Strait Passage: The Journey

I recently came across, for the first time to really pay attention to them at least, the passages of Matthew 7: 13 and 14 and was excited by what I read there:

13 Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:

14 Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

This is from the KJV - Note the spelling of Strait. It is not Straight. Strait is a correct translation from the Latin Vulgate, “angustam porta”, literally “narrow passage”.
The dictionary definition for Strait is thus:

1. A narrow channel joining two larger bodies of water. Often used in the plural with a singular verb.
2. A position of difficulty, perplexity, distress, or need. Often used in the plural: in desperate straits.

These two definitions, together, make up the whole of Strait in this context.
I have spoken of straits before, referencing to the John Donne poem “Hymn to God, my God, in my Sickness”, and the relationships in that poem to the journey of the wanderer. What I said about it was this: “In ‘Hymn...’ Donne makes reference to several Straits (That of Magellan, Anyan, and Gibraltar). A strait represents a tight place of passage, between to large bodies of water, literally, or figuratively we can safely say it is a reference to making the journey, from one place unto another. Perhaps as Brendan [St. Brendan] journeyed from this world to another and back again.”
I am a believer in journey, in living the life of a seeker in all things. Although I consider myself spiritual, being a seeker is more than any sort of faith – even an atheist has a philosophy, and everyone has a passion. It is through our world-view that we establish the understanding of the natural order, how the world works, that is the foundation for our mores and ethics, our human relationships and even our decision-making philosophies. It is my belief that it is not just the enhanced life, but it is the true life that is the life of the wanderer. The true student, the faithful disciple, is the wanderer.
I endeavor to be a wanderer. I endeavor to question, to seek, to my satisfaction. An answer is the foundation of a question, and the question is ever faithful to the truth.

“Strait is the gate, and narrow the way, which leadeth unto life” – The strait and narrow, the hard road, is the path to life. The hard road is the path of the wanderer.
Not the Straight and Narrow as is so commonly said – What means this, straight and narrow? It says “Follow this line” (the road as defined by another), but this is a perversion of the truth: A command to unquestioningly, undeviatingly, unknowingly walk a prescribed path.
The hard road, the difficult road, is the honest road. To be honest, we must be questioned, or tested to use another word.
To be tested we must not take the beaten path, the easy path (the wide gate and broad way), but the hard road. To be questioning, to be questioned (for, are not most questions in this realm essentially of ourselves, or relating to ourselves, making us both the questioning, and the questioned?), is the way of the wanderer.

The Journey - Making it Real

This: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051230/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_american_teen, is one of the more fantastic things I have read in quite some time.
Just because these things tend to go down, I'm going to copy the article here, its alittle long but bear with me, por favor comrades.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A 16-year-old from Florida who traveled to one of the world's most dangerous places without telling his parents left Baghdad on Friday to begin his journey home, the U.S. Embassy said, drawing to a close an adventure that could have cost him his life.

The mother of Farris Hassan, the prep school junior whom U.S. officials took custody of in Baghdad this week, said she was "grateful" he was headed back. Shatha Atiya said she already knew what her first words would be to her son.

"'Thank God you're alive,' then I'll collapse for a few hours and then sit down and have a long discussion about his consequences," she said in Fort Lauderdale.

Consul General Richard B. Hermann said Friday that Hassan "safely departed Baghdad." He reiterated warnings by the State Department and embassy against traveling to Iraq. Forty American citizens have been kidnapped since the war started in March 2003, of whom 10 have been killed, a U.S. official said. About 15 remain missing.

"This young American is now on his way back home to his family in the United States," Hermann said.

Hassan spoke to The Associated Press early Friday, several hours before the embassy announcement, and he was still under the impression that he would be following his personal travel itinerary, which had him leaving the country by himself on Sunday.

He hadn't even been aware that the story of his perilous travels was published around the world — or that his mother was being interviewed on television.

"I don't have any Internet access here in the Green Zone, so I have no idea what's going on," he said.

A military officer accompanying him, who did not identify himself, said it was his task to get Hassan "safe and sound to the United States."

The embassy refused to release any further details about his travel, and it wasn't known when he would arrive home in Florida.

Hassan has three older siblings who are all enrolled at universities. A brother, 23-year-old Hayder Hassan, called the trip "absolutely mind-boggling."

"I just want him back," he said.

Farris Hassan, who attends Pine Crest School, an academy of about 700 students in Fort Lauderdale, left the United States on Dec. 11 and traveled to Kuwait, where he thought he could take a taxi into Baghdad and witness the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections.

A strong history student, Hassan had recently studied immersion journalism — a writer who lives the life of his subject — and wanted to understand better what Iraqis are living through.

"I thought I'd go the extra mile for that, or rather, a few thousand miles," he told AP in an interview earlier this week.

The teenager was able to secure an entry visa because both of his parents were born in Iraq, though they've been in the United States for more than three decades.

Skipping a week of school, he only told two of his school friends he planned to leave the country. He didn't tell his parents until he arrived in Kuwait.

"He is very idealistic. He has many convictions. He is very pro-democracy, very compassionate, always helping out others, he's very driven," she said. "Those are more characteristics of Farris than adventurous. This is the first adventure he's been on."

He took his U.S. passport along with $1,800 in cash. He said the money came from a sum of $10,000 his mother had given him after he gave her some stock tips that earned a 25 percent return.

From Kuwait, a taxi dropped him in the desert at the Iraq border, but he could not cross there because of tightened security ahead of the elections. He went to Beirut, Lebanon, to stay with family friends, and flew from there to Baghdad on Christmas Day.

After his second night in Baghdad, he contacted the AP and said he had come to do research and humanitarian work. The AP called the U.S. Embassy, which sent U.S. soldiers to pick him up.

State Department officials then notified his parents.

The mother, Atiya, said she has a 60-year-old brother in Iraq but that she had refused when her son recently pestered her for his number. She said she offered to take her son to Iraq later, when tensions eased.

"I thought that would be sufficient for him, but he took it upon himself to do this adventure. He has a lot of confidence, but I never thought he would be able to pull this together," she said.

Hassan does not speak Arabic and has no experience in war zones, but he wanted to find out what life was like there.

Atiya said her son is studious, works on the school newspaper and is on the debate team. He is a member of a Republican Party club at school and spends his time reading rather than socializing, his mother said.

When school officials learned of Hassan's trip, they threatened to expel him, but Atiya and Hassan's father, Redha Hassan, a physician, persuaded officials to allow him to remain, she said. It was not immediately clear why they wanted to expel him.

Julie Schiedegger, who teaches English at Pine Crest, said Friday that she learned Hassan was headed to Iraq about two weeks ago when she overheard some students talking about it.

"He is very bright, friendly, respectful, just a good kid," she said.

Michael Buckwald, a 17-year-old classmate, said Hassan immerses himself in subjects that he likes and was opinionated in class.

"He always struck me as a very intellectual person. He's very outspoken at the same time," Buckwald said.

This kid has stones.
Was it stupid? Absolutely.
Was it wrong? No.
Sometimes we have to step out... sometimes just out into the daylight, sometimes into a new place where the light shines in different color and the earth beneath our feet is strange and alien. It may be scary, it may be hard to explain, to justify to anyone else, and it may seem, from a "common" sense/logical perspective to be the wrong thing - but the voice inside wont let go.

As a wanna-be writer, I think this kid deserves high marks. If he continues on his journey, as a journalist (think about those words), his drive will take him a long way. He obvious doesnt have any problem going to dangerous places if he wants to see something. All I can say to him is keep after it, kid.

Bliss

"Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before."
Joseph Campbell

This is truth.
For every door that might close when you follow your bliss - More will open, and they will lead to your goals. The ones that closed, never would have.

The voice in your heart is the touch of the infinite.

Connections

My recent post has strong connections with three of my older posts as well. Just for the sake of completeness, I wanted to link them here:

Lost - Being observations on the state of searching, the spirit of the wanderer.

Hymn to God, My God, In My Sickness - Being a commentary on J. Robery Oppenheimer's spirituality at Trinity Site, and the particular work of John Donne used in the title. Important for the following post.

Wanderers - Being a further commentary on "being as passerby", the implications of a wanderer and connecting thoughts between the two previous posts, the quoted material there-in, and other spiritual and mythological works.

The Journey

This is from Col. John Boyd's book Creation and Destruction (which is, interestingly enough, a book on warfare - Its subtitle being "The Operational Level of War". All things intertwined and in harmony, in the natural order).

"Godel's Incompleteness Theorems, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, all taken together, show that we cannot determine the character or nature of a system within itself. Moreover attempts to do so lead to confusion and disorder - mental as well as physical. Point: We need an external environment, or outside world, to define ourselves and maintain organic integrity, otherwise we experience dissolution and disintegration - i.e. we come unglued.

Living systems are open systems; closed systems are nonliving systems. Point: If we don't communicate with the outside world - to gain information for knowledge and understanding as well as matter and energy for sustenance - we die out to become a nondiscerning and uninteresting part of that world."

Emphasis (bolding and italics) is mine.

To find the source (God) we must journey. To journey we must step forward into the unknown and experience it, in success and failure, in triumph and mistakes. To have the journey, we must walk new roads and see new things.
For some, for many, the road to God is well paved, heavily traveled and the journey has a group leader and very good roadmaps in every motel along the way.
But law, natural law (Gods law), is not evident from the teachings of other people to those who's spirits are of the wanderer. The wanderer must come to know God and the natural order, the harmony, of things through personal journey - not the guided tour. And that is about making decisions, making choices, and having control.
We are all part of the infinite, and the events that make up our lives happen according to the infinite, but the roads we choose to walk (perhaps are born to walk) help us to find the right events, the right places to be, to learn what we need to learn to complete this leg of the journey. None of those things are the same for everyone, but the voice in our hearts is our compass for the path.
Somehow, I think that voice in our hearts is not that different than the voice of the infinite.

I Feel Entropy

I'm Twenty today.
One of the benefits of having an interesting life and an excellent memory is that, at Twenty, I feel old. And young, at the same time. I can look back on my life, particularly the last ten years, with a great sense of accomplishment - and a great deal of experience, hard learned lessons and hard won wisdom. And with that in mind, I can look forward with a great sense of curiosity. It can only get more interesting.
At Twenty, I have never had a real job. I've worked for my family business (a cattle ranch), and been paid for various work on neighbors ranches, or similar services, but I have never had a formal "job". That said, I have successfully run my own business for the last five years.
I am a published writer and poet.

I grew up fast, as a kid. I've always been mature.
Some days I feel like I missed out on having childlike sense of wonder... others, I can spend twenty minutes watching a red-tailed hawk floating on a thermal without once moving his wings, and wish as hard as I can that I could feel what that was like.
Every day I am thankful for my experiences, even (maybe especially) the hardships. What does not kill you, makes you stronger. I am not dead yet... not for a long long time.
I have much journey left to complete... and I am looking forward to it with an intense desire and passion.