Revelations

Every boy knows there is something magical about trains, and sailing ships, and airplanes, at least if you pilot them solo, and horses.

It is the mystery of the journey. It is the same thing that drives us to travel instead of stay at home for the perfect vacation. The same thing that makes the life of the cowboy or the sailor so attractive, or makes urban romantics pine for a cabin in the countryside.

It is the well-recognized urge to “get away from it all.”

To travel is to be yanked out of the everyday context of the world; to be pulled out of our daily lives.

It is a dress rehearsal for death. And the fact that it is essentially pleasurable for us promises us something about death itself.

So said, then the archetype of all travel is the pilgrimage. The pilgrimage up a mountain, perhaps, for a mountain too pulls us up and away from the world, in a literal way.

Today I climbed to the tomb of St. John the Evangelist, St. John the Divine.

Hence this revelation.