The Adventure Worth Having

In my last two posts I talked about home, and what home is to me. Home to me is people, or a Catholic Church (which is really a Person). I do not miss places. I enjoy them when I am there. No matter how long I am there I find them beautiful, and no matter how long I am in different places I don’t miss the old ones. Perhaps because there is so much to discover in any one place, and perhaps because I try to enjoy everything I am presented with, I am always too busy enjoying my current place to miss my old place.

One interesting result of this way of thinking of place is that it radically (in the old sense radix: root; from the roots up) shapes my idea of adventure. To most people going somewhere they have never been before is an adventure, in and of itself. The very idea of seeing something new is exciting to most people, or terrifying, or inconvenient as the case may be, but certainly the novelty of a place they have never seen before is one of the key features of that place. 

For me this is less true. It is true that I enjoy seeing new things, but no more than I enjoy enjoying old things. For this reason I consider it a very good thing that my job has forced me to go to new places and see new things. It has greatly broadened my mind and sharpened my mental and emotional appetite for beauty. It is a good thing, not because I would dislike the idea of traveling if I were not forced to, but because without that impetus I would probably be too busy just being wherever I was or doing whatever I was doing.

Simply going somewhere is not an adventure for me.

Neither is adrenaline. I have experienced my share of adrenaline. I have hunted IED’s with a knife and handheld mine detector. I have witnessed IED’s blowing up a mere vehicle length from me. I have been shot at with rockets. I have jumped out of airplanes. I have practiced martial arts and fought in full contact tournaments. I have blown things up, fired thousands of rounds until simply pulling the trigger was a chore, and broken into rooms with live bullets flying feet from my head. I have cross country skied into back country mountain passes and downhilled across miles of untouched powder (rather clumsily, I might add; my skiing skills are not the best. I have navigated across miles of wilderness alone with a map and compass. some of these things were fun in their own way, or terrifying, or merely a dreadful bother, depending on my mood at the time. All were thrills, at least at first.

None of them have satisfied me. Not one of them provides a strong enough reason to keep doing what I am doing, which is part of why I am getting out of the Army at the end of this enlistment. Thrill is not a reason for existing. An adventure ought to have a purpose, and only one purpose have I found that still seems meaningful to me. It is not “America’s Interests.”

It is not that I consider all of those “adventures” worthless. Each one served its purpose, although it was not necessarily the purpose I or anyone else thought it served at the time. I have grown from each one. I have succeeded where I expected only failure, and excelled when by all rights I should have flunked. I have also failed when I expected only success. I have met my limitations and surpassed them, met them again and been utterly crushed and unable to go one step further. I have cried out for help in desperation and been answered out of marvelous darkness. These are good experiences, I think, for any man to have in his younger days.

If nothing else they have given me this perspective, that I have tried them and found them wanting. At twenty-eight years old I can say confidently that love is the only adventure worthwhile. Love of God, first and foremost, and then love of everyone that He loves. Love is the only purpose that still seems meaningful to me.

But lo and behold! Love is meaningful, and for its sake and by its light every other thing is meaningful. Everything is an adventure. Everything is worthwhile and beautiful when done with that love.

That seems to me to be something worth learning.

Beauty Near and Far

In my last blog I explained how home has never been a place to me. Rather, it is the people who make home. For this reason I have a lot of “homes.” When I visit the farm in upstate NY, I am home. When I visit my cousins in VA and make goofy home martial arts videos, I am home. When I get to see my god-children I am home. When I wake up at 7:30 in the morning for two or three hours of leisurely conversation over a pot of freshly brewed tea with my aunt and uncle, I am home. When I sit in Panera bread in the Tacoma Mall, surrounded by other young Catholics, studying the readings of the day, then I am home. I am home when I smoke a pipe or drink a beer with my brother. I am home making pizza for my friends, or going for a hike up Mt. Si with them.

There even more places that are home to me, in a deeper sense than I have ever known, so deep that I cannot blog about them. But home is always the people I am with, never the place I am.

Some people have a hard time understanding this. Most people, I think, have a certain amount of nostalgia for place, whether the place they grew up, or the place they spent much of their time. Some people truly do love, say, the hills of upstate NY with a fondness bordering on passion. For myself, it is not at all that I am indifferent to place. Instead, I love places. I love them all. I love the crispness of upstate NY,


the lazy warmth of the deep south,

 the glory of entire landscapes changing colors in the fall, and the warm smell of sun-baked pinestraw on the floor of forests that will never change their hue.

 I love the ice and snow of a New York winter,

and the sun, sand and warm water of a beach in Thailand.

I love the fertile, windswept high prairie of Eastern Washington and of Colorado and Wyoming,

and also the cozy grey drizzle and precious clear days in the Northwest.

I loved the tangled fertility of the Tigris river valley, and the blinding, unlivable sands stretching away from it as far as the eye could see. I loved the wild, harsh austerity of the Hindu Kush,
and the glory of the Himalayas, when the sun breaks over the barely visible peak of Mt. Everest.

 Beauty large:

And beauty small:


I love them all. When I am there I soak them up and glory in them, but I do not miss them when they are gone.

I miss people. One of the consequences of this attitude towards place is that it radically alters my concept of adventure, and what adventure truly is (that is subject for another blog). No matter where I go I see beauty to be shared and I find stories to be told, but what on earth is the point if there is no one to share them with or tell them to?

That is the point of this blog. To share beauty and tell stories. Not just the strange beauty that it has been my great good fortune to see, but the familiar beauty that we, strangely, do not see. All of it comes fresh and whole from the heart of God.

*All photos in this post were taken by the author.

There I Am Home

 

Home has never been a place for me. I have been so many places in my life. I have a special nostalgia for the farming country of Upstate NY, especially in the Summer, and the Fall. And the Spring. And the Winter. That's because I grew up there, and I guess in a certain sense that makes it "home." But I use the word "home" about a lot of other places as well. Home has been apartments, houses, other people's houses. The barracks have never been home. America is home sometimes. Sometimes Washington State is home, sometimes New York State is home. Sometimes the whole east coast is home. Depending on the context, home can be a very ambiguous word in my lexicon.

 The reason for this disparity is, as I said above, I have never associated the  concept of "Home" with a place. Home is more of a concept, and even in some sense a feeling. As much as my inner wordsmith dislikes using such a word for something so nebulous as a feeling there really is nothing else for it. When I am home I feel relaxed. I feel like I belong. I feel whole and at rest. Perhaps it is a good thing that I can feel at home in so many places, but it is never the place that is the home.

Or perhaps Home is not a feeling, so much as the things that I have those feelings about. Home is always ever two things, in my life. When I speak of Home (with a deliberately capital 'H') I am speaking of either people that I love, or a Catholic Church. Having traveled quite a bit and lived in many different places, I have made many friends on both ends of the country. Sometimes it feels to me like I can never truly go home, because there is no place that unites all of those people. My Tacoma/Puyallup family would be missing if I were on the East coast, and on the west coast my related and pretty much related family would be missing. When I have leave and I go to the east coast I don't have time to visit my NY family, and my VA family, and my SC family. Home for me would be some scenario where all of those people could be gathered together for Mass, and then a huge pizza party afterwards. When I travel overseas it is not America that I miss (cheeseburgers, the mall, fast internet and all that) but the people. My friends. And when I am in a non-Catholic country I miss the Mass.

 

In a similar way that I have home all over the place in the people I love, I have also been to many different Catholic churches and seen many different liturgies. Some hold a special place in my heart (shoutout to Our Lady of Good Counsel in Verona, NY; St. Mary's in Greenville SC; and St. Francis Cabrini in Lakewood WA) but at all of them there is Jesus in His Sacramental Presence. There I am at home. 

It is amazing where you can find a Catholic Church these days. Just google "Catholic Church in Kathmandu and a link for the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption will appear. Since I happened to find myself in Kathmandu, with a google machine handy, I did such a search, and for the price of an outrageously expensive and more than usually dangerous taxi ride, I was able to get to the Church thirty minutes before the 9:00 A.M. Sunday morning Mass. (In Nepal, Saturday is the day off, it being a Hindu country, so Sunday is the first day of the work and school week.)

The Church in her role as educator.

I fell in love with this Church right away. Kind of like the Church I attended in Thailand, there was a strong blending of western and Nepali art and architecture. (The Navajo church I attended in Arizona was a different story. That was straight up Navajo. The only western influence was the English language, and I felt like even that was merely a concession to the priest, who spoke no Navajo.) The Church can assimilate seamlessly into any culture and give it rebirth from within if it is not hampered by overzealous ministers. I think that even the most vehemently anti-Catholic regime or hostile government or culture will not hinder the spread of the faith one half so much as her own ministers will when they insist on too narrow a view of what the Church is.

But I digress. I spent some time wandering around the outside of the Church and School buildings. Kathmandu is a large, loud, dirty city. The church was located, not in Kathmandu proper but in another city called Lotpuri, which is separated from Kathmandu by a river filled with trash. The streets around the church complex are narrow enough that two taxis cannot pass in them. The church grounds are surrounded by a brick wall with concertina wire on top of it part of the way around, and a security guard at the gate. He made me leave my backpack at the guard house. I had a laptop, Samsung galaxy note, passport, and about 80,000 Rupees ($920.00 US [Long Story]) in it. I was therefore a bit hesitant, but he promise to watch it. I figured, you know what? God's got this. So I left it under St. Isadore's protection, taking only my passport. St. Isadore is a favorite of mine. Remind me to tell you about that sometime.

No Shoes inside. You will notice that my shoes are covered by a touristy white hat which I bought to keep the sun off my touristy (and balding) white head.

I took a surreptitious picture during the Gospel. Does that make me a bad Catholic?

There are no pews in this church. There are some plastic lawn chairs along the side aisles, for the old people, but where the pews would be in the body of the church there are only rows of much compressed red cushions. Parishioners are expected to sit or kneel on these cushions. I am actually quite good at sitting cross-legged, but that was a bit rough on the knees. Totally worth it though. I enjoy praying cross-legged. I can see why Zen practitioners often meditate thus and at the risk of being branded New Age or (horrors!) a Liberal! I have often thought that it might profitably be used by Catholics as well.

One consequence of not having pews is that when it came time for Communion, people simply made a beeline straight for the Eucharist! Back of the church, front of the church, whenever and however they liked, they came. It may not have seemed orderly, but it made sense to them and I am sure it made sense to Jesus as well.

And it was the Mass! Apart from any novelty, irrelevant to any strange customs or eye-attracting art or architecture, above and beyond and infinitely deeper than all of these things (yet at the same time in and with and through all of these things) it was the Mass. The God of the Universe saw fit to arrange my schedule and travel plans to make it possible for me to visit Him in the Mass. It bears out what I have said on this blog many times, brings it home, (pun very much intended) that God wants to give Himself to me far more than I could ever want to receive Him.

The old lady on the right in white sat cross-legged for the entire Mass except the standing and kneeling bits. It took her literally fifteen seconds to get back to her feet after Mass. And we Americans feel imposed upon when we have to kneel during the Consecration!? I also loved the fact that as she very, very slowly made her way up the aisle after Mass, all the children came running to her for her blessing. I probably should have done the same, and just didn't know it.

Praise the Lord all you nations!