Ithaca Is The Journey

          As he was nearing his end, Nikos Kazantzakis wished to give an account of his life’s journey to his mythical grandfather, Greco, and did so in Report to Greco.  He recounted his passionate embrace of Christ, then of Buddha, then again of Lenin, assuming each would be his final destination.  Not surprisingly for a Greek, he put his journey in terms of Odysseus searching far and wide after the Trojan War for his home island of Ithaca.  Kazantzakis saw himself as a modern-day Odysseus searching for the final truth-haven of Ithaca but becoming increasingly frustrated to keep thinking he had found home in a final Truth only to find himself compelled from within to keep journeying on.

            It was then that he came to his great mystic insight: rather than being the haven at the end of the journey, Ithaca was the journey.  This insight electrified me back in the early 70s when I first read Report to Greco, not only somehow validating my own journey (which at the time was leaving Catholicism behind for who knew what) but also confirming my own deep intuition that it wasn’t about finding the fullness at the end but dis-covering the fullness all along.

            I hope the pages that follow will serve to invite the reader to ponder more deeply her or his own spirit’s odyssey, which, even as it unfolds, holds the fullness.  My own odyssey begins with “Catholic Grounding.”  Written close to two decades after I had moved beyond Catholicism, the poems here hopefully will be seen to contain appreciation as well as critique.

            My embrace of Catholicism was so total that I launched after high school into the waters of religious life in which I sailed vigorously a full decade.  “Jesuit Years” hopefully catches something of the significance of that pivotal period in my life when my mind awoke and my spirit caught fire.

            In contrast to the total life upheaval in 1969 surrounding my decision to leave the Jesuits, my decision three and a half years later to leave organized religion was the gentle fruition of a long ripening, culminating in a sudden crystallization on the eve of my return from a long outer-inner trip abroad.  The poems in “Declaration of Independence” attempt to recapture both the drama and the import of that crossing of a great divide.

            Merton, Krishnamurti, Watts, Hesse, Jung—seeds sown by these spirit-giants fell on fertile soil both before and after my departure from Catholicism, opening me up to the wisdom of the East.  So great was the allure of Tao growing the world from within versus God making it from without that I termed this stage of my journey “From God to Tao.”  May the poems in this chapter and the church talk in the next give at least a flavor of a different perspective than we’re used to in the West.

            Beginning in the 70s and intensifying in the 80s I gravitated irresistibly to the Earth, thanks to progressive exposure to Native American spirituality—solid confirmation indeed of an Eastern insight that divinity was immanent and nurturing.  The scientific “Gaia hypothesis,” that our planet is a living growing being, was anticipated by millennia.  May the poems in “Down to Earth” be an invitation to see how a rejected stone may yet become the cornerstone.

            A certain ambivalence had entered my relationship with Jesus after parting ways from the religion named after him.  The poems in the next chapter make clear that once I worked through this ambivalence, the relationship only deepened.  May spirit-journeyers of any or no religion discover, after separating wheat from chaff, the bracing tonic and profound comfort of having Jesus for companion.

            Poems in “Christ Re-Visioned” touch upon yet another gravitational pull on me, that of a creation-centered spirituality (not to be confused with anti-evolution creationism) sp