Welcome back! I received a very well written book about setting up a not-for-profit church or foundationa week ago, and I will begin applying for the exempt status very soon. Then yesterday the mail brought a certificate from the Universal Life Monastery bestowing the title of Spiritual Counselor on me. It looks nice near my PhD diploma and the four self-produced notices* listing the regionally accredited schools I graduated from with a BA, BS, and two MAs. On the door of the front bedroom (my studio and office), I hung a nicely framed text: "Bro. James' Cloister."
I decided to become the Astral Monk James about the middle of June. I am a retired educator. I taught as a De La Salle Christian Brother in New Mexico and Louisiana for eight years. In my fifty-year career, I was e certified educator in Louisiana, New Mexico and New Your City and State, as well as the Department of Defense Dependent Schools. I don't know if those certificates have lapsed since I retired and left active teaching and managing in the secondary schools where I spent most of my time from 1959 to 2005. I was an adjunct, lecturer, program coordinator and guest professor as a number of schools including Louisiana State University, the University of Maryland and Assumption University of Thailand, and was a regular contributor to The Science Teacher and Science Scope , and had a weekly education column in The Bangkok Post in 2007.
I've written or contributed to novels, a history book, a middle school and a high school textbooks, and my works have been republished in journals and books.
But why become a monk? Well, as I said above, I taught as a Christian Brother for eight years. I spent six years training to be a Catholic monk, and I liked being a monk, but as times changed, I changed, and with Rome's approval I moved on.
I continued as an active lay Catholic, working mainly as a composer, singer and directors of music programs at the Catholic chapel of NYU and in the Army chapels in Schweinfurt and Heidelberg. Misunderstandings made it impossible to continue that service when a new chaplain arrived in Schweinfurt, and ceased complete in my years in Ansbach. I was not involved in church work after I returned to America in 1995, but was more involved when I accepted a position as guest professor of educatonal leadership at Assumption Universotu of Thailand, a pretigious Catholic institution in Bangkok in 2005. My new boss was the president of the school, and was a member of the Brothers of St. Gabriel. It was great being back among brothers, though I was a layman and soon married a Buddhist doctoral student in her Cambodian home, blessed by four saffron robed Monks.
During my time in Thailand Icreated a bery blog on religion and spirituality on Blogit.com for months it ranked in the top ten blogs on that subject. I was amazed when I discovered there were over two thousand Blogit bloggers writing on that subject. I was gratified at my success.
I left Bloggit to save money when my wife entered Harvard ten days after receiving her floppy doctoral hat and her red robes with the three velvet stripes.in Bangkok. (She was the only new doctor to earn her degree with a GPA of 4.0, magna cum laude.)
At Harvard, she studied climate change and the complex ethical questions it involved, and I was allowed to attend as a guest auditor. That summer I joined a law professor at Penn State in publishing an academic article about the ethical obligations nations have when they contribute to global warming and neglect taking the means to reduce CO2 emmisions.
I am not currently involved with Catholic institutions, but lately, in my quiet, uninvolved retirement, I have settled in Austin, Texas for medical reasons, where I can be near my youngest adult child, who is a therapist at a local spa. We are very similar in our spiritual values and practices, and neither of us is comfortable living under the rule of any church authorities. I think it is partly due to our individual church-related experiences, and partially due to our genetics, and in Buddhist and Hindu terms, it's a part of Karma or the multiple reincarnations souls experience.
I miss my wife, who now owns a bvery successful business in Boston. We stay in touch by telephone nearly every day, and are deeply happy with our commitments to one another and we rejoice that though we are apart, we are the best of friends and partners in our parallel life journeys.
As I consider what I'd like to do in the next quarter century of my life (I turned 75 last February), I have decided to be a monk again. I've had six years of training and eight years of practice already, so I know what I must do. As a self-appointed "Astral Monk," I will bring comfort and sense of belonging to those who come to me. I will welcome those who wish to join my Brotherhood/Sisterhood, As I did when I was writing my frequent posts at Blogit.com, I will strive to inspire readers with courage and free them from fear and timidity, despair and anger, and provide spiritual companionship in the difficult days that lie ahead.
At Blogit.com, I called myself Twainman, partly in honor of Mark Twain, who spent some time visiting in Dilsberg, Germany decades before my family and I moved there, and partly because my grandfathers were both linked to trains. My mother's dad managed the construction of a rail line built from Lafayette, Louisiana to Arkansas and beyond in the late 19th century. He retired from the railroad after a long career. My dad's father was overseer of the large and historic Enterprise Plantation in Louisiana, and headed the construction of the narrow-gauge railroad that ran through the widespread sugar cane fields and transported the hand-cut cane back to the refinery where it was ground and processed into sugar.
Now I hope that I can maintain the humor Mark Twain had, with a little less bite to it, and move farther into the Spiritual realms that I explored in my Blogit days.
Let me describe my Monastery, or Cloister. It's a two-bedroom apartment in north Austin, quiet, for people 55 and older. Like my quarters on the Catholic campus of Assumption University in Bangkok, it has a swimming pool I can visit everyday. It is also quiet, since the older people here are not rowdy and tend to be friendly and kind. My bookshelf has Catholic, Protestant and Buddhist books, psychology and science book, photography books, music books and a variety of large National Geographic books filled with pictures and feature articles about world cultures, ecology and the cosmos.
You and I find ourselves in perilous times. Anxiety is apparent at every turn. People are desperate for comfort, reassurance, and something to believe in. Something solid. That's really impossible, since in physics, nothing is really solid. Every atom composed of wavelike electrons vibrtatomg or spinning around far, far from an incredibly dense, tiny speck called the nucleus. Even iron, lead and gold atoms are mostly space! if you hit your thumb with a hammer, it's not the atoms in the steel that hurt you. The iron, carbon, cobalt and other stoms in the hammer head individually are harmless. It's the invisible forces holding the atoms together that bruise your thumb. The elemental atoms are harmless individually.
So for something "solid," you have to reach for something that's not made of atoms, not made of parts at all. The ony things that are not made of parts are spirits and the forces that rule all existence, the Eternal Truths.
The Bible, Koran, Talmud, Buddhis Pali texts, Hindu Scripture, and the truths still alive in oral traditions are all simply reflections, analogs, analogies based on God's Truth, God's Nature. In each culture, people revere certain writings or ancient, oral traditons. The New Testament says, "Everything holy and wholsome is from God." That's true even of the work of creative artists, painters, sculptors, playwrights, composers, actors and actresses, producers and directors, novelists and poets.
If you find what is really wholesome in a phrase by St. Paul or the words of Jesus in the Beatitudes, or the writings of truly inspired people, you can hang on to that. It's solid if it is God-like. And God-like has to be Good, because God is Good, not mean, hateful, vengeful, impatient, jealous, greedy, hypocritical, lazy, cruel, vail and full of false pride, pompous and untruthful, dishonest and devoted to evil powers.
What I don't do: don't preach. I listen. Instead of using the Bible or Koran or any other sacred text as a club to beat you with, I take the essence of God's word, wherever it comes from, and explain its real meaning. I have a give for explaing things in a way people can understand. I see the true meaning because I know God's mind, for I have surrendered my own opinions to this enlightenment. I act as a messenger carrying God's messages to you. I have done that all my life. It's a natural gift. Others have recognized that.
Somehow I hear people cry out through their eyes, I see their burdens in the way they walk, and listen to their silence. I can close my eyes and see the world as it has to be in twenty, forty, sixty years. I don't prophesy, I just see where roads lead, I see the outcome of the choices we as individuals, as Americans, and as members of the huge and restless human race are making. I don't think about their bad choices in terms of sin, guilt, or Devine Retribution. That's generally the preoccupation of highly committed "religious" people, people who are living out a script written their parents, priests, preachers, mullahs, rabbis and zealots who themselves were strongly influenced or controlled by the teachings, practices, traditions and moral rules of their human mentors. You may know some pious people, following the harsh and deeply ingrained negative attitudes they learned in childhood or youth, harbor hatred and are convinced it is a reflection of "God's righteousness." But they are wrong. God is abundance, God is love. He has decided not to rob us of our free will. He knows some people are deliberately mean. But that's not how God is!
Many find themselves bound as if in straitjacket by rules they hate. Many fear God will punish them for being true to themselves. Many profess to love God yet have no problem hating other people, other religions, other viewpoints. They hate people who have different morals, sexual feelings, spending habits, foreign accents, educational levels, skin colors, shapes, hair in the wrong place or the wrong color or texture, or addresses in the wrong part of town. Hate is powerful. It feeds on perceived unfairness and frustrated desires. It feeds on insecurity, fear of the unfamiliar, and feelings of self-loathing.
Oh how I pray that one word, one smile, one helping hand can shock a hater into the stunning realization that the hated one is okay! The hated one is really good! Really a fellow human, really an eternal conscious being operating in a unique human body, as strange or ugly or even as frighteningly beautiful that body may be!
Do you share some of these feelings? These are the dreams I live by, wishing that all people might somehow recognize that we are all alive because God - by whatever name we give our Higher Power!- is the source of our very existence, the sustainer of our lives, the ever flowing River of Life, Source of Light, Maker and Master of the entire Realm of Being, the Limitless Well of Wellness, Giver of Being.
Join me as you read these words. Place your soul's being in the hands of the Almighty, and breathe deeply. Hold the moment. It is a sacred moment. Now rise, and let us walk with God, with Divinity, with Peace Personified. Forget all the hate, all the sinister rules, all the false prophecies that may be ruling your life. Raise your spirit to the Realm of Heaven. Forget the cartoon "Heaven," that infinitely wide cloud city ruled by a crotchety Old Man in wearing a Long White Nightgown, but raise your soul to where the Almighty really is, where there is no time, no distance, no pushing or pulling, no hurry, worry or fear. It is where people who have had areal near-death experience found themselves, where Reality is the light and substance of existence, and where the souls are one with each other and full of joy being with their Maker.
As some read these words, they will click away and escape this endless babbling. Or perhaps some hidden hatred will find yet another thing to hateh. I hope, you are not like that. Instead, you choose to join with me in Spirit. I hope you catch a breath the clean, fresh air of Freedom and feel yourself rising from the heaviness of Earthly life and for at least a moment, enter into the realm of Transforming Love. If you do, please return soon for more time with me as I welcome you into my Astral Home, my home in the center of God's love. I want you to spread your wings and take to the sky, right with me. I hope to be with you again, soon.
James, your Brother in the Starry, Starry Night.
* I lost all my other 4 diplomas, but have the official transcripts unopened and with raised seals.
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