Chapter 12

Wholly Holy

There was a time when travel ended in a little yellow envelope.

You dropped your film off at the Fotomat kiosk in the parking lot of the grocery store – a tiny hut with one lonely employee imprisoned inside like a prophet in a transparent monastery. And several days later, you got back twenty-four slides of your vacation. They fit nicely on the back-lit edit tray.

Half of them were terrible.

A thumb over the lens. Someone blinking. Three pictures of the same waterfall because nobody knew if the first one “took.” A motel sign at dusk that looked profound when you were tired, but now just looked blurry.

And yet, laid out with light shining through them, those little rectangles slowly became more than photographs. They became a story.

Not because the story was in the pictures themselves.

The story emerged because you were there.

It is my observation that this is an urge the human mind cannot resist. We gather fragments and immediately begin searching for order. Plot. Meaning. Connection. We lay the slides onto the projector tray of memory and begin listening for narration.

“This was before the storm.” “That was the morning she laughed so hard she snorted coffee.”

“Here is where things started changing.”

Human beings are meaning-making creatures. We do not simply live events. We assemble them.

Sometimes wisely. Sometimes desperately.

And perhaps that is why I have spent so much time wandering through these pages examining stories, memory, ego, consciousness, religion, politics, fear, rationality, and all the strange machinery of human thought. Not to arrive at certainty, exactly. But because I cannot seem to stop arranging the slides on the table and asking:

“What is this all pointing toward?”

For a long time, I thought holiness meant arrival.

Holy people knew.
Holy books settled things.
Holy institutions guarded answers.
Holy men stood behind pulpits with polished certainty and well-creased pants.

But the older I get, the more suspicious I have become of people who arrive too quickly. Especially when they arrive carrying maps for everyone else.

Because life itself does not feel like arrival to me. It feels like movement. Searching. Revising. Losing the trail and finding it again. It feels less like marching toward a fortress of truth and more like following something alive through the fog.

The ancient Celtic Christians had a curious way of speaking about the Holy Spirit. Rather than using the gentle dove so familiar to Western Christianity, they sometimes spoke of the Spirit as a wild goose.

Not domesticated. A wild goose does not sit politely in your theological birdcage. Startle it and it disappears over the horizon. You hear a far-off honking when you are trying to sleep.

And perhaps most maddening of all – it never flies in a straight line.

I think that image has stayed alive for centuries because it feels true to experience. The deepest things in life rarely arrive through conquest. They arrive from unexpected places.

These tiny epiphanies slip into our consciousness – like Danny learning to guide the forces of the floor buffer instead of fighting it.

And these moments, these bits of deep truth arrive when we least expect them:

You read a novel at the right moment.
You sit beside a hospital bed.
You hear laughter coming from another room.
You lose someone.
You fall in love.
You fail publicly.
You forgive someone you were certain deserved punishment.

You watch sunlight strike dust in a quiet room and suddenly feel the unbearable weight and wonder of simply being alive.

And afterward, The Me immediately rushes in with clipboards and labels and systems.

Explain it.
Define it.
Control it.
Market it.
Turn it into a movement.
Build a platform.
Defend it against outsiders.

But the deeper currents of existence, the underpinnings of being itself, don’t prattle on about it.

The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.
The map is not the territory.
The menu is not the meal.
And perhaps theology itself is often only the photographs of encounters, not the lived encounters themselves.

I think this is why wisdom so often hides itself from the overly certain. It is something like a soap bubble. Grabbing it only results in an empty hand.

Wonder doesn’t grab. Reality is just there, waiting to be noticed. When I was younger, I imagined spiritual maturity as climbing upward toward clarity. I now suspect it may be more about becoming large enough to tolerate mystery without panic. Or small enough to feel the unquestionable awe.

This is where the janitor named Sock is. His job was to train Danny. His passion was to encounter his apprentice right where he was.

Perhaps, living by this presence, this wholeness of being, requires us to chase the wild goose without demanding it land in our backyard forever. And this changes how one sees and relates to other human beings.

For if I believe I possess the one, final truth, then you become a problem to solve, convert, correct, categorize, or eliminate. But if we are fellow travelers – wandering through fog with our little packets of developed photographs – then perhaps we can sit together at the kitchen table and compare what we have seen.

To notice things. Not to defeat one another.

You see something I missed. I notice a pattern you overlooked. Your suffering taught you something my comfort never could. My failures revealed something hidden beneath my ambitions.

And somewhere in all this unfinished conversation, meaning flickers. Real, yet seldom complete.

I no longer think holiness means becoming pure in the way I once imagined purity. Untouched. Certain. Separate. Stainless. Perhaps “wholly holy” means something closer to becoming fully present.

Present to joy.
Present to grief.
Present to ambiguity.
Present to other people.
Present to existence itself.

Wholly here.

Holy here.

This book has been, for me, just such a journey. The Me in me wanted so much to just tell you this marvelous revelation I received. We talked about mythological structures back at the beginning of this journey. And I have a very clear, very simple mythological structure:

At some point, the docent ought to stop gesturing vaguely at the paintings and admit what he thinks he has been seeing.

Humans and other living beings have a central consciousness. I call it the I Am. In this world, with its constant storms of physical consequences, the I Am by itself would be completely lost. So there is another part of us, perhaps a part of the I Am, which learns, connects, reorganizes, and plays back the bits and pieces of reality that swirl around us. Things don’t just happen to me; they happen to The Me.

In this book, we have spent a lot of time with The Me, that little fellow who has all the past in memory and projects all the future in stories. It is much more dramatic, glorious, pathetic, sad. It is interesting, The Me, and it is at the heart of all our art.

However, as I have noted, The Me exists in the I Am, without which none can exist. More than that. In my mythological structure, the I Am is the Universe and more. Much of what we call God and the gods and the powers and energies and relationships of all of this reality is the I Am. And somehow, within these temporary, separated selves, the Universe has awakened enough to say: ‘I Am.’

This is where I have arrived – for now.

Then I realized no one is saved by borrowing somebody else’s certainty. So I took the role of docent, of a quiet guide, to share my observations.

We have been on quite an adventure. Well, I hope you found it entertaining, this Wild Goose chase. Chasing the Wild Goose keeps us moving. Humble. Awake. Alive.

It keeps us listening for distant honking and wings overhead.

And maybe that is enough.

Maybe the point was never to capture the truth beyond fact at all. Maybe the point was what happens to us while following it.