A Soulful Journey

  "There is an art to wandering.  If I have a destination, a plan -an objective - I've lost the ability find serendipity.  I've become too focused, too single-minded.  I am on a quest, not a ramble.  I search for the Holy Grail of particularity and miss the chalice freely offered, filled and overflowing."  - from On Becoming Lost: A Naturalist's Search for Meaning.

“That is the problem of Dante’s Divine Comedy too.  The crisis comes in the “middle of the way of our life,” when the body is beginning to fade, and another whole constellation of themes comes breaking into your dream world.  Dante says that, in the middle year of his life, he was lost in a dangerous wood.  And he was threatened there by three animals, symbolizing pride, desire and fear.  Then Virgil, the personification of poetic insight, appeared and conducted him through the labyrinth of hell, which is the place of those fixed to their desires and fears, who can’t pass through to eternity.” – Joseph Campbell If you hold onto the past you cannot access the  possibilities  of the future.   Be open. That is the  gateway  to heaven while the  other  is the  pathway  to hell.

The Kelmer Maggid came to a city where a modern Talmud Torah had been erected.  The leaders wanted the new school to receive a certain amount of the charity money that belonged to the old school.  A heated argument arose and the Kelmer Maggid was asked to give his opinion.  So he rose and addressed the people in his own inimitable way: “My good friends, I want to tell you a story.  A man arrived at the gates of paradise dressed in modern clothes, with a trimmed beard in the fashion of a Frenchman.  He wanted to enter.  Father Abraham, who stands near the entrance, approached him and asked, ‘Who are you? ‘I am the Vilner Maggid,’ the man explained. Abraham stared the newcomer’s attire and repeated, ‘You are the Vilner Maggid?’  Tell me, in which synagogue did you preach?’ After a few similar questions that man broke down and confessed.  ‘The truth is that I am a former actor of a Vilna theatre....

Life is no straight and easy corridor along which we travel free and unhampered. But always, if we have faith, God will open a door for us, not perhaps one that we ourselves would ever have thought of, but one that will ultimately prove good for us.   -A.J. Cronin