Well, the house needs a roof and a new chimney. This I already knew. But I only just found out that it requires these things now, rather than later, before I move in. I discovered this in the home inspection process. This fact changes the situation rather dramatically. It would probably be most prudent of me to renegotiate the selling price – lower, obviously. It would be good to pay less for a structure I have determined is worth less. But, however, this necessitates beginning the long process I have just undergone yet again – that is to say, starting with a new offer, a new contract.

 

This is interesting. Every time I have moved in the past, and I have moved many times, it was in the midst of a calamity, a divorce, a bankruptcy, an arrest – that sort of thing, (and usually in some combination.) Each time I have moved in the past I have moved with nothing, or very little, except myself and my toothbrush, some clothing, and my books. This is because the same calamity which forced me to move had already caused me to lose most of whatever else I may have accumulated – automobiles, houses, appliances, furniture, wives, children, and so on, things that take up a lot of space. In other words, moving used to be much easier.

 

Today my life is very different. It is much less complicated in many ways, but it is also much more crowded. The short way of saying all this is that I now own an awful lot of stuff.

 

Last night I dreamed I was wearing a black sequined mini skirt. I would enjoy knowing your interpretations of my dream.

 

Anyhoo, I seem to have a little more time to spend with you than I had thought I would. That’s not a bad thing, since I love you. It is very like being unable to leave a wonderful vacation with family and friends in a lovely place until a major car repair, perhaps in which there is some difficulty finding the parts, is finished. So I find that I must linger a few days more. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but somewhere along the way I seem to have acquired the virtue patience.

 

For many years people have told me that I live a spiritual life. I’m only just beginning to believe them. But I wasn’t trying to live a spiritual life. I think they – those people who have said that – were simply observing something about me which I was unable to see in myself, and this had something to do with the things I like to talk about and the things which seemed to be of interest and importance to me. All I have ever really wanted is to be loved, and in that way I am the same as every other human being in the world because it is in Love that we are made and it is into Love that we dissolve, and looking for Love is everything we are really doing in the meantime.

 

The White Tornado

 

It is possible to half fall in love with somebody. Emotions are really nothing more or less than thoughts of a particular kind. We don’t entirely control our thoughts, as much as we may try to. We govern them. Sometimes we are governing an unruly and discontented populace. It is often true that one cannot help but entertain a thought. They can come unbidden. But we can choose not to allow our thoughts to entertain us, and this is what I attempted to do with my thoughts (feelings) for The White Tornado. Since she was married I couldn’t give in to them, or surrender to them, or allow them to influence my more sober thinking. Of course they did anyway. And so, for about a year the best term to describe my general state of mind was “nuts.” When we first met, when she was first getting to know me, I was sound of mind and happy, as I am now. By the end of that year I was ready for the rubber room. I’ve learned now that falling half in love with somebody is just as bad as going all the way.

 

Most of us can probably think of a few tee shirts we might wear which are imprinted with funny sayings describing something about us – about our characters and personalities. One which seems to describe me is “Instant Asshole, Just Add Female.” This isn’t necessarily a good thing. It’s not my better character qualities that make it seem to be true but my worse ones. Sure it’s funny in a cynical sort of way, but it’s not something I wish for myself.

 

That’s life. So what?

 

Step 1: Check to see if unit is plugged in

 

Either intentionally or unintentionally I write about the ways in which I don’t function properly. The White Tornado adventure was one such case. And, whether we realize it or not, that’s what most of us write about, and that’s what most of us talk about when we sit down over a meal or with a cup of coffee between us. That’s what most Hollywood movies are about, and most Broadway plays, and operas, and so on. It is the plot of every novel and every short story. It is the part of our favorite song that makes us cry. What makes a fictional character interesting? What makes the human character interesting? Isn’t it to a large extent the things that are wrong with us which make us interesting, the ways in which we are broken? I think it is.

 

In most cases I think our flaws are what make us interesting, and I think that these flaws are most glaringly apparent in our relationships – that which occurs when one broken, dysfunctional human being makes eye contact, or more, with another.

 

I’ve written that the world is crazy, and it is. There may be several reasons why the world is crazy, but surely the biggest reason is because we are crazy. Furthermore, I believe that there is a reason for our craziness, our brokenness – a first cause, an origin – and it’s something we really can’t do anything about, which is very frustrating. I think you already know I am speaking of Original Sin. And sin is one of those words that seem to have the magical ability to utterly close the minds of many readers, or listeners, to the rest of whatever is being written, or said. This is because everybody thinks he knows what it means, but it has been my experience that very few of us do. We react to what we think we know, and what we think we know is wrong.

 

Many of us seem to think that sin has something to do with what other people think about us, and nobody likes to be judged. I don’t like to be judged, same as you. But Original Sin means one thing, and one thing only – though it may be expressed in many confusing ways – and that is Humanity’s first act of disobedience, or Humanity’s first deliberate turning away from the Will of God.

 

And sometimes we think of God as being the same as you or me – just some geezer. Most of us bristle at the suggestion that we need to be obedient to anybody. But God isn’t just some geezer. God is Love. Original Sin, as it is explained in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, was Humanity’s first deliberate act of turning away from Love, or of deciding to choose something other than Love. And because of that first deliberate act of turning away from Love we are actually born with a fault which is going to cause all kinds of trouble for us. Our broken relationships, our broken lives, our isolation from each other, our loneliness, our animosity, our regrets, resentments – in fact, everything that is wrong with us, (and everything that is interesting about us), and everything that is broken about us, comes down to this first cause, this turning away from Love, according to this magnificent story of our Creation.

 

We can argue about whatever else the word sin might mean, but for the purpose of this writing in which I am trying to make it understandable not just to religious people but to everybody, sin is basically our disconnectedness from Love. It’s the reason we are broken, the reason we are not quite right, the reason we are dysfunctional. According to religious people it is even the reason we have to die. It’s the cause of all human suffering, and of death itself.

 

So, all of that is to say that when I use the word sin I am not telling you that you are bad because you’re doing something which other people think is sinful. (It's none of your business what other people think about you.) I’m not telling you that you are bad because you’re doing something I think is sinful. All of us – being human – are doing essentially the same thing: looking for the Love that we have lost, the Love we once refused. And all of us are broken.

 

This was the toughest thing for me to understand because I also read somewhere in my Bible that we are perfect, and I’m kind of a logical guy. How can we be perfect and yet so plainly imperfect? But the answer is really very simple: we are made to be perfect but we are broken. Nobody makes a thing to be anything other than perfect, not an automobile, or a rocketship, or a toaster. When we make something with our minds and our hands our intention is not that it should be broken. In fact, we would prefer it never broke. God the Creator made us to be perfect, and according to the story He would have preferred we never broke. But we did break. And when we broke so did the world.

 

The good news is we can be fixed. This is the good news that religion has for us. I think that even the most vociferous scoffers at religion understand on some level what religion and religious people are trying so imperfectly – so humanly – to do, and I think perhaps they scoff as loudly as they do because they do understand this, and they are disappointed. Remember that we are all looking for Love, and when we don’t seem to find it we naturally become disappointed. So great is our disappointment that we make wars against each other, and kill each other, and create all kinds of trouble for each other. We even – and this is the most horrible of all possible horrors – We even kill ourselves. The story of this trouble is Our Story, or what we like to call human history.

 

If the world is broken because the human person is broken then Heaven can really only mean one thing: the world fixed because the human person is reunited with Love. And I think the only real difference between somebody who seems to be living the “spiritual life” and the person who seems not to be is that the spiritual person is more aware of this. In reality, we all want the same thing. I think the only real difference is where one happens to be looking for it.

 

And I may continue to post more of this writing as time allows. 

 

I can’t imagine why, but there isn’t a single picture of a 1975 Mr. Coffee Auto Drip coffee maker on the World Wide Web. So I had to take my own, borrowing my son’s camera since mine doesn’t seem to be working, and well – here it is.

 

 

Somebody gave this to me. A nice lady, the same one who baked the cookies when I was invited to a dreaded dish-to-pass party a few weeks ago. I hate those things. You don’t ask a misogynistic, toothless, aging hermit to a dish-to-pass affair. Seems like common sense to me. But anyhoo, this coffee maker is (was) the only good auto drip machine ever made for home use. It came with a spare carafe and a spare warming plate – actually a hot plate. Water will boil on the thing. The nice lady gave me that stuff too, still in the box it came in. I’m so happy.

 

You can also see an old Voice of Music amplifier and tuner up there on the shelf, and the bread box is very nice. The toaster, which is just sneaking off the frame on the right, is the same one used by David Niven in Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. You put the bread in, it goes down automatically and then pops out when it’s done. You may remember a few cartoons where the toast would shoot out rather violently. The spring on this one isn’t quite what it was. But, of course, neither is mine.

 

Raindrops on roses, and whiskers on kittens…

 

Liberals and conservatives accuse each other of having a mental illness, and both are right, in a sense. The difference in the way their minds are “wired” is extreme, and it is impossible to perceive reality the way another person does. I am looking at a color and I call it red, and although you may also call it red I cannot see the same red you see. I can only see my own red. You see? Simple.

 

Looking for colors to paint my house. I think maybe red, though it’s not an old house. Or maybe gold. It was built the same year the coffee maker was made, so I’ve got that part covered. Maybe here’s a picture or two, not of the house itself but of the property, the view, the beaver pond, and what not.

 

 

I’m in the retrieval business. Somebody told me that recently. She may be right. I’ve been busily collecting electronic music files, and of course I’ve downloaded thousands of hours of Old Time Radio. If you’d like to you can think of the society we live in as if it were a cafeteria. We pick this and that – choice morsels – and leave the rest. But I view it more like a salvage operation – salvaging a sunken wreck.

 

I’ve got to make peace with the music. I love it so. It’s beautiful. It’s salvageable. I hear God in the music, and I see Him in the Mr. Coffee maker. Sure, God is inside of things. Why not? He is the Uncaused Cause, and that’s the reason Atheists believe more firmly in God than Believers do. They just haven’t yet been introduced to themselves, and so they look for Him in other places – Science Fiction, politics, money, health, sex, or whatever. You go back to the most famous argument in History, arguably the foundation of Logic, and there you will discover the God Who Has No Name, and it is terrifying. But it is an abstraction. A person cannot believe in an abstraction. Logic cannot prove anything except itself. In other words, Logic cannot prove the existence of a thing, only that it is logical a thing exists. Proof, on the other hand, isn’t abstract. It is completely personal. Jinkies.

 

Why do people believe in God? Because they’ve met Him. That’s the only difference between somebody who does and somebody who doesn’t.

 

So I guess what I’m trying to say is don’t be so darned critical. Or, that is, I shouldn’t be. The longer I stay up to my armpits in shit the more likely it is that I’m going to complain about a few things. There’s a quaint saying: if you can’t accept it, and you can’t change it, haul ass.

 

I was thinking a very dark sort of green for the trim. Around here we have a few houses painted completely black, which seems rather strange. But, if you were to look very closely you may see that they are really just a very dark green. It is called Village Green and it is very silly because it really might as well be black. There’s an historical reason for it that I don’t feel like writing about right this minute. But I think it would make a nice trim color.

 

 

So this is the land. It looks like land, anyway. This isn’t all mine. I’ve only got six acres of it, but it does look very alike on the other side of that property line. I don’t feel any different when I step over it.

 

You know how I love the old time radio programs from the 1930’s and 1940’s – Fibber and Molly, George and Gracie, and all that? I used to post them frequently. I even devoted a separate blog to them, though it seemed after a few weeks that I was better off just combining the two blogs. Now I recall in Merton’s autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, he wrote about those same radio programs. They weren’t “old time” radio programs at the time of his writing; they were contemporary. They weren’t nostalgia. They didn’t “bring him back” to a simpler and perhaps better time. He wrote that they were rubbish; that they seemed to exemplify everything that was wrong with the culture, everything that was twisted, diseased, decadent, and horrifying, and insane. In other words, his view of my favorite radio programs was a rather dim one. His view of my favorite radio programs was just like my view of the crap on television today. There was no TV when he wrote The Seven Storey Mountain, or that is to say those radio programs were the TV of his day.

 

I was abashed – to a point, and reminded of Defining Deviancy Down, a phrase which has lately been applied to a much broader range of cultural phenomena than was the original scope and intention of Daniel Moynihan’s 1993 essay. But it is apt.

 

The meat and potatoes portion of my post is this: I admire, and to an extent I seem to emulate, Thomas Merton’s spirituality, but I will probably always like Fibber and Molly. I will probably always discern the beauty in non-sacred and non-liturgical music which Merton could not recognize, (the contemporary music of his time being Louis Armstrong rather than Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), but then Merton may not have been given the same gift of musical appreciation that I was given. I hear the Divine aspect of music in all music, though there is good and bad music, some being more inspired, some less. Does that mean it’s all worthwhile? No, of course not. When I first became sober, eight years ago, I developed a strange fascination with “death metal” and that sort of thing. There was something life-enriching in it – energy, I suppose, a joyful noise hidden beneath the rage – which I seemed to be able to recognize and extract from it. But within a year it no longer appealed to me. Newly sober drunks also seem to require a lot of sugar in the first year. Perhaps there’s a correlation.

 

I cannot say for certain that I will always appreciate these things that Merton grew to despise – just that I probably will. I remember fondly, and without regret, doing certain things which would shock more than a few of you. I’ve lived a rather depraved life at various times. For these things I was guilty and ashamed, but of them I’ve repented, and now I look upon them with humor, and a deep gratitude for my deliverance.

 

It is in some ways similar – though I run the risk of claiming a false moral equivalency which I’d rather you ascribed to nuance – to my changing appreciation of the cinema. There are many films I’ve seen which I recall with fondness, and of which I am still able to recognize their artistry – their wonderful acting, the skill apparent in their direction, editing, and so forth – but which I would no sooner watch again than I would willingly swallow broken glass. I don’t regret having seen them, but I would not wish to see them again. This is “on-going,” (to use a popular non-word) – you readers of The White Lodge have been witnesses to it. You can scroll back into my archives to read several of my reviews of such films, and about my great love of movies in general. Since I began writing this journal I’ve become more discriminating. You might say that. You might also say I have been stepping away, backwards, keeping my eye on it in case it might attack, from “the world” in general – and by that I must mean the culture - as though it were a tiger in a cage.

 

Think about this:

 

I’m always hearing that Christianity is “under assault” from the shocked and outraged among us. They state the obvious, and they are saying nothing new. There was never a time when Christianity was not under assault. Who is to blame when a tiger in a cage eats a man? It isn’t the tiger. Obviously, the man is to blame who walked into the tiger’s cage – the moron. If there was ever a time – and depending upon how one chooses to tell the story of our lives there may or may not have been – when Christianity was the dominant force guiding our civilization, and that time has passed, and it is no more, then it is not the fault of Evil that this should be the case. It is the fault of the moron who walked into the cage. Christians never enjoyed a period when they were not “under assault.” What happened is this: they stopped defending themselves from that assault. They walked into the tiger’s cage. You can’t blame your enemy for doing what enemies do any more than you can blame the tiger for eating you. Duh. At the moment Christians en masse began to accept the notion that religion is a purely internal, personal, and subjective thing, they ceased being Christians because they ceased being religious. And Christianity is a religion, or it is nothing at all. That notion, that idea, is the antithesis of religion. There is one religion left on this Earth – only one which meets the definition of what a religion is – and it is Islam.

 

A few years ago, closer in time to the WTC attack, I read the writings of several notable mullahs and other Islamic holy people which took the form of criticisms of Western Culture. Certain words kept recurring, words like insanity, chaos, depravity, decadence, moral turpitude, and so on. I agreed in large part with their assessment of our aging tiger, and in fact when I was reading Merton I read the same words again. I agreed with the mullahs, and I agree with Merton. What do we all have in common – in this most unlikely conspiracy of agreement on certain particular ideas? Religion. It’s simple.

 

Now, I was made not to live in this world but to live in Heaven, and that is why the world has become increasingly hostile to my nature. It hasn’t changed, but I have, and the way in which I’ve changed is becoming anathema to my environment, my immediate surroundings. And so it follows that my surroundings are becoming turbulent and dangerous waters in which I tread. My dreams – that is, what I would wish for the future – are all about arriving at last upon the dry land, and the definition of that has changed as my desires are slowly shaped to conform to my appointed purpose. And no, it is not that I should buy a house in the country I realize, though I am doing it anyway as it seems to be the external design of another step on my journey. It is – as I’m sure you who read my writings regularly have surmised – an imperfect method of escape from the culture, from the society which has become hostile to me. But it is certainly not the last step, or the final destination. As you know, death ends nothing except the flutterings of a butterfly against a windowpane, and if I were to die right now it would be of no importance; my journey would continue.

 

The paradoxes I mentioned in my last post have ceased to be paradoxical, but they have become obvious taken-for-granted truths, and it is increasingly the logic of the world which seems paradoxical to me. This stands to reason, just as increasing one’s knowledge of anything will make it clearer and less befuddling – such as the workings of a clock or an automobile, or a rocket ship. It becomes increasingly difficult for me to make myself understood because I take such things as given which are obscure to many, just as one who knows the Earth revolves around the Sun would have difficulty communicating with another who believes it’s the other way ‘round. Where does one begin? 

 

But here I should say something about austerity because it is much in the news of the day.

 

The life of “downward mobility” is the one I’ve chosen, and it is necessary that it should be a free choice. Just as a sacrifice which is compelled is not really a sacrifice at all, the renunciation of material reality is not really a renunciation when it is forced upon a person from the outside, or by others who are more powerful. When you (or we) are told that we must make sacrifices for some nebulous “greater good” it is the devil talking, for a sacrifice is only valid when it is freely accepted. Just as Christ accepted the bitter cup in the Garden, the definition of sacrifice requires that there must be a choice. No one can make us sacrifice, and no one can make us renounce. The word for a sacrifice which one is compelled to make is merely hardship, in which there is nothing noble, and the word for a sacrifice one is compelled to make by a government is merely oppression, and it is just that simple. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness – these words helped to establish a nation which is penultimate to the Heavenly Kingdom. The United States of America, and the ideas upon which it was established, are as close as we can get to Heaven on this Earth, and the reason God guided those men to establish it is so that we might enter freely into accordance with His Will for us. Of course, it follows that we might also not. That’s the whole point of having a choice, isn’t it?

 

There is no hope for Humanity in the mirror. But that God gives us the ability to choose to look instead at Him is the very essence of having God-given rights, and the reason why our nation is the closest thing human beings have ever done to goodness in our twisted history of mucking about in shit. Beware of false prophets, and by that I mean listen very carefully, and with whatever critical thinking skills you might possess, to some of the things being said and done in this time.

 

A few comments are in my Inbox, presumably from my last post(s), which I will reply to soon.

 

 

     

 

 

 

“On or about” June 30 is the wording in the contract. Perception is interesting. Time seems to have slowed to a crawl. By the time we get to June 30 I imagine I might be saying “What house?” It’s boringly ordinary – this phenomenon which occurs in the cases of most home buyers, and one thing I have not wished for The White Lodge is that it should be ordinary. But, with one thing or another, this may be the last time I get to post something. Or not.

 

For just a moment I was tempted to deactivate this blog, and why? Because I’m no longer the person who wrote so much of it. For instance, I no longer carry torches for Juicy Lucy or Sister Midnight, or The Lady, or The White Tornado. These were non-non-fictional characters; there were real people inspiring them, and to a point it may be safe to say that there is no such thing as a complete fiction. Let us imagine The Squabbler has opened a door here in The White Lodge which I have never seen opened before. Light pours from behind it. Presumably it leads to a room, to a country, a world, a universe. And, one by one, the denizens of The White Lodge have arrived to pass through it into their final destiny.

 

Perhaps this is why memoir writers choose their last days – or as close to their last days as they can predict – to commit their lives’ stories down to paper: what seems important now may be of absolutely no consequence tomorrow, and the high drama of yesterday is no more than childish and embarrassing when viewed in the light of the present moment.

 

It has happened now and then that I’ve heard from people I hadn’t spoken to for a few years “out of the blue.” And, hearing them give their accounting of themselves, it has occurred to me that I have changed in ways that they have not. I seem to be moving ever upwards, without knowing it, in time. When I have heard from persons of old acquaintance it has seemed to me that I am looking down at them now from a higher place among the clouds. And in saying so I don’t mean to suggest that I am better than they are – I might just as easily be looking “up” at them and fooling myself about our locations relative to each other. But my point is that it does definitely seem that I am observing them from a height, and they are still in a lower place where I once was, but I am no longer there.

 

And I wonder are there people who never really change, or who never change greatly? Do they still believe the things they once believed? Do they still attract the same kinds of troubles and circumstances they once did? Do they still make the same sorts of decisions and mistakes? Do they still want the same sorts of things they always wanted? Do they still value the same sorts of things they once valued? Do they still have the same faults they once did, and the same strengths and weaknesses of character? Do they remain unchanged in time? – except, that is, for their bodies which we know are always dying?

I suppose the answer is yes, there are such people. Perhaps this describes most people, although in a highly relative way. In any case, it has been my experience that this life is a journey I must take alone, and that where I am going I can bring no one with me. Or perhaps I should say no one seems to wish to accompany me once they see that my destination is so different from the ones they would wish to visit themselves.

 

What I really mean is this: that I can’t even bring myself with me, for the person I was is not the person I am. When you look through the eyes of the world it would seem that bigger is better, that expansion is superior to limitation, wealth is better than poverty, health is better than sickness, and the soul – assuming that one is aware of it – should always be striving to become large and all-embracing, and aspiring to its fulfillment. This is the paradox of the spiritual life, however – not that I am but rather that I am not. The spiritual life is not about self-fulfillment but self-denial. It is about renunciation. And considering that all things move towards their end, it must also involve austerity, the abject humiliation of personality and the unconditional surrender of self will. For there is nothing within the atom; at the heart of Nature there is void. It offers us nothing but death. The worms eat us. The End. And no one will stick around to watch the credits.

 

And so, the soul doesn’t become larger. In fact, it must become very very small if it is to squeeze through that famous needle’s eye, small as it was when it was first made – just a dot – without all the rubbish that has clung to it like barnacles on the hull of a ship. The paradoxes pile on: true freedom is the result of obedience, true happiness is the result of forgetting to be happy, or of renouncing happiness.

 

There are two premises as different from each other as the night is from the day, and upon these two premises are built the entire structure of Reason – or that is two different structures on these two different foundations. One of these is the Tower of Babel, the tower built upon the world, and it has its own logic, assuming the premise is sound, (but the premise is not.) And the other tower is invisible because it is real and so it cannot be seen from the unreal world but only from the real one. One of these towers is always falling down and always having to be rebuilt. It is the story of civilization, of empires, of human advancement. It is History itself, this story of falling down and rebuilding. It is the house with its foundation built upon sand. Let us call it The Black Lodge. But then there is the other tower which is built upon the solid rock, and which has always stood, invisible, impervious, eternally. The only way to enter into it is to become invisible too.

 

Look, if you were to examine one of your own beliefs – pick any one, it doesn’t matter – and follow the reasoning upon which it seems to based, follow it backwards, follow it down “the rabbit hole” to where it begins, you will find that it is either sound or it is unsound. That is to say that there are true things and there are false ones. Yes, we can all appreciate this. But Faith, and only Faith, is ultimately the foundation of all Reason. Why is that? Because we must begin all reasoning with an assumption which is improvable. In every case, in every person’s mind, there is a faith. It may not be faith in God; it may be faith in something visible that changes and dies, but there is one. This is your premise – whatever it is – the faith at the very end, at the base, of the rabbit hole. I have tried to make this point in many ways, but never articulately enough. I don’t know how I might better explain it, but Beauty is nothing more or less than the contemplation of Faith. There cannot be Nature without God, not by any thought which resembles logic.

 

Any door which The Squabbler may open here leads to nothing if it doesn’t lead to Heaven. And we have opened quite a few doors, some of them many hundreds of stories below us now. Would I deactivate this blog? No, of course not. It would be prideful and silly of me to do such a thing. That temptation tells me I still have an ego. So what? If in a year I look back at this post and say to myself it’s rubbish, or that it’s embarrassing that I once thought this way, it wouldn’t surprise me. I’m glad a few of you have appreciated what I’ve written.

 

Speaking of The Lady, here she is, with her daughter, pulling into the driveway in that grand and glorious Audi A-6 million of hers, with the holy shit handles. This is a new one, blue, or it may be black in the fading daylight. I must put on my gracious host hat and greet her at the door.

 

 

As I prepare The White Lodge for its relocation, and subsequently what may be a long hiatus, I want to express my deep gratitude to you its denizens, its citizens, its visitors, its inhabitants, its guests – my co-authors and collaborators. In other words, thank you to all of you who have read and participated in The White Lodge. This little blog, which I began on a whim one Sunday afternoon without expectations, has been at times the single most important thing in my own life, which I’m not ashamed or afraid to say. All sorts of good things have happened here, none of them possible – and none of them good – without you. And I mean especially TR and Sherry, purple fly or lizzie gott, AZRON, prisonerofhope, Rosie, n.lynn, Whispered Promise, Biggie T., Taylor, Bella, Lucy, Lookin’, wayfarer, et al.: You have been good friends, and my life has been greatly enriched by knowing you.

 

But now I find more names are coming to mind: shoutoutgirl, Desari, Praywithhope, PolarB, Prank, Miss Lou, Jamocha, HeatherScot, Celtic Mist, Coloconnect, Misty, raspberrytoast, cracker, chandabear, VEGAS, Gecko, Cat’s Daddy… of course all the people who visited during the time we were doing the Saturday night music thing, which would take a while to mention. Whit stopped by a few times, and r.e.knowltoniii, Zappa Fan, Dixie… This is beginning to sound like a scene from The Godfather – “and from Chicago we have…” I don’t wish to leave anybody out, because even those who visited only once or twice, or those who may no longer be on the stream, were extremely important to The White Lodge.

 

Thank you also to Pioneer, who administers this site as a labor of love. I doubt he makes much of a profit on it. He might even lose money on the deal.

 

I hope above all that we have had fun with it. From the start I’ve said this is really no more or less than a computer game. But I know we each take our own approach to it. Some of us take it a little more seriously. Although I’ve always maintained this isn’t “real” – it’s a game, and I write fiction – I approach my real walking-around life the same way, so I guess The White Lodge has really been a pretty accurate representation of… me.

 

But I’ve discovered something here – with your help – which really is real. I don’t mean a house in the hills, or whatever I have previously thought would make me happy. I’ve learned there’s only one thing that will make me happy, and that’s to live and die in Christ. And I’ve learned it isn’t possible to be in Christ and also in the world. You see, the world is insane, and it always was. But we weren’t made for it; we don’t belong in it. We were made for Heaven.

 

Now, I could go on complaining about the details almost indefinitely – the sicknesses, the wars, the injustice, the silliness – Viagra and Advil, reality TV, crumbling morality, consumerism, political rubbish, or whatever. It doesn’t matter, really. A thousand years ago I would have been able to make the same complaints about the same things with different names, and a thousand years from now I expect it will be the same. Like, the end of the world has always been nigh, and it always will be. People are often blind and mindless, and stupid. So what? Every worldly good is no better than a necessary evil, and we can hope for nothing in this world because we were made for a better one, and that is the source of all joy.

 

I’m going to get in touch with somebody on the stream – probably TR, once I have an address, which will probably happen in July. I may also get a chance to post again, now and then. I don’t know, and that not-knowing is absolutely wonderful. I wish I could put a bow on it and send it to you.

 

Thanks for coming to the Lodge, and making it a better place.