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Has the world lost it's way or have I ?
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Mar 4, 2007 8:00 am
1157 Views
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I Remember my early attempts at testing my intellectual limits. I'm pretty sure I was the first kid in my JR. High School to read "Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck. At first, I thought the former preacher, Jim Casey, was there for comic relief like a court jester. He was unlike any character I had ever come across.And then, like an ancient Druid traveler having the laylines reveled to him, guiding him home,I almost supernaturally had revealed to me the wisdom of his Epistles. It was time to flex my intellectual muscles. People would see me in a new light.
That Sunday at Mass, with the smug, self- assuredness that only a budding JR. High intellectual can possess,I blessed myself by saying "In the name of the Father and of the Son and the Human Spirit, O'MAN." THWACK! I thought the back of my head exploded. Maybe my great, expanding brain had burst like a star going nova.In a milli-second I had the horrifying, embarrassing realization that I had been cuffed in church by my father.It sounded like a hymnal being dropped flat on the floor. People across the aisle turned to look. But the people seated closest, my loved ones, had heard what I had SAID. "Och, the dirty blackguard."
In the many ensuing years, I have past through a variety of of different schools of thought. I may have felt one sector of an ideology may have appealed to me for a certain reason or another segment was going a direction I was going, but it soon seemed as though I wasn't going that way anymore.
I've been giving "Grapes of Wrath" another going over lately. Aside from the political overtures of Steinbeck's socio-communistic apostatizing,the book with it's message of the strength of the human spirit and letting men run their own affairs combined with Steinbeck's awesome, yet poignant descriptive powers, still strikes a strong cord with me. Have I pasted through various ideologies or have they pasted through me? Is really me that has changed? I seem to have found myself sitting alone in these years while the world has cartwheeled away from me. Or maybe"I'm sittin' down here in the campfire light with the ghost of Tom Joad"* *Bruce Springsteen.
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