John G Evans - Mystical Explorer, Award - winning Writer, Poet, & Essayist
 
 
 

I embrace the imperative to work in the desert solely for the purpose of discovering my true self/Self. I shall benefit exploring further into the exploration of the spirit life within two separate entities i.e., the indigenous spiritual lore from an exterior desert landscape as well as the interior desert landscape transformation of the human soul. Regarding my future as a writer, I write from the soul. I dig deeply excavating emotion from raw and hungry places that require holistic healing and love. I am dedicated to living life in purity and perfect union with the Great Father of all Creation.

 

I found my deep map of place, far from my homeland within the interior life. New dimensions and new realities. Life had transformed to the deeper reality where the spiritual life is an inherent beauty all her own. I became enthralled as did all indigenous tribal communities for this new vision and sacred quest, hence, discovering worldly vision can create within us savagery, but through coming to know our failures and fears,  overcoming the flesh through acceptance and confession, and new life springs forth along with a new intuitive balance. When the human emotive senses align with a grander purpose transformation does occur.

 

Past educational values rich with the flavor of a Religious Studies program, and an encounter gave way to a wonderful academic desire to continue my hopes studying in a Comparative Mystical Literature program including Indigenous, Christian, Sufi, and Jewish mystics who also sought out the beauty of the desert way. Whatever the conclusion one will walk away from the southwestern desert a new spiritual sentient being. The consecration of earth and sky shall penetrate the human spirit creating from within the enigmatic mystery to this sacred earth. The Creator shall embellish the soul as a mirror where the naked eye and inner ear shall see and shall hear the chanting from the perspective of the native peoples.

 

During this period my bodily senses will remain silent. Throughout my life I have witnessed many occasions infuse peace, awe, fear, and contemplation that I can call divine, sacred, or holy. These experiences are like the delicate petals of a rose opening to her source of light, so too, is it with the soul and its Creator. The desert peoples have recognized this theme since the ancients. I wish to integrate with these good people and the desert land whose spiritual prowess dominates the heart and soul. A simple "yes" to a Higher Power remains effective in a communicative walk upon this ladder of love with an imbued illumination that will enamor the soul. A Oneness in the Omnipresent Divine can be with much preparation, the ladder to an ecstatic bliss of holiness, and perfect sanctity in harmonious balance of the self/Self union.

I sense the truth that a world of diversity includes understanding that patriarchal culture does nothing to contribute to the safety or sacredness of the womb of motherhood. The patriarchal circle often visualizes an egotistical vision for the womb on its own terms, not all, but I see no solitary male working to inhibit a peaceful solution for the sanctity the womb holds apart from the religious.

 

There is great power and love in the womb of motherhood. An unknown power to most males. However, the womb of maternal love is sacred and holy to a spiritually attuned woman, a sacred secret understood by most of the maternal force for unknown limits of  what a holy love entails.  

 

As a male writer I cannot fruitfully comprehend validity with an understanding of the inherent and God-given right blessing that women are the keepers of the secrets of saintly motherhood. Women simply know. I seek only answers through my query to recognize, appreciate, and value an identity I can comprehend even on the most diminutive scale. For this truth I would be ever so grateful. I feel great salvation through this maternal keeper of an unfathomable love as a flower springs up from the soil, so too is it with the sacredness and valued growth within the capacity to know more than I do of the womb of life.

 

I shared an epiphanically holy moment with my first love and first wife. This moment realistically held me in a moment of dazed love, and a holy moment upon sharing sacred time with her through espousal love. This was pure gift from God. I recognized through a dream state the moment to be holy. A purely, divine, spiritual ecstasy I knew did not even exist. I surrendered to her love and God's love. Plain and simple. I knew through a tender, beautiful kiss of reconciliation receiving this gift was from God. A place of spiritual dimensions. I give thanks to God often for this shared surrender. Beautiful.

This is as close to understanding I may come through approaching this empty vessel from her womb to bearing wonderful fruit in the form of our daughter. I have been converted to feminism as well as femininity. I desire only to protect them both but realize this to be impossible for God protects his own.

 

In summation, I conclude by celebrating life from a holistic view of sacred and holy love originating from the Creator of us all.

"Left heel first … in unison," barked the Drill Instructor in charge, "you f***Ing bullet stopping pigs! I said left heel first!"

 

 but we couldn't keep the discredited pace, so we were yelled to form our formation again and again and again!

 

"Get a**h*** to belly-button you maggot s**th***s,"

 

 a hurried step was all we could bear.

 

"Hmph! civilians! What do they know of military life? You filthy scum bums, move it, move it, m.o.o.o.o.v.e!!"

 

"Marine Corps boot camp is a cross between a professional football training camp and prison" the front-page story of my local newspaper wrote, just a few weeks before I left for Parris Island in 1971.

 

Fear began to strike my core!

 

I had no idea what I was about to embark on, or what was to become of me, hell, it even made me sick to my stomach upon departing from the bus and onto the "yellow footprints," once upon the island.

 

I read of a S/Sgt. McKeon marching his platoon of recruits into the swamps drowning all, upon a drunken rampage, in (1956).

 

Damn! God help us all as the paced quickened, and there were now three Drill Instructors, and this was our first day.

 

And we had been holed up in receiving barracks for six days with no showers and no change of clothing before we were all picked up by a platoon staffed by three, very angry D.I.'s.

 

And then, it was time to shower for the first day in our newly built squad-bay head.

 

Get ready for this … and time on deck was 0830.

This European Golden Finch, this born bird of the black early dawn with hymnal ears,

Inflective tones and earthly moans are never a monotonality's song,

I've never to hear this tearful joy weeping drip and jeweled ballad's chaunting chant,

          Eden's lot of floral mint, sipping twice of a Chai of tea ferment,

Lends this sojourn's blend of sky and moral me, my heart hence born of flesh and bone you see,

          Twilight blood runs through this golden gate of a staircase flight,

Hindered only by this earthly attire revives a freshly human's auditory light.

          And breathe new life into this creature's soul, minimizes pain once earthly scorned.

The earthly ruminated labored pain grips this truth not quite so vain,

          This odyssey that spans the tones of man in verbal delight,

Carries forth her truth for a silenced night … and a ballad's right … to sing her song with my envoi's esoteric sight,

And Tolstoy was just an author's diplomat who knew how to write.

As a writer and poet myself, yet, foremost a reader of great poets and writers as Edgar Allan Poe, and his "The Raven" for his ceaseless illusory reality and darkness, suffering, perhaps delusional thoughts performed to create a great poetry elitist among even Poe's critics, I certainly identify with, not as a classicist, but as a man whose suffering himself forced me to live a life of death and darkness, tribulated endeavors, and even to a point of perverse notions from a past of personal attacks upon my character and honor through depraved acts destroying my childhood and youth where ideation (SI), was a close friend of mine.

 

Another great literary artist Ralph Waldo Emerson's vision of life as "transcendentalist" embraced the intuitive nature of humanity, rendering truth in a world or mindset well out of reach of a humanity gone awry with its own stubborn egos had discovered the collective and all-inclusive wager that the human intellect alone could not solve even their own uncertainties or fears and apprehensions.

 

Throughout my life as an accomplished, published writer and poet, I have been fortunate enough to witness social and behavioral adjustments to my manner of thinking that often leave me speechless as to where and how do these words flow to the beat of "a different drummer of the supernatural or divine, perhaps?" For me, this is a mystery, though I embrace my own theoretical hypothesis.

Darwish writes from a place of truth and darkness. Although he bears witness to a place of global darkness he still writes his gift of word embracing his Palestinian birth-right. Even Jesus Christ was a Palestinian Jew. If Israel accepted Christ as Savior and not simply as being dead, truly there would be conversion by Israel to celebrate God's unending love. Poetry dwells best upon a dangerous path, "had I known the ending from the start, I would have had no work left in language," writes Darwish in The Butterfly's Burden.

 

I poeticize this truth from the flash suppressor's rage. The flask of golden vermouth turns me to the next page. I cognize this coldness settling in between my cervical spine, and the TNT-filled dirt bunkers with my intuitive feel that bleeds onto this earthly Rhine ... and … the gutted spent cartridge I learned death upon death is pure revolt … no matter the side … and I who know of this radical alter, a world at odds from pride …

embraces a global ideation …

this muse of contemplation …

this inner stirring for reflection …

the ponderings of meditation …

where I grip peace, as well, I muse this …

to be …

darkly ironic and finely emphatic.

First round of a white, hot, phosphorous grenade and the target was hit, but now, lasers run the show, not during the Nam, though, but in two-man teams with the F-16 fighter jet willing to bet the sniper type of kill, and then up the old grind willing to unwind in some swanky R&R bar along main-street, Jacksonville N.C., poetically jazzy in Birdland where waitresses dressed as birds end the peak of climax for a night spent in great heights along the dark roads of a fool;

 

the smoky wine breathes the dingy air, a classy swish, and upscale dish, high class chic, and a smart-ass click from the fields of war tears up all the defeats that embrace a mental disturbance, the kind that lend the brain of man to fry upon the bed of volts, yes, shock treatments that execute the child of combat chores, Marines back from Nam, only to embrace the cold, cold streets of their city homes of discarded soup bones and winter's hone like Baudelaire's poems.

 

This battle then that, never took part in  Operation Apache Snow (1969), though speak of days of Operation Exotic Dancer's thrill (1972), where my naval bud lost his hands, speechless, and stared into his nightmare's chill.

 

Drawn into Poe like an artist pro, I speak of campaigns and the loss of a nation's soul, where the best poems are born by trauma, blood, and bone, I write onward with words as stone, tripping like a brother's sound, and fist pump beat, abandons the heat, Lejeune so neat, I rest my case upon a foxhole bunker and spent cartridge found in bits and pieces through explosive sounds, lending my ear to the concussive downs, I speak, "depression bound," to old SA town never to speak the truth till 50+ years down.

To poeticize this truth from his flash suppressor's rage,

My flask of golden vermouth turns me to another page.

I cognize this coldness settling in upon my cervical spine,

the TNT-filled dirt bunkers with my intuitive age, and style

that bleeds … onto this earthly Rhine ...

and the gutted spent cartridge's aim,

was death upon death as pure revolt …

no matter what the claim …

and I who know of this radical alter,

a world at odds from class …

embrace a global ideation …

this muse of contemplation's act …

this inner stirring for reflection …

the ponderings of a meditation …

where I grip peace, as well, I muse …

to serve well can be …

darkly ironic with a distinctive batch of hon-or …

emphatic.  

Throughout my life I've not considered myself activist or passivist, i.e., I never considered myself a warrior as a former US Marine, though incredibly proud to serve within this capacity, and I was very good at this type of warrior. Quite clearly I am a warrior for truth. Truth for some can be overbearing, but it can be liberating under the umbrella of a diverse and inclusive moral character. The Golden Rule shall be my barometer, and the courage to speak the truth (especially within a public forum), may be a key takeaway to live my life with dignity. Dignity, however, often eludes me as survivor of sexual assault(s). I so often feel I do not have the ethical or moral courage to face this massive demon. But I must rise above the slaughterhouse of predatorial empowerment. You see, often I feel I have no right to speak out against what so many people cannot come to believe as truth. In other words, if these folks don't believe I either press onward or I have failed. His truth goes marching on. I must proceed onward for truth to prevail, and this requires large doses of courage.

 

Scripture may denote courage essential as David embraced along with wisdom to fight the enemies of God. He was a warrior. But his prevailing love for God and truth empowered David to win battle upon battle, a wonderful thing to remember. God does not gift one favor of the divine Throne of Justice & Mercy until holy acts of courage empower the believer in the faith of trusting God in all things. This is a key takeaway.

 

In recollection I recall a night where I corrected a Drill Instructor after I graduated boot camp. I had to. A recruit was demonstrably ostracized because of his virtuous value treating women with respect and dignity. I moved in swiftly with the truth of honor and valor to guide me and defeated the DI just as deplorably as he insulted the recruit. I rendered the DI no mercy as he demonstrated no mercy for the recruit. And this took place in front of the recruit's entire platoon of approximately 60 recruits, and a Marine buddy of mine who witnessed the entire barrage. Needless to say, the DI surrendered his authority to a truth war he could not win. Sliding back into the darkness of the squad-bay under the alleged authority he thought he had while under the cover of the brim of his DI cover. He was defeated, momentarily. And, the DI was five paygrades ahead of me. I explained to the recruit and the DI I would be back to further investigate the character of the DI and the emotional and mental stability of the recruit. I explained furthermore to the recruit he was to obey the DI's commands but to remember the recruits inexorable honor he obviously knew he embraced.

 

Honor can be within the military environment imperceptibly perceived. A combat Marine may be identified as a man of honor when he has killed fifty enemy combatants, and a Marine who stands his moral high ground not to kill innocent civilians even by order of the commanding officer is to be shunned. So honor is a tricky word to navigate through definitively within our military industrial complex. The behavior of the DI was an assault on the moral and ethical integrity of this young recruit proving his guilt to destroy not simply ego, but in many cases such as the one I describe, his honorable righteousness for telling the truth. I mean, my God, what manner do we identify with? Perversion or a real man's honor? In my personal estimation, the recruit, though sobbing throughout the entire discussion, was aspiring to be honorable in a much different way. In what ways do we attribute ourselves to hide such behavior? Why, that's not a real man at all. Period.

One must become an accomplished seeker | explorer and first indulge life with spiritual equity to comprehend by faith and reason for a comparative analysis review and the three separate entities for a numinous theology. Why must I include numinous theology for this work regarding Harriet Ann Jacobs? Numinous theology draws a soulful, intuitive, integrity interpreting human beings at their best, or worst as the case may be, pronouncing character for each human being. One must excavate raw and emotional balance to their life to feel the full measure of impact a numinous life shall render. Does this mean visions or locutions will be seen or heard? More likely no, but the God-given possibility is present. Harriet Ann Jacobs had visions of kindness within her heart for those expressing kindness to her. And this trait can manifest goodness for anyone's life. Gratitude falls closely behind as the younger sister or brother of kindness. It is a charitable act of love, and love begets mystery. Mystery begets a furtive, enigmatic, secret found within the heart's Omega Point between the individual and God, thus joined with the intimacy, participation, and cooperation of heart and soul with Creator. A numinous experience is holy. And by Harriet Ann Jacobs measure the quickest way to communicate with God was through a holy heart. Clearly, I understand and value the feminist and the abolitionist movement before, during, and after the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. I realize Harriet Ann Jacobs did as well. The trueness for the explorational experiential component within her heart filtered the good and bad as between Jesus and the devil. The difference between God and a darkened and fallen angel (even if he was a Prince of Angels), did not within the soulful intuitive nature of this author compare whatsoever. But this is not a story of religious studies or theology. It is the story of a young six-year-old slave child named Harriet Ann Jacobs; a story that shall live on within my consciousness, forever. And gratefully so. Harriet taught me in one reading what has taken a lifetime to validate, all men and women are created and fashioned by an equality law of nature. So, where, and how did Jacobs learn love? What gave her a heart-full of hope? How was she able to interpret goodness and wickedness from such an early age? What exactly made Harriet Ann Jacobs tick … even as a six-year-old child slave?

A young boy at just 17 enters a man's world to combat foreign and domestic enemies of the US
Constitution and Democracy. Times were bad, bad at home in 1971, so I volunteered with the USMC.
Vietnam was reaching a new height since the TET Offensive. Carpet bombing from B-52 strategic aircraft
was a round the clock offensive on the North Vietnamese region. Problems stateside were boiling over,
and there was a young Marine (myself) exposed vehemently to the morally corrupt mid-level NonCommissioned Officer who exploited me through sexual assault while I dozed aspiring to get some shuteye. This incident occurred in April of 1972, and I battled my own insurrection of my moral compass for
40 years. Suicide became my final answer. But … I couldn't do it.

I had to live the fact a man raped me through this penetrative occurrence before I was to ever know the
love of a good woman. Statutory rape and rape can be a common occurrence in the military. I was one of
its POWs with a regard to assault by a superior ranking individual.

20 – 30 US Veterans per day lose their lives to suicide. I was lucky I didn't have the courage to pull the
trigger as I placed a loaded firearm to my head. Or was I? I recall the day my 20 year career military
father explained to me two of his buddies blew their brains out after coming home from Nam. So, for
myself, I chose to suffer internally for 40 years or better, and by myself. Lost jobs, relationships,
homelessness, no self-esteem left, no courage to face life on my own terms, nothing, except living under
the duress of mental torture. I lived alone for 35 years. No one to comfort me or share in love and
holiness with me. Until I met a pleasant, intelligent homeless lady, my second wife. Then I began to heal
and tell my story of an unjust war, homelessness, torture, permanent nerve damage, and This story lives
on after 14 years of marriage.

The image entitled 20 Veterans per Day speaks volumes of the mind-twisting of a sexual assault and an
attempt on my life and how Military Sexual Trauma, PTSD, and a cervical spinal cord injury create within
me an ideation so fierce my life could be taken any day, now. When you see a homeless veteran on the
streets or smelling badly while grabbing some food for a change, don't thank him or her for their service,
listen to their story. If you are struggling call 988 then Press 1.

Living in the Shadows:

Life After MST

 

For some life hangs in the balance. Living in the shadows is never easy. Life after Military Sexual Trauma is not easy, either. But some of us reach that ideated pinnacle where suicide and attempts become an everyday experience. Our lives (especially as a fresh seventeen-year-old), aspiring to serve democracy and the US Constitution, become blind with fear, retaliation, self-shame, guilt, doubt, brokenness, peer pressure, and excessive worry. We develop our cognitive thinking with a paralyzed personality. And, as definitory explanations are concerned, we think regarding the gravity and urgency of our experience as a "forceful violation of the sexual intimacy of another person," (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd Edition 566). Life can, and oftentimes will be lived in darkness that may be envisioned by the victim (survivor), as before an elusive firing squad. A permanent dark scenario of suicide as a final answer imminent. This must not be congested as a final solution to a serious problem. We must be able to claim victory (or progress), over military judicatory preferences.

 

Loneliness sets into a panic as fear takes control. Loneliness has a way, though, to reach even the hardest of hearing. I have heard God call me by name, and still the suffering and pain continue. But in the suffering upon many years of a self-indulgent lifestyle brought about by sexual misconduct (especially as a child), MST adds fuel to the already burning fire. I do not listen to some so-called authorities because I believe in experiences not empirical data. Experience is reality. Empirical data eliminates experience where it becomes indulgent upon numbers.

 

 

 

My experience lay claim to a decade's long ordeal of suffering upon serving a short tenure with the USMC (November 1971-June 1972). But the facts do not stop with rape. We continue into the scenario of combat zones, fire-fights, explosives, and M-60 spent cartridges with their gutted shells heading for their unsuspecting targets during ICT (Infantry Combat Training), with a suspected concussion hit in the cervical spinal cord I lay flat on my back. I was hit! Derelict voices sifted through a PA system commanding me to "keep moving". Blood snaking down my neck mixed  with dirt and sweat and barely the strength to push me beyond the boundaries of M-60 rounds jetting past my nose under this barbed-wire steel cage where I continued to crawl. Just fifty yards to go and my thoughts are "will I survive? Don't move, just crawl."

 

After the ordeal, a fellow Marine explains to me that an accident occurred on the field that day in April 1972. He told me I now believe because he observed I was in a daze. I was stunned and confused. The incident witnessed by the entire company grappling with the notion "how could this have occurred in a training exercise?" The Marine who befriended me was among two others who were buddies of mine. He informed me a night crew was out cleaning the contaminated field. But the concussive blast shielded the truth behind the repressed memory already taking shape prominent in this underdeveloped mind who did as ordered. My friends as witnesses advised me to report to Battalion. But the incident was forced back into my thought process.  Later, I discovered one of my buddies had reported to Battalion. And, after the incident, and me without the opportunity to be seen by a medical officer, I remained stunned with just two band-aids on my neck. What a disgrace for those in charge.

 

After training, I was sent to a grunt unit at Camp Lejeune, N.C. where nothing made sense to me. I was living a surrealistic life. I had forgotten my training and discovered inside this grunt outfit men who out-ranked me, with man-sized statures, and experience as US Combat Marines. This frightened me to the point of walking around as a dead man. I did not even have the sense to come to attention when an officer entered the room. I was oblivious to the chain-of-command. And, as memory serves me presently, fearful of my life. Simply put, I was running scared.

 

This became the point of what I prefer to reiterate as the field of valor. As it were, I was brave enough to complete the training as well as the infiltration course with honor, and no complaining. I felt my work was accomplished in a highly professional manner. My assailant was running scared, too. He feared the truth I would report him for the subsequent sexual assault. This may have been grounds for him to receive a Bad Conduct Discharge or worse, brig time if I would have pursued to file charges. But what does a seventeen-year-old kid know anyway about judicatory privileges to a system allegedly bulging at the seams with corruption? I wish I would have known then what I know now. I served honorably. He did not. And the squad-bay was reminiscent of others who were sexually assaulted by this middle-ranking NCO; not withstanding attempted murder charges through friendly fire against me. This has become my final consensus.

 

Fast-forward to life after the Corps. What type of young person was I going to become? With a disheveled manner of thinking, dazed, confused, and worrisome over my future, I stepped off the bus in Victoria, Texas, waiting for a transfer to San Antonio. Will I be welcomed home? Can I find help? Will I survive? Do I wish to survive? Suicide was always a risk, and an option. I was and am an innocent man. There were no premeditated motives on my behalf. I was there to serve the community. But, not as a puppet for a disturbed sexual predator who also tried to have me killed. However, I was the only one who carried this disturbing secret with me. Everyone else was trying to forget.

 

Upon arriving home, I discovered an extremely difficult truth; I was not welcome. Not by my parents, school, no job opportunities, no friends, absolutely nothing.  I, for all intense purposes was a young teen without any future, and without any hope. I had no money, no car, no home, no job, and, I had not even known the love of a good woman at this point. Penniless, all I had was the ultimate truth of what had transpired during active duty during the Vietnam War. I was even spat upon by a solo-protester coming home at the airport for my first leave. Another indignant welcome home.

 

I could only muster enough thought to write a small poem while sitting at the bus station back in Victoria:

 

"So, where is home? Home is where the dust cries in a foreign land, as we shall all come to know the bitterness of exile. And yet, where is this home? It is inside the mustard seed where only the dying can see. If, we are to poeticize these inkwells with an altruistic art, we must become the pen upon this page of forceful doubts. Only then, shall we come to light this legendary fire of hope."

 

As the hopes for an accomplished poet began to sink within my sullen eyes, all dreams began to fade to a mode of survival. My primary interests in school were writing/photography. I am just now receiving (or seeking out), the privilege of accomplishing just this, here now, in 2021.

 

My goals presently are to create a schematic of sorts for social change regarding our sexual natures and reeducate that we are gifts not meant to be seized as property, but to be given in lieu of John Paul II's vision as in Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body. The transformative changes after a vision as gift (West 204-205), are truly holy and life-altering. We envision ourselves in a whole new way. The transformative power of God and holiness create within us a deeper level of understanding our bodies, our way of thinking, and our vision of espousal love that is non-threatening and quite beautiful. One must know how to reach this delicate and intimate balance.

 

As West goes on to state:

 

"All the man can do is "receive femininity as gift" and only when the woman freely gives it," (West 204).

 

For me, this is a beautiful manner to envision women, as gift. This was the way I viewed women as a teenager. Growing up in the mid-sixties was not an easy thing to do but the fashion industry took precedent over our moral values with mini-skirts and untied blouses.

 

Confronting the heretical skeptic regarding MST and rape are my greatest challenge. Transforming myself to a believer as a Christian where trials turn to grace a true conversion. God is good, they say. And I believe this. Saint Augustine said that, "we may find one man made savage by love, and another gentle by iniquity." Plainly speaking, love drives us all mad. Iniquity brings us home. Augustine's statement is in direct alignment with the Catechism's definition of rape. If we are to stop the barrage of sexual misconduct today, we must in some manner, reinvent the wheel, per se. Attitudes must be traded in through the experience of being wrong. How can we identify being wrong? Ask yourself through your espousal love, is the conjugal love holy? Have you experienced a pure, divine, spiritual ecstasy leaving you in a daze of holy love? Is the depth of your love Godly? Are we engaged in misdirected love, or are we engaged cooperatively with God's own divine will? How are we able to comprehend this? Are we in a controversial denial of how we should love one another? How may we reeducate ourselves? If as I wrote in the previous compositional poetic phrase:

 

"we are to poeticize these inkwells with an altruistic art, we must become the pen upon this page of forceful doubts" in order to, "light this legendary fire of hope,"

 

then experience, as poets well know, are truths that must be revealed to discover a hope within ourselves that desperately seeks out a kind of divine romance with our spouses and with our Creator God. To transform a misdirected love in heart and soul, one must be honest with themselves, enough so that truth is inevitably a freedom that will, as Christ said, shall set us free!

 

I concur I have witnessed a truth many have faced. I wish to theologize new beginnings as an advocate for those inflicted with the pain and suffering from sexual assault and rape. For me, this remains an imperative.

 

This was a beginning to a love affair not just with truth but with transforming the wickedness within my own heart, a healthy desire to change, and a permanent transformation that not only heals, but puts me on the same kind of path as the early desert mothers and fathers of the early church. There exists so much wisdom here.

 

Fox states,

 

"Like alcoholism and drug addiction, nihilism is a disease of the soul…Any disease of the soul must be conquered by a turning of one's soul. This turning is done by one's own affirmation of one's worth-an affirmation fueled by the concern of others," (Fox 192).

 

Conclusively, we typically view evil in terms of a hardline assault on the flesh, and human-beings who are: human; and we make mistakes. My life was a balancing act trivialized by MST, but we can turn our trials of suffering into the graces of the Sacred. Remember Augustine's statement, "savage by love, gentle by iniquity?" Think about it. As well where Christopher West reminds us we are all a gift to one another, perhaps we should behave as such. If we become transformed by our thoughts as St. Paul recommends we can change the world to a world of holiness. And this is something I can get excited about.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited:

Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd Edition. Washington, DC, USA: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1994, 1997. Print.

 

Fox, Matthew. Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2016. Print.

 

West, Christopher. Theology of the Body Explained: A Commentary of John Paul II's Man and Woman He Created Them. Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2007. Print.

 
ISSUE NO  1|  October 14, 2022,  |  Volume III

1 John 5: 6 NKJV

 

"And it is the Spirit who bears witness because the Spirit is truth." NKJV

 

Last night I dreamt of death, yet the evening sufficed to live beyond my measure of hope to a promised land.

 

From the mystic within my concession has been written from celestial depths. I have discovered "I am the Samurai poet who draws up courage from the ink wells scribing time, where death is not darkness but shooting arrows drop by drop for a liquified line; fluid, yes, discerning of all said rhymes, or not, but a hunger strikes each hungered note making it mine."

 

I am for all measure the tiny mustard seed where only the dying can see." I AM: The Tiny Mustard Seed, John G Evans, p. 22,  6, April 2018, print. 

 

So, last night I saw.

 

I heard a woman's voice call me by name, "John." I heard not with the ears of my flesh but of soul. Perhaps I reached an interior celestial discernment. Mysteries were revealed but through my own disparity only simple glimpses could be seen. Today, I know the well must be filled. 

 

So, I begin to read and write of past experiences, a thing I know very well. 

 

"Home is where the dust cries in a foreign land, as we shall all come to know the bitterness of exile."

 

I learn, "if we are to poeticize these inkwells with an altruistic art, we must become the pen upon the page for forceful doubts. Only then we shall light this legendary candle of hope."

 

I believe, and know somehow, "it is the Spirit who bears witness because the spirit is truth."

 

So, I have learnt my life worthy to live. 

 

Through the years my heart embraces this consecration to this Spirit that is Truth. 

 

The story is simply a beginning and serves as a reference point to solidarity with God. 

 

I hope the ending is not only well-written but peaceful. 

 

Until the next issue, aurevoir.

 

John Gregory Evans