The Gospel of Mark, 3:23-33, well explicated by Fr. James Martin.

You know, the one where his family "went out to restrain him, for people were saying, 'He has gone out of his mind.'"  (And they believe the same.)

There are the things you cannot tell family.    And so it is that you come to live amongst the good disciples.

"He's free.  And that makes him both effective and dangerous."  Father Martin.

I wrote a book in order to express something.  But when we do so, we find our imaginations going further than we might have originally intended.  We go to a place that only we ourselves understand, and then, from that point, there is help from the divine, in faith.  We go from the particular, to the universal, from daily events to the meaning behind them.  And each step of life offers us important clues.  We have to accept them, as best we can.

The writer has to look beyond the events.  He has to have faith.  That one day the meaning of the events he has depicted will become meaningful, as there are layers of an onion to be peeled.  Certain events have to happen, and from them, comes understanding.  Woe unto the world because of offenses.  Lincoln liked that line.

The faithful must still be engaged in the world and its business.   And things will come about, naturally.  The kinds of things that are of strife and misunderstanding between people, largely out of differences of temperament.

It is a long process.  Why should it take so long?  We cannot obsess over events, but must move on from them, taking the course toward meaning, to finding the meaning of events, which I suppose come through analogy and parable, as the template of the Gospels lays down for us, both in form and in meaning.  There's a long time of digestion, I suppose, the chewing over of things.

And one supposes, at least, that this all has something to do with growing up.

Of course, one comes upon such things through his own mistakes, his own errs.  Material granted to us for being who we are.  Which is why we do not judge others, because you cannot learn and grow without making mistakes, sometimes publicly, embarrassingly.  It is a matter of character, that such mistakes come, for what they will elucidate out of you.  Daily bread.


The old (or rather middle-aged) writer sat around.  Why he was too lazy to go to church, who knows, or maybe he was shy.  Maybe he was working on something.  When asked about it, he might have said, 'oh, well, the church is really all around us, and one simply has to do his work;  going to church everyday--nothing all against it, in fact I always enjoy it, mightily so--is not for everyone given their schedules.'

I suppose he had been tested, in ways invisible, as we all shall be.  There was no sign of his having been sent to some Siberian-like prison, no experience like that, but there was a sense that he had sort of fallen out, fallen into a kind of exile, which either encouraged or allowed or made it so that he by habit kept somewhat to himself when he was not called to go his job, what they would call his day job, which we do not really need to go into all that much, beyond that it was trying in many ways, at least physically, but also mentally, a kind of, a form of persecutions financial and otherwise.

He did not really have an prospectives, as people would commonly think about them, in any career sense, and thus he was doomed to pursue the path he had somehow set himself upon at a young enough age.  So to speak.  It's never too late, as they say.  Let's just say he had not found anything particularly lucrative or sustaining a model of security.  But, he had words, and upon a daily basis, one can only see that they, the words, seem to be sustaining for him.  Such odd birds we all are, all of us.  I suppose his father had left with him some teaching, that he was to pursue that which he found natural, a notion based upon, as the old man might have said, the meaning of the liberal arts education.  And such he had received, though he might not have seemed to, upon initial inspection, seem to have mixed perfectly well with it.  But, people liked him, as a young man, and put up with his particular wry form of grumpdom well enough.

Perhaps it would be within the bounds of fairness to conjecture that there were not so many who understood him, fully understood him, but for a few exceptions.  A kindly retiree had taken him once years ago, as one might take in a feral kitten, as the man we speak of here had fed several litters of feral cats, before giving up on the project, satisfied that he had tamed one cat, a slight orange female who had recovered from a limp only to one day disappear, perhaps in a city roundup involving traps, sadly enough.  Friends had given him his own little calico kitten from a feral litter and the two of them had had an excellent relationship, for a good fifteen years, until rectal cancer overtook her good feline health and spitfire ways.  Like himself, the man was from a very kind family, and kept a good faith himself, as each faith is an individual matter.

And so, one comes across the pile of his writing, first out of curiosity, but then with some engagement, and then finally with some enjoyment as to the meaning he derived out of events such as happen to us as well besides the unlucky.  He took reasonable care of his own health, took his vitamins, and did other things to maintain himself in his own private fashion, as if he were unafraid of being alone for the most part, then took to red wine when bored with himself, the writing mainly done for the day.

What do we make of the Old Faith?  How do we live with it, live within it, explore it, handle it, humor it, practice it, walk with it, read with it?  Does it come before us, or after us?  Are we organically bound to finally flower into it after coming blindly out of roots in the ground?  Mysterious matters, indeed.  Are we fated toward it when we are born?  Does it even help us when we come upon the things that draw us out and into what we might argue to be great works of literature, the "sudden flooding wind " of Dostoevsky's crowning accomplishment of  The Brothers Karamazov, its roots in the exile of labor prison camp.  Would we rather not be so drawn?  Or does it come finally as a relief, as an inevitable thing that one can finally not distract one's self from or run away from.

I know the man liked his writing time.  The practice had grown with him, I gather.  Like the green flannel shirt he wore on a regular basis during the colder seasons, to work, at home, everywhere, a simplification of life, not unlike the monk's begging and his bowl of rice and his tea.  Live frugally, without much show, and do not overemphasize the self nor the illusions of it being separate and as tangible as we might like to think, out of a desire for pleasure beyond simple satisfying things.  He did it privately, without saying much about it ever, without ever claiming to be something along the lines of being a professional about it all, a journalist, a novelist, what-have-you.  He simply meandered along his way, like a stream content with its way through the forest and the stones, old enough with its habits to allow all seasons to pass, leaves, born green, waiving up to the summer, then falling as litter.

Well, there were bound to be certain disagreements which might have rose, I say in a chuckling manner, betwixt himself and the society he marginally lived in.  Being so bound to the devices of the day, it might have been, on the other hand, somewhat refreshing to come across him, different, like finding a snow leopard, not to cast him with too much romance.  Many would have expected his company to be dull and dungeon-like, cold, but when engaged, he was friendly, and with a sense of humor that bounded up the higher levels without oppressing us as a loud noise might.

He liked naps.  As did Jesus, though there are not any paintings I can think of the Lord taking a good nap curled up in the ship ropes.  A habit good for the taxed mind, and good for the stress, a kind of meditation.  Another man might have suggested to him, being of different mindset, that he would be better off reading Investors Business Daily, but what can you do;  hard it is to change people, sadly enough, I guess.   Is a criminal a criminal being born that way, or of his nurture, or both, or is it a matter of what is called karma...

There was something Quixotic about him, by which I mean, as the old knight had taken to reading obsessively books on chivalry, something about  the writing process might have weakened, or softened, his mind and his basic level of sanity, enough to allow a man much like the writer to become, well, more than he was through certain works and flights of fantasy.  Does Quixote shine a light of some sort back upon Old Cervantes himself?

But I digress.

His notebooks tell their own story, not that I necessarily approve of it, or of them.  Perhaps I should have simply thrown them into the recycling bin before, before something happened of an inexplicable nature.  I make no judgments upon his sanity or otherwise.  To his credit, I suppose, he stayed in the game, as long as he could, before moving on, as we do sometimes.



Verily, I say unto you, except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone:  but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.
John 12:24-26

Dostoevsky used it himself.

But there is truth in it.  Truth in the sense that one moves on.  The point of the story was not about the  details, about getting the girl, so to speak, but about human society, about the soul.  About the ego.  About those things which you let go of, as the lesson within, as the reality of the situation, dictates.