Back is the way forward

- GK Chesterton

So there my father was, he had heard that Alfred Delp name somewhere, probably from a reading my mother had read, and had run down to the basement chest to get the book. A red hard-cover, with an introduction by Thomas Merton, and I mean a stone-cold fucking introduction. The whole book was stone-cold. The Prison meditations of Father Delp? come on. Written from Nazi death row at Plotzenzee? There are books and then there are books, and then there are testimonies from death row - and the gravitas is just in a different sphere.

Ole Berncat couldn’t read the book… his brain was too battered by that point, but my mother told me he walked around with it for an hour, for he knew, deep down, what a great book it was, what a profound testimony. My mother told me the story when I stopped by later…. and gave the book to me. I read it a while back, and it made the journey North with us, where it remains one of my go to spiritual books that I seek out in times of confusion - which is most of the time, alas it’s been a tough road trying to figure this life out.

For that is what I have attempted to do for a long time now, understand my world… that painful emergence from the order of my father’s household, to the chaos of what felt like to me a society spinning further and further into disarray. You see my father never really fit into this culture very well - he fit in with his family and friends beautifully, but with the culture… nope. There a quite a few things I could point out about the man - that went against the grain of his culture, but I suppose the fundamental one was that he was of man of God in a culture that had whole heartedly embraced gratification of the individual - on physical as well as emotional levels - as the supreme good. Self-restraint was passe.

But as a child, The goodness that emerged from my father’s character, the stability, the love, the structure in the house…. all these things were undeniable. And so a great battle arose in my soul, between my father and my culture - torn by respect for his ways, yet sympathetic to the culture’s urge to gratify… for it feels good to gratify… especially in the moment. Gratified with alcohol and gratified with drugs and gratified with sex, but at the end of the day, if you engage in gratification and once in a while just tough things out and engage in doing your duty - doing your duty feels better in the end. Pleasures are only skin deep while truly taking responsibility goes deep to the bone.

And so torn yes torn, not just by the battle of gratification versus responsibility, but the intellectual struggle to understand God in a post-modern world where the childish faith of belief without investigation sometimes could seem to be on the level of the tooth-fairy and santa claus - wishful thinking….

Torn also by an inability to understand the world according to human thinking. The piece I wrote about the young men shooting up the kids after football practice lodged in my mind - I kinda blamed society for their actions, but I knew deep down that it was deeper than that - that these boys too were responsible for their own action, that picking up that gun to murder was done according to their own free will. I looked at all the wrong turns in my life, I looked at the pain caused by messed up behavior all around me, I looked at my father who had built such a solid existence based on right behavior… and had to to admit, had to accept the disastrous consequences of sin.

And later that day, I picked up the Delp book. It resonates on me not because it is a religious book, but because it honestly states how woefully out of touch the church has become with the plight of man. He wrote a book from death row amidst the bombed out rubbled of war, honestly seeking to accept the overwhelming forces that mankind has to deal with these days, yet honestly crying from his deepest being, a being martyred for the faith, that if Man is to heal… he must go back to God.

And there it was, after 25 years and seven kids and five moves and 2 painful winters of mortification, the scales finally, as they say, fell from my eyes.

Ohlson Mountain, October 2022