"Halfway along life's path, I found myself lost, in a darkened wood, assailed by beasts, unable to find the straight path," Dante tells us at the opening of Inferno.  I guess we all know the feeling, from time to time, being lost.

A writer is a person looking for faith.  And worse than believing in "a fairy tale" is believing in nothing at all.  This is the search, to find out what he can honestly believe in.  The task, to take from experience, to understand, to free himself from the confusion.  And so he must reflect upon himself and where he is in life and witness the lacking of faith within himself.

And at midlife, I found myself in a dark place, having personally facilitated a fair amount of bad behavior, having done a fair amount of it myself, the sin primarily of thinking incorrectly, selfishly, in my attempt to diagnose the ills of life and the way to live.  The sins were not intentional, but from being misguided.

Well, well… but we'd have to stop and define sin.  I don't believe that allowing people to get together over food and beverage to discuss and open up is sin at all.  I'd take that to be a good thing, even in many ways aligned with the basic Christian message of loving thy neighbor.

As a professional in the business I had fallen into in order to keep my on with my writing, I was supposed to care about the ins and outs of wine.  I was supposed to focus on salesmanship.  I was supposed to endure and keep the stuff coming, so that eventually people felt pleasure and relief.  There was good in it, I am sure, that of people meeting and sharing, and that was where the happiness was for me.  Coming along with that was some stuff that inwardly made me shudder, perhaps primarily the celebration of the secular world and its culture, its culture of consumerism, pleasure, leisure and a lot of things are not serious.  And when I fell into it, say, celebrating popular music or culture more than it needs to be, there was always a spiritual hangover, a reminder of my not being serious, my times as an idler.  In my prodigal blues, I wished for faith, perhaps in the way the generations who fought in WWII and before were steeped in, like the Catholicism of a New England mill town, or the Protestantism of a college town, or even Transcendentalism.  And somedays reading Eckhardt Tolle sufficed, if not a sifting through of the Lankavatara Sutra.

Sure, I learned about humanity.  I learned about myself.  I learned too much about sad things, like the violence of urban culture, scary things hard to stomach, deeply unsettling things.  And sometimes I would go home and try to wash them away through escapist oblivion, too tired, I suppose, to look at the problem directly of the lack of faith.

Perhaps ultimate realities are reflected in the tradition, the story of the Prodigal Son, who is all of us, or who represents our basic problem of taking what isn't ours, or however you might like to frame it.

Coming back from a visit to the beautiful place I where I went to school I felt something, had sensed that deeply behind it all, behind the science and the classrooms and the learning there was the religious impulse, and feeling it odd that I had fallen away from such things, I pondered what to do.  But was I a believer enough in the Christian story itself to make my fitting in a strong possibility?  Would I have to allow myself to be brainwashed, as that would seem to go largely against my father's Theosophical thinking and skepticism toward things like the show business of Rome?  Could I, for that matter, really be a Buddhist?  Could I turn myself into an academic concerned with religion?  And all the while, the job I was doing, though it kept a fig life of responsibility over my meager life, was unsatisfying in a deeper way, as if presiding over something meaningless, a treadmill.

So I was in some subtle form of pain, and realized I was a person lacking faith, and lost.  I felt stuck, and I felt cowardly.  I was perpetuating worldliness, drunkenness, the lack of answers, the distractions of life.  I felt the need as a sinner to be embraced by God's love, as silly as that sounds.  I felt the need, and in so doing I hoped to understand better the unhappiness of where I found myself, chasing after some meaningless goal, my own inadequacy to address that which I found important.

The problem seemed to present itself in a strange way.  By not having faith in something like the Christian story's specific beliefs, as any modern rationalist might, had my own life become something of a fairy tale, a story I was telling myself, that I could continue on with my job and the place where I was living and it all would work out, something I found increasingly hard to believe in.

Though my father was not a Catholic, and had refined spiritual sensibilities, there was a background of faith he was steeped in, and that seemed to be what my late generation was missing, not encouraged really to embrace a stiff faith.

The idle inconclusive thought of a writer with little to write about.


I wrote a long piece, in novel form, or is it long short story, about a young man going through a spiritual crisis, misbehaving, and utterly failing to comprehend the mild sort of courtship ritual he's in.  As we know from polar bears and the rest of the natural world, that ritual involves careful choice, and so of course might seem to be pretty brutal to some of its participants.  I suppose a spiritual outlook does ultimately color the effort, a kind of very subtle Brother's Karamazov sort of a thing.

But I wonder, who am I trying to impress when I go off to work to a restaurant to tend bar?  Am I trying to fit in with a crowd that tells interesting stories?  Am I subverting my deeper will?  Am I simply earning a paycheck in a lazy fashion typical of a modern slack artiste?  Was I trying to recreate a scenario?

What do you do after messing things up, completely failing at the courtship ritual, when you end up as if you'd gone through some shattering experience?  How do you avoid a French Foreign Legion emotional dead zone, which then itself becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, for then offering nothing of any substance for anyone else, no room for anyone else?