The Great Gatsby (Book and Movie review by Bob Racine)

                             The book by F. Scott Fitzgerald

                                         The movie

                             (2 hrs & 23 min, color, 2013)

What does it profit a man if he gains his millions by however the means, fair or foul, but loses his heart as well as his soul to romantic illusion and high minded expectation?  How can even hope become superficial and dangerously risky?  A major writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald sheds fervent light upon these questions.

Few novels of the twentieth century have corralled the kind of interest and fascination and earnest study among the literati as his 1925 portrait of life among lavish moneyed society in post-World War I America.  At least six movie adaptations of “The Great Gatsby” have emerged over the past nine decades and the best seller has never during all that time been out of print.  It has found its way into college curricula and is generally recognized as Fitzgerald’s signature creation. 

What makes it so?  The novel is anything but a sweeping epic.  It is not a panorama or a multifaceted account of history or a magnum opus.  All the action occurs during one summer.   In fact, the text is compact, terse and concise, a relatively short read.  Some may think of it as an extended short story.  There are actually only four major characters, and one of those narrates the entire flow of events and provides the sole sustained viewpoint.  The other three are objectified, seen only through his eyes.  The story does not carry us into a wide assortment of settings; the action is confined mostly to a remote point on the shores of Long Island Sound.  The bulk and complexity that attract most readers to works of fiction are not present.  There is nothing racy, controversial, exotic, or horrific about it, and the only incident of violence comes near the very end.  So how do we explain its phenomenal commercial success?          

The plot is rather simple too.  The time is the early 1920s.  A young war veteran from the Midwest named Nick Carroway pursuing a career as a bond salesman in nearby Manhattan decides to settle in a modest middle class house by himself on Long Island Sound to be near his rich second cousin Daisy, who is married to a corrupt and philandering scion of wealth Tom Buchanan.  Nick is curious about their lifestyle and a bit tempted to try it out.  In his exploration he is soon distracted and further enticed by an even wealthier next door neighbor, a man who calls himself Jay Gatsby.  Gatsby is noted for his elaborate and sumptuous parties to which all New Yorkers can invite themselves on weekends, while he himself is a private individual seldom seen by anyone, hidden away behind his own walls.  His palatial mansion is directly across the Sound from the Buchanans, unbeknownst to them.  Nick discovers that Gatsby, veteran of the war himself and a man from a very poor background, is an old lover of Daisy’s who by shady means has made himself a multimillionaire.  Nick through Gatsby’s chicanery becomes the reluctant catalyst to reunite his cousin Daisy with her ex-boyfriend.  It seems that Gatsby is still carrying a torch for Daisy and is determined to win her back from the husband he does not think she really loves.  Little does Nick know that his accommodation to Gatsby’s wishes will have tragic results.      

This summary would not give anyone who has not read the book any idea why it continues to be regarded as a literary masterpiece.  The answer lies in the writing itself.  Fitzgerald’s prose is beautiful and mesmerizing.  In fact, much of it is more poetic than prosaic, and that is why translating it into narrative linear terms has dogged the efforts of many to frame it on the silver screen.  This is the fourth attempt I have seen, and in my opinion it is the best rendering thus far.  Not that it is without its flaws.  Baz Luhrman directed it and co-wrote it with Craig Pearce; he loves glitz, flash, stardust and even a little fireworks and has used them to some excess, especially in the party scenes.  But despite his over indulgences the poetic phraseology comes through, uncompromised and unvarnished. 

Primarily what makes this a superior adaptation is the choice casting of Nick and Jay.  Toby McGuire gives Nick a pulse beat that I have never felt before.  He is more a restless presence than earlier adaptations have made him, not just a mouthpiece.  We seem to hear more from him than in previous films.  And Leonardo DiCaprio is quite captivating as Gatsby.  He gets something slightly edgy into the man that hints of a desolate child hiding beneath his veneer of self-imposed refinery and shrewdness.  (I have always had difficulty accepting Robert Redford in that title role in the 1974 vehicle.  There was something too callow and even keeled in the way he handled it.)

But despite all DiCaprio’s good work, Gatsby, as in the novel, remains somewhat of a mystery, as he is intended to be.  Even to Nick, who comes to know him better than anyone else, he seems to be a dreamer reaching in the twilight that he believes is morning for an objective that has already left him behind.  He is a singular embodiment of romantic illusion, which Nick in his reflections calls a “romantic readiness,” all dressed up in an immaculate conceit.  The mystery consists of the form his secret pacts with the forces of darkness have previously taken and how in such a short time he, a child of poverty, “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.”  His pursuit of Daisy becomes more pathetic as it unravels and carries him to a fatal face-to-face with his very soul.   

Daisy too, beautifully portrayed by Carey Mulligan, is something else underneath her refinery.  She is a fluttery, somewhat flighty young woman on the surface. She rhapsodizes in a dream of her own and has become inured to Tom’s (Joel Edgerton) infidelities, but you do not have to dig down far to get some idea of the repressed pain they have caused her.  In the novel someone comments that “her voice is the sound of money.”   She has always lived in the lap of luxury; she threw Gatsby over because he was poor.  But now that he is rich and she has the chance to have both her first love and her sumptuous lifestyle, she lands on the horns of a dilemma from which she is not morally or constitutionally equipped to extract herself.  Nick has to witness this sad little “holocaust,” as he calls it in the book, helpless to stop the heartbreak he sees coming.  In this movie it is enough to sour him altogether about life on the east coast and the emotional blow it delivers to him lands him in a mental institution where in retrospect he tells Gatsby’s story to a therapist.

Nick slowly comes to the realization that Tom and Daisy and all their plushy acquaintances are “a rotten crowd.”  His last words about them are brutal in their indictment:  They “smashed up things and people then retreated back into their money and their vast carelessness.”  In contrast Gatsby, victimized by their sly machinations, wins his begrudging respect as the most “hopeful” man he has ever known.  But we know, if Nick does not, that hope divorced from realism is a fool’s errand to nowhere.  Hoping does not begin by returning to a place from which you once started; hope begins at the present moment.

  

All those of us who make a habit of exploring the vicissitudes of the human heart with an understanding mind would do well to either see the movie or read the book that has enthralled millions over the past century.  You can pick up a copy of it from just about any public library.   And of course the movie is available from the renowned Netflix.

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

Fosse (Review of Stage Musical by Bob Racine)

                             2 hrs and 10 minutes in color

                                 Available from Netflix

Choreography!  In all likelihood everyone reading this has heard the word and chances are most of you can define it.  The art of Choreography is ages old, but I did not realize until very recently that the word did not take up residence in the English language dictionary until the 1950s.  And it was not put to unofficial public use in our country until 1936, when the immortal George Balanchine was credited with it in the opening stage production of the musical “On Your Toes.”  “Choreography by” Balanchine!  Before that the programs of stage productions read something like “Dances by” or “Dance Supervision by” or “Dance Designer.”  Of course any student of Greek is familiar with the two Greek words chorea (dance) and graphe (writing) from which the term is derived.  So Choreography is the practice of writing with dance, dance-writing, using configurations of dancers and dance steps to say something. 

For centuries the designation was confined for the most part to the classy, graphic art of formal nineteenth century Ballet.  Think “The Nutcracker!”  But by the 20^th century modern influences came into the picture.  Think Jerome Robbins, Alvin Ailey, Gene Kelly! 

And think BOB FOSSE!     

What I offer for your consideration this time is “Fosse,” a posthumous two-hour-plus compilation of over twenty choreograph sequences from his most successful musicals, first staged in New York in 1999, twelve years after Fosse’s death – a stage musical production complete within itself!  Contrary to possible misunderstanding it is not a documentary study; it is all dancing, one number segueing into another without a break (except for intermission time).  Included is some of the work he did in the following: “Sweet Charity,” “Kiss Me, Kate,” “Cabaret,” “Chicago,” “Damn Yankees,” “The Pajama Game,” and “Pippin.”  He also created a show for the stage in 1978 with the modest title of “Dancin’ ” and designed a television special featuring the talents of Liza Minelli, called “Liza with a Z”.  Parts of these two are also included in this two-hour plus bonanza. 

His career spanned over thirty years.  He won numerous awards and nominations for awards, including the Oscars, the Emmys (one for “Liza with a Z”) and an unheard of eight nominations for a Tony.  He was Oscar nominated for movie director four times and won once – for the movie version of “Cabaret.”  Some of you may have seen the 1979 movie, “All That Jazz,” which he wrote and directed as a semi-autobiography, starring Roy Scheider.   Some of that film’s dance content also shows up in “Fosse.”

Bob had his performers doing things with the human body, both solo and in aggregate, for which there was no precedent.  Anything you can imagine a body could possibly do short of endangerment to life and limb he had his troop doing – and then some.  There are those, and I am one, who think he cannot be equaled, that no other dance master’s work has ever even approached his. 

Scores of words can be employed to describe the personality and temperament of his work:  lively, exuberant, jazzy, frisky, offbeat, fast-stepping, perky, acrobatic, furious, sassy, sometimes saucy, satirical, impish, often joyous, nonsensical, but almost always slyly funny.  The bodies that do the interpreting are lithe, loose, expressing themselves in all varieties of symmetrical and asymmetrical contortions.  Finger-snapping and leg-slapping play a huge part, as do hats.  He creates varied moods, but at the same time keeps his music and the dancing feet moving with an intense, driving force, aided by a most astounding use of lighting.  There is a huge stretch of imagination in every individual act; nothing is presented in one dainty dimension.  The basic maneuver or strategy is treated to multiple variations, often starting in simple steps but compounding into progressively more exciting and electrifying and sensational highs.  Watch “Fosse” and I suspect that your blood pressure would be given a great boost.   He transformed the art of Choreography, gave audiences worldwide a new way of looking at it.  He was also an actor, a dancer in his own right, director (stage and screen), screenwriter, and film editor.  What a career! 

Fosse the man died in 1987, twelve years before this posthumous tribute materialized.  One single stage performance of it was filmed, later shown on television and eventually published in DVD.  That is what you see on this disc.  The show, which in itself became a Tony winner in 2000, was put together by celebrated dancer Gwen Verdon, his third wife and partner, and by Ann Reinking, a member of his coterie almost from the beginning, who after Verdon’s untimely death became the show’s director.  Reinking knew Fosse’s work inside and out, all his techniques, all his disciplines, all his vision and intent, having been exposed to them first hand, and she made this sensational work to honor his memory and keep alive his name and his unique place in the pantheon of musical masters. 

The enjoyable advantage in watching the video is not having to sit through all the plays themselves, some of which are much better than others; a few of them I find rather inferior in terms of the storylines, which he had nothing to do with.  Of course it all depends upon individual taste.  But in all of them the Choreography is worth the price of admission.  Some great singers are heard along with the footwork, and the orchestration is first class at every turn.  Several different musical styles play a part – rock, ragtime, swing, blues, modern romantic, even boogie. The chief singer is Ben Vereen, a very colorful comedian and showman, a dancer himself who has been with Fosse ever since the first audition for hoofers took place under Fosse’s supervision in the 1950s.  He has style-plus and contributes quite a lot to the electric pacing. 

At curtain call I count twenty-nine members of the cast altogether.  What a costume nightmare somebody must have lived through and what a rigor beyond imagining to which the players had to submit changing their garb so many times, some of them with only a minute or so to make the switch.    

My favorite episode is a takeoff on the classic song, “Steam Heat.”  Two men and one woman do a crazy spin and tumble on romantic intimacy, stretching every nerve and fiber.  For me it is nothing short of a showstopper.  “I Wanna Be a Dancin’ Man” ranks high with me too, a masterpiece of coordination.  A duo from “Chicago” is fantastically good, an Emmy winner in and of itself.  Two shapely females sing of the tawdry values they enjoy in the so-called Roaring Twenties.  Have we not all heard of “Hey, Big Spender,” a highlight from “Sweet Charity?”  And nothing I know of in musical history can compare with the fifteen-minute-long finale, when everybody gets into the act, literally, accompanied by an onstage band.  What a jamboree that becomes!  It should carry you to the heights of watching and listening pleasure.  There is one act out of the bunch that I am not fond of, a very torrid bit of sashaying that comes close to being a sleazy striptease.  Some of you might want to fast forward through it.  The only solemnly serious piece is furnished by Vereen doing his touching and sad immortalization of “Bojangles” Robinson.

   

Do not form the misconception that Fosse is a clown or a leader of clowns.  There is no ambience of the circus here.  What you get is first class professionalism and artistry all the way.  Every segment is scrupulously crafted.  Actually the show is a three-act deal, and during the two intermissions we are taken backstage into the dressing room and treated to some personal sharing by Ann Reinking and Ben Vereen and two other women performers.  They give us some warm nostalgic conversation about the Fosse they knew and what made him the very best.  All give favorable report of how satisfying and supportive he was to work with.   

Vereen calls Fosse’s work a testimonial to life itself.  I always go away with the feeling that that is so.  In accord with that claim he sings, both at the show’s start and near its end, “Life is just a bowl of cherries, don’t take it serious, life’s too mysterious.  You work, you save, you worry so, but you can’t take the dough when you go... The sweet things in life to you were just loaned, so how  can you keep what you’ve never owned... So live and laugh, laugh and love... live and love and laugh at it all.”  I hope you who view it will feel, as you view, the aliveness and the love and the laughter.  I hope it does something for your soul.  You do not need a thinking cap for “Fosse”; a love of music, some tapping feet, an open heart and a sense of rhythm will be quite enough.

  

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

Abide with Me by Elizabeth Strout (Book Review by Bob Racine)

                                      Published 2006

Midlife crises have become a widespread subject for consideration.  In fact, I often get the impression that it is virtually an honor today for anyone older than fifty-five to be able to claim to have had one.  Having weathered a perfect storm by that time, especially one involving personal identity, gives you a little heft when you are in conversation with anybody about major life issues.  Some of us seem to enjoy showing off our battle scars and walking others whose confidence we share through the drama of our past-life moments of truth.  Autobiographies have been penned recounting enormous life-altering changes that have had to be made under the gun of traumatic circumstances, domestic upheavals, cultural shifts, or heightened self-awareness.  We have no trouble claiming to be veterans of private wars or even iconoclasts.  I sense that before my time people had these crises but kept them largely to themselves or called them by other names.  You stayed married to the same person, attached to the same job, or if something happened that made it impossible to do either, you absorbed the shock and justified outcomes as the mysterious will of God.  Self knowledge as a result was not always in great supply.     

No novel I have ever read has taken me more richly and radiantly into that world of yesterday than Elizabeth Strout’s “Abide with Me.”  The victim of forced change and crisis is a Congregationalist minister, Tyler Caskey, presiding over a small town church in the state of Maine in the 1950s.  He gets married in his twenties to a young woman barely out of her teens, who turns out to be an inappropriate choice for spouse in a remote parish.  Compounding the marital crisis that this engenders is her untimely death, which leaves him with the rearing of two preschool girls.  How does a trained clergyman, who must bear the burdens of others, manage to maintain his poise and personal symmetry in the aftermath of this loss? 

The fact is, this one does not.  He goes into a kind of denial, tries to step outside this sorrow and carry on his duties and functions, fixed upon the Biblical promise, “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength…They shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk and not faint.”  He thinks he has a clear sightline on what as a widowed minister he should do.  “For the sake of God he would do his job.  (What else could he do?) . . .His job was to stand in church with his shoulders back and his chin up, and make his congregation understand that being a Christian was not a hobby. . .Being a Christian meant asking yourself every step of the way:  How can love best be served?  His job was to be their leader, their teacher, their example.  A small parish perhaps.  Not a small job.”  A great ideal this, but suppose those shoulders have been bent too far for the chin to be raised, with a secret sense of guilt contributing to that weight?  His life for a while becomes an exercise in unconsciousness and concealment – not from his congregation but from himself.  He preaches on Sundays, makes pastoral calls, meets with the elders of the congregation, listens to peoples’ private woes, and carries on an apparent friendship with neighbors and his community.  But slowly the telltale signs of impotence and disengagement from reality begin to be noticed by those he endeavors to serve. 

He is unaware of how neglectful of little but vital things he has become.  His home does not get the care it needs.  His sermons begin to lose their thrust and fire.  And worst of all he avoids confrontation with the stark needs and inner turmoil of his five-year-old daughter, Katherine, in Kindercare.  Summoned to her school, he subtly resists the admonitions of the faculty about her bizarre and disruptive classroom behavior since her mother’s death.  Tyler’s mother, who lives not too far away, has taken over the supervision and expected rearing of his two-year-old, Jeannie, and because of Jeannie’s absenteeism from her own home he is in danger of losing all rapport with her and doesn’t seem to be aware of it.  A woman who confides in him over an act of domestic abuse gets no help from him; he seems to forget she has told him.  Most enervating of all to the quality of his clerical leadership is the emanation of gossip about his allegedly inappropriate interactions with his housekeeper.  Though the rumors are totally unfounded, he seems unable to take any steps toward clearing them up.   Best to ignore!  Yeah, sure!

Tyler does not realize until very late that what he is undergoing is not just a crisis of circumstance but one of faith itself.  Today (I’m not sure about the 1950s) we call it “the dark night of the soul.”  He dwells on the words of his favorite hymn, “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide, the darkness deepens, Lord, with me abide . . .”  He tries to do devotional readings.  Bonhoeffer, Nouwen and Kierkegaard contribute extensively to his private ruminations.  One of Bonhoeffer’s last musings in a letter to his mother before his execution comes to have special appeal to Tyler:  “Now the dismal autumn days have begun and one has to try and get light from within.”  There seems to be some figurative affiliation between these words and what he senses is a coming showdown with his people over his continuing suitability to shepherd them.  

It was unthinkable back then for ministers to succumb, even temporarily, to conspicuous human failing.  They were supposed to be reputable examples of self-control.  Whoever heard of an experienced, educated, fully trained, accomplished man of the cloth needing pastoral counseling or therapy?  Or, if he needs them, he should get them in private and not involve the congregation.  But this congregation is catalyzed by his personal crisis into some heightened self-knowledge of its own, despite itself.  And that is what makes the book such a total absorption for me.   A total absorption and a very powerful, rewarding journey of the heart, involving many parishioners who are at some measure of loss as to how to help this man whose well is running dry!

Strout, a Pulitzer Prize winner for another novel with a Maine setting, is so wonderfully gifted.  She has an amazing grasp of human nature.  Several characters and their crises of soul and conscience are also given inspection every bit as extensive and poignant as Tyler’s.  Any one of them alone would be a suitable subject for a novel.  She paints with a very narrow brush, making us see the physical environment, especially the New England winters, in all its somber and quiet magnificence.  Her prose is graceful and impeccable and her pacing is so perfect that it makes gorgeous music right on the printed page.  Though her writing style is lean, you get the feeling after you have read the entire book that she has left out nothing.  How all the material threads out is worth the reading.  I highly recommend it for all sensitive and mature adults, church-affiliated or not. 

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.

Called Away at Morning (Idyll by Bob Racine)

The mist was heavy, as I walked through the meadow.  As on most mornings thereabout, I waited until the early light came burning through, turning the gray soup to gold, my castle unfurling its shadows across my sodden path.  The emerging sun was a luminous fire finally clearing the air of all haze.  At its behest I surveyed the distant mountains.  They were a study in grandeur – always new, always spectacular and strangely forbidding! 

Then I saw him – standing on the mountain.  I cannot say how.  Surely my mortal eyes could not have identified anything or anyone from that distance?  And yet I knew he was there, not perched upon some peak, but standing on the green and rocky slope.  It was when I heard his call that I was fully assured that this was no hallucination.  He was not shouting.  There was no bellow from a cave, no blast, no amplified voice.  He spoke softly, but I knew he was miles away, deep in the forestation.  And I somehow knew that he would wait for me, however long I took to come, however long my castle held me in thrall.

My memory of the next few hours is as misty now as was the air that morning when I awoke from sleep.  But I remember that I heard myself singing a new song, a song of blessedness and expectancy.  I was not a lone voice; I was part of a chorus.  The birds and all the four-legged animals joined in.  The lowing of the deer harmonized with it.  The brook babbled with me hinting of that mighty river somewhere in those mountains that I had heard of but never seen.  I walked; I did not run.  It was a moment of rapture, even though I was still on the ground deep in the dense growth.  Perhaps he would lead me to that river.

I expected to reach the foot of a slope, where the flat earth suddenly gave way to an incline, but soon I realized I was on the mountain already and it felt just like the valley, like any other turf.  I had no sense of elevation.  I could not tell where the level ground left off and the slope began.  He had moved up further, and I knew I would never come close enough to him for me to touch him or take his hand or cling to his long arms.  I could not see all of him, only his head above the foliage or his feet along the shaded path.  But I was close enough to see his hand waving me on. 

Surely I was going to be led to the top, to a new vantage point from which I could survey the ground I had spent my whole life covering!  I expected transcendence.  Why would he have brought me all that distance, if not to open a new door, a door to heaven itself maybe, or at least a foretaste of it.  Had I not felt that morning upon awakening, before going outside, that this was to be a new and special and supreme day for me?  Would he have called me out, if he had not deemed me ready for a place in the company of angels?  Or at the very least he would lead me to the bank of the mighty river. 

But I knew by and by that this was to be a different kind of pilgrimage.  He led me into a thicket so deep I could only see the trees – around, before, behind and above me, concealing the sky.  We walked into dark and shadowy paths, ones I could never have found the courage to follow by myself.  Without his figure before me, however distant, I would have stumbled, struck my legs on rocks.  The song my heart sang had drifted into a cautious minor key.  Doubts fluttered all around me, like worrisome fireflies.  The sun began to give way to the darkness of the night.  How could the whole day have passed so swiftly? 

I became frightened.  I was far away from the castle I had heretofore called home and knew not if I could find my way back to it.  I tried to call to him, but my tongue cleaved to the roof of my mouth and unspoken words stuck in my throat.  I was growing more fatigued by the minute.  Streaks of light from the setting sun, poking through the trees, played across my face, as if teasing me before they disappeared altogether.  Finally it was dark, pitch black dark.  I could not see my hand in front of my eyes. 

Terror shot through me like a volt of electric current, as I felt strange hands begin to touch me and stroke my face and rub my back.  Were they human hands?  At first I was not sure.  They were like no hands of a human I had ever encountered.  They were roughhewn, coarse, and clammy.  I recognized none of the words coming out of their concealed mouths, but I began to hear mutterings and cryptic conversations in broken syllables.  The vernacular began to swell, and within minutes they were a babbling chorus grinding and fuming in their ferment.  While the language was foreign, I knew it was one that no lower animal could utter.  And I sensed that whatever the drift of their dissonant dialogue, I was the subject of it.  They were in dispute about what to do with me, this stranger who had crashed their nocturnal scene.  Perhaps I was to be a human sacrifice.  Perhaps this was an inspection to see if I was prime, if my flesh and bones would satisfy their deity. 

The hands then took hold of my shoulders and arms and began leading me through the dark.  I was not a stranger to darkness.  I had known the darkness of night after a sun-drenched day, but this dark was far more frightful.  What would it hold?

Within minutes the blackness was pierced by a tiny orange point of light.  As we moved closer, it grew in size, until I distinguished the sight of a campfire.  The light and the heat it gave off I welcomed, but the sight of it 

was alarming at first.  Was this the sacrificial flame that would consume me?  Were these the flames of hell about to choke me?  Were these companions of mine devils or damned souls?  But then the hands released me.  Suddenly no one was touching me, and I knew much to my relief that I was not a prisoner.  I had entered a circle of humanity in which no credential was required of me, no oath, no initiation rite – a new kind of kinship.  And at once there was no hostility in the flare of the campfire.  No fire-breathing dragon was present.  The flames were strangely endearing.  I had been called to this place – this dark, remote, wilderness abode and I was not a lone pilgrim any longer.

I danced with joy in the bright glare.  The fire warmed my face.  The fear of the dark subsided.  Whatever secret this place kept I knew it would be a blessing to discover, if he ever gave me leave to discover it.  Round and round I went in my frenzy and frivolity.  Half of me felt like a pagan, a fire worshipper.  But the other half knew he was somewhere round about, and that he was the author of this new epiphany. 

I shouted with a new voice, my throat at last clear and resonant.  “Oh great One, sing to me, keep my soul safe until the daylight returns.”

I danced and danced and danced, as if there were no one else on earth but me, forgetting for the thrilling moment that I was not alone, that I was being watched, that in front of the fire I was the most visible of all, and perhaps the most vulnerable.  

But by and by I saw him standing at the edge of the crowd, and there was the river behind him. 

There was the river at last!!! 

I had thought it would be a surging river, but it was calm and gentle, and its very gentleness drew me to it.  And he, the one I had followed, seemed empowered by it to minister to the throngs.  He was placing his healing hands upon them, stilling their tempests, assuaging their pains, calming their fears.  I discovered I was in line, being pushed closer and closer to him.  I was prepared for a long wait, but before I knew it I was in his space, and I was distressed to find that I could not look him in the eye or even touch his arm.  But others behind were not so restrained.  A scurvy hand reached out and around me, apparently waiting for his healing touch.  But the One before whom I thought I stood did not respond to it.  The hand waited, shaking in mid air, feebly attempting to arouse the compassionate heart that we all heard beating.  How many anxious and daunting minutes did it take for me to discover that that heart was my own?  The malodorous hand wanted to touch and be touched by me, and at once many were clamoring – for me!  Me, their fellow dirty pilgrim!  Me, the one who had not known his way through the dark forest!  Me, the scion of privilege reduced to the child of fear!  Beseeched by the hungry and solicitous throng!

My reticence to touch the One in whose steps I had walked suddenly was gone, in the blink of an eye.  But when my hand darted out, I found that he was not there; I did not see him.  I had just been standing feet and inches away, but now even as I craned my head in all directions I could not find his form.  I still felt his presence – spirit but not substance.  At once I understood.  He had left them all in my care – the sick, the crippled, the battle scarred, the squatters in ragged clothes, giving off acrid smells, their faces ashen and streaked with old and familiar torments, even the deranged.  I was part of the ragged throng, though we seemed not to be of one tribe or one nationality. 

I fell to my knees, I cried.  Without speaking a mortal word I was emptied of all illusion, of all craving for my own private nirvana, for some scented path to the eternally ethereal.  I was shoulder to shoulder with the sufferers all around me.  There was no easy escape, nor did I wish for it.  All day I had thought my pathway was but the means to reach him, to embrace him, to wrap my arms around his shoulder or snuggle in his arms.  The journey I had supposed was only something to endure, the forest only something to surmount.  The means toward the glorious end!  But now, transformed by his evanescent spirit, I knew at last that the journey itself was his gift to me, the pilgrimage that would go on and on.  My castle no longer beckoned to me, and from the crest of the mountaintop I looked down and saw that it was not a castle at all.  Now everything in creation was inviting – the air, the soil, the transforming flame, the life-giving river.

Everywhere was now home. 

To read other entries in my blog, please consult its website:  enspiritus.blogspot.com.  To learn about me consult on the website the blog entry for August 9, 2013.