According to your great
kindness, And according to the multitude of your mercies, Erase my
iniquities, Wash me completely from my iniquities, And cleanse me of my
sins.” The psalm is quite long and took all the way to the room to
complete.
In English, it’s a little guilt-ridden, isn’t it? What would
eighteen-year-old boys know about real iniquity? But in Latin, it was
entrancing, especially the way the muffled drone of the chant rose and
fell as we came round and round down the stairwell, then dissipated
into the darkness as one by one we went different directions to get to
our rooms.
 Our nights were quiet. The presence of God hung over the house, bearing
us into solitary sleep and away into our dreams. I especially liked the
nights. I remember lying in bed watching the clouds blowing over the
river-worn bluffs across the valley from the novitiate. I cherished the
solitude of that time. During the day we had very little time alone.
Despite the silence, we were together, the thirty-some novices and
about six faculty, almost all the time.
In the photo below, I am at the very far back in front of the venetian
blinds. You can just see my flattop haircut. Mike Aten is standing tall
next to me. (I wonder why I always hid in photos.)
The Novicemaster, Father Herbert Pieper, S.M., was a wonderful old man with
the quick mind and mentality of a rebellious teenager.  He taught us to
cherish the styles and rules of religion and monastic life not out of
fear of punishment but out of personal responsibility. And he
introduced us to some of the most avant-garde ideas in modern Biblical
scholarship. He played taped lectures to us from retreats for nuns by
the then very far-thinking exegete Barnabas Ahern, C.P.
Fr. Ahern was a
Passionist. It’s an order that
preached retreats, especially for other Catholic religious orders;
Ahern inadvertently helped foment the sea-changes that happened in
American Catholicism in the 1960s by telling nuns and school sisters
what the Bible really was.
Like those nuns, we learned that the holy texts had to be interpreted
in the context of their own times and according to the genres and
literary forms in which they were written. It may seem obvious in an
English literature class that poems should be studied as poetry, novels
as fiction, and literary criticism as expository prose, but that’s not
how the literature of the Bible has traditionally been studied. The
poetry, fiction, cultural commentary, theater, history, and legalities
have all been lumped together and treated as though they were all alike
with the same subject matter and same rules of interpretation and same
literal authority.
Modern Scriptural exegesis, for instance, showed that the Book of Job
was a Hebrew endeavor at a Greek tragedy; Job was no more historical
than Oedipus, though, like Oedipus, he was a kind of Everyman dealing
with important human issues. This form criticism, as it was called,
revealed that many of the stories in the life of Jesus were recounted
in an ancient Hebrew allegorical style called midrash which applied
traditional cultural symbols to current events in order to place the
events in a larger context. The visit of the Wise Men to the Infant
Jesus was a prime example. According to modern scholarship, the story
of the Magi was not intended to describe an historical event; it wasn’t
written in the literary form of an historical account. It was an
allegory about the universality of Jesus’s wisdom which his followers
would later recognize applied not only to Israeli Jews but to
Greeks
and Persians and Egyptians, even Romans.
Indeed, the gospels themselves
were epic poetry more concerned with meaning than with news reporting.
These were heady thoughts, radical discoveries for teenage boys.
(I would later have Barnabas Ahern as a Scripture professor at
C.T.U.
(Catholic Theological Union at Chicago) when I was with the Servites.
He was a remarkable man; I served Mass for him once and he went into
ecstasy at the Consecration—the other server and I looked at each other
in wonderment, thinking maybe he had died and we should call for help,
but then he came to and continued the liturgy, but wept profusely
throughout the rest of the
service.)
The Assistant Novicemaster, Brother Mel Meyer, was an accomplished and
multi-talented artist and sculptor.
This link to "Invaluable.com" auction site shows a variety of his creations https://www.invaluable.com/artist/meyer-brother-melvin-nrpo3narn3/sold-at-auction-prices/.
 He had just spent the previous year, studying
for a graduate degree in medieval art history, driving around Europe on
a motor scooter, visiting monasteries and photographing Gothic
churches.  He
showed us slides of his photographs of cathedrals, like Chartres, and of
stained glass windows. Bro. Mel romanticized monasticism.
 He
had us make our own
frescos; he got us to call ourselves monks, not teaching brothers. He
taught us we were part of a long history, and showed us religion as
art-form and expression of beauty.
I was
appointed house librarian and given the job of recataloguing the
library of devotional literature of several thousand volumes. The
problem with the
library at Marynook was that librarians had rotated through that job
every two weeks for years just like through the jobs in the barn or the
kitchen; there’d been no consistency in how the books were organized.
So, for once, one person was going to recatalogue the entire library
following the same organizational scheme and interpretation of the
Dewey Decimal system. It was a great assignment.
It kept me from being
assigned to the garden or barnyard jobs, for which I was especially
grateful when the temperatures were below freezing and the fields were
covered with snow.
I did work in the kitchen— and that proved to have significant
consequences in my life. It meant that one day I was going to be able
to say I knew how to cook for large groups. (That's how I got the job
at the Mann Ranch Seminars, where I would meet Joseph Campbell, ten
years later.) This was one of those
things like in Arthur Schopenhauer’s idea of life like a novel where
chance events turn out to be leading agents in the structuring of your
life.
Brother Cook (his title, not his personal name), who was in charge of the kitchen, was newly assigned to
the novitiate this year. And halfway through the year he was
hospitalized in nearby La Crosse. The novices weren’t supposed to know
the truth, but it was understood that he’d had a nervous breakdown
under the stress of managing the kitchen, especially sticking to the
tight budget. He was gone for several months, and three of us who’d
seemed to enjoy being assigned to kitchen duties were allowed to take
over his role. We learned to cook for thirty to forty people and to
manage a professional kitchen.
 Ironically, one of the other novice
cooks got over- enthusiastic and, just before Bro. Cook returned,
prepared a celebratory dinner, with Cornish game hens and a dessert of
Dates Supreme with whipped cream. He blew the budget for the rest of
the year.
Poor Bro. Cook. I have wondered, in retrospect, if Brother’s
nervous breakdown were more likely a sexual/homosexual crisis brought
on by his being assigned to the novitiate with all these
sexually-repressed but hormonally-maturing young men. Whatever it was,
his crisis would change the course of my life.
As librarian, I was able to spend long hours, in the dead of the
starkly beautiful Wisconsin winter, reading and studying the books. I
discovered a God much grander and more worthy of interest than the
moralistic and doctrinaire God I’d been taught about in catechism. I
discovered the mystics. I discovered the appeal of the divine
wilderness, where no one is at home save God. And it was not unlike the
wilderness of stars that I had for so long yearned to traverse in
science-fiction fantasy.
 I
learned about Brother Lawrence and the “practice of the presence of
God,” a fundamental aspect of what I would later learn as meditation
practice. I read Saint John of the Cross. (The Salvador Dali painting,
The Christ of Saint John of the Cross, hung in the stairwell outside
the library.)
I discovered the Jesuit
paleontogist/ mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin before most Catholics
were allowed to know about him and his vision of evolution as the
self-creation of God.
 I fancied myself a disciple
and fellow traveler of Thomas Merton, the 1930s communist-radical
turned Trappist monk and social commentator who’d become a spokesman of
American Catholicism after his spiritual autobiography, The Seven
Storey Mountain, was chosen by the Book of the Month Club. He too
romanticized monasticism. (I would grow up to look surprisingly like Merton.)
Read more about Marynook--with a funny story: The Daily Schedule
Read more about the Novitiate experience: The World Navel in Trempealeau State Park
In July 2020, the Marianist Social Justice Initiative released a
YouTube video titled: Living Our Marianist Charism: Embracing the
LGBTQ+ Community. This strikes me as remarkable. Here's a link:
https://youtu.be/_ItQVlyXjd4
A Recollection of Winona, MN and the Guardian Angels
In Catholic mythological tradition, Oct 2 is the Feast of the Holy
Guardian Angels. That became a special day in my lifestory in 1963 in
my year of novitiate with the Marianists. The novitiate, called
Marynook, was in the little town of Galesville, Wisconsin. On that
date, the novices got a field day to visit Winona, MN, just across the
Mississippi. It was a glorious day. It was fall.
Here I was a young Texan who'd never really seen seasons, now in the
northern Midwest. I'd never known there were such trees or such autumn
colors. They drove us over in the back of an old farm truck and we camp
songs, like children at summer camp, and especially the "Lalalala lala"
chorus from Edith Piaf's song "Milord." (Little did we understand the
prostitution subtext--it was just fun singing.)
They left us at the base of the bluff below the public park Garvin
Heights. And we climbed up the road to the top. This was the real
magical moment for me. There were autumn leaves flowing down the road,
a foot deep, as though we were walking down a riverbed. With an
enormous rustling, like a waterfall.
The Introit verse from the mass that morning was
from Psalm 91 "He has given His angels charge over you that they should
bear you up lest haply you dash your foot against a stone." I think
those words rang through my head all day as we clomped around the
bluffs--with a magnificent view both to the east beyond the Mississippi
and to the west looking out on rolling hills filled with autumn
mists--and nearby a lone, still-standing chimney of a house long gone.
I remember feeling profoundly nostalgic about that house and that
chimney--though I was only a teenager.
On the way down, a bunch of us decided to skip
the long walk down the road and just run down the hillside. Neat for 17
year olds! One of those runs you start and keep getting faster and
faster and more and more out of control. Great fun! But how do you
stop?
One of the other novices tripped and fell at the bottom
and sprained his ankle. That inspired a sort of joke about irony of his
haply dashing his foot on the feast of the Guardian Angels. I have told
this story many times in my life, partly in jest and partly in profound
respect for the irony of myth--and the twisted humor, perhaps, of "God."
The novice who sprained his ankle was my best friend in
the novitiate class that year, Ralph Siefert. We were kind of "class
leaders" together--that's a whole 'nother story.
But I am remembering Fr. Ralph Siefert, OSM here.
Ralph died on August 20, 2021 -- in a "breakthrough" case of Covid. He
was wonderful man; he was President of Chaminade College Preparatory, a
Marianist high school in St Louis County. RIP, my friend.
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