A Pilgrim's Progress

Seeking to Seek comes with many distractions

I have always enjoyed The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. True, I never understood it but the fact that I finished it is a constant source of joy to me.

"What, you haven't read The Pilgrim's Progress?" I imagine me saying. "It's a classic."

"Wow, Philip is so deep," I imagine them replying. If they do read it they must think "Philip must be real smart to understand this." "He's so cool," I can see them fawning. If my life were up to my imagination, then well, wow, that's hard to imagine - but I'm sure it would be cool.

Having lost the sane, I give you my humble version of a pilgrim's progress.

* * * * * *

As I alighted to slumber in the midst of some lecture, I now knowest not of what it pertained, I had a dream. In this troubling dream there was a young man named Phil (pronounced Bob).

Now as my dream continued I saw Faithless Phil crying out for direction. Faithless Phil was seeking the Lord. Or at least he was seeking to seek the Lord - I could discern not which it were. Having set aside one day for this task he mounted his faithful blue steed, Honda, and began a journey to where the leaves are green.

He made the first leg of his trek without incident, save being robbed by the two highwaymen named Gate and Toll. When he arrived at the point where his faithful old Japanese bred mount could take him no further, he dismounted and secured Honda.

The next portion of Phil's journey was interrupted by the breathing and grunting of an aggravated professor. He did not much care for revelations being received by means of deep meditation. I tried to persuade him, that at least I was learning something - this didn't have the desired affect.

When I was able to rejoin Phil, I picked up on the dream exactly where I had left off - which is the first documented instance of this ever happening.

Phil's first companion on his journey to seek the Lord was Nick Gnat. Nick; however, met an untimely death in the city of Vanity Ears. As far as I could tell he offended the inner ear drum and the long arm of justice was swift and powerful as it squashed Nick against the town lobey.

Phil missed his dear companion, for what reason he did not know. However; he was strengthened by the sense of peace and quiet with which he was now surrounded.

Presently Faithless found himself lost. He first searched the logical places; the clearing, the rain gully, the lowlands, but he did not find the path to God. When he thought he had, the path that he chose emptied into the open pit of omniscience (so named because it is an open pit).

As he searched he became frantic. Finally in an epiphany he remembered the sage's advice and began to search for the last blue marker that he had seen before he had veered from the path. When he found a tree with a blue ring around its trunk, he breathed a sigh of relief. His eyes then searched the path ahead of him for another blue marker. He found it straight ahead of him, he then proceeded down the narrow path toward this marker.

He was to get lost a few times more before he reached the celestial sandstone knoll, but each time he did, he would return to the last marker and look for the next one.

At the next point in his journey, the path narrowed to the lowest point and the foliage became very dense. So dense in fact, that you could cut it with a knife (metaphorically speaking, of course. I don't want to misuse the words literal and metaphorical - that would make me look silly). Thorns tore his exposed legs. While he didn't like to wear pants on such a hot day, he realized that they would have provided protection from the petty thorns, sort of like having a thick skin.

He pressed on, for how much longer he did not know. What he did know was that he needed the Lord. What better place then in the wilderness where there would be no distractions, he thought. This, his thinking, is what drove him.

But it could only drive him so far. And when it stopped he wanted to stop. He was tired. The sun had rung out his body like a damp rag. The spiderwebs covered his sensitive skin in a ghostly embrace. He could not, nor would he entertain that the makers of the webs were also holding tight to his body.

He saw a clear piece of ground. Nothing spectacular but at least he could stop, seek and go home. True he had wanted a solid rock upon which to sit, a view of the lake from the high ground, and a clear area where he could be in communion with God. This sight had none of those but it was there. And what he had may be the best there was, he reasoned.

His reason lost, and he continued.

Once again he nearly lost his way in the dense underbrush and untrimmed trees. He regretted that he hadn't sought God earlier when everything was dead. The path of seeking the Lord is much cleaner and easier to get around in when everything is dead. "Life is messy" he thought aloud to himself. Of course, I overheard him.

Eventually he found the spot that he had had in mind. It wasn't exactly as he had thought it would be, but it was the spot. The celestial sandstone was there. So was the view of the lake of loneliness, and its location on the plateau of peace. He settled down to "seek the Lord" and that's when he noticed that he was not alone... literally.

Ricky the Tick and Tavi, his wife, and their family of arachnids (blood sucking parasites - metaphorically) were having a reunion, and Faithless was the locale. Phil had always been a believer in family values, which is why it took him a whole second to unsheathe his knife and scrape the family off of the leg that he valued more.

For the next few hours, it may have been longer (time is really hard to tell when one is dreaming) Phil sat there on the rock and sought God. He prayed some, and read the Bible some, but mostly he just sat there deep in thought.

He didn't find it to be the deep spiritual experience he had wanted. The card that certified him as "spiritual." The sign that he could post up on his dorm room door.

It was his fault, he thought. There were still too many distractions. He couldn't seek the Lord with all of these distractions. If it wasn't borders from the tick family, it was a leftover spider. If it wasn't the sun being too hot, it was the wind being too strong. "Life is not only messy, but it is never void of distraction," Phil wrote in his little notebook pad. "Seek the Lord while he may be found" was the last thing I was able to read before I awoke from my dream. It was 20 minutes before or after the hour, I'm not real sure, but the bell had rung and I had a life to live.

Shall it be my lot to go that way again, I will take better notes so that I can fill you in more completely on Faithless Phil, meantime I bid my reader adieu.