Holy Madness

These are true stories, though only partly factual.

There once was a small rural post office. One day the local postman heard something faint in the wind blowing from the far off sea. “The true king has landed,” he said. He closed the post office, went home, grabbed his shotgun and his horse and his pack of hounds. He then went to the town police department and attacked it with a shout of ‘long live the king.’ After burning it down, he then rode to meet the true king out of the west with his hounds trotting alongside him. He was hundreds of miles away. Nothing daunted, he attacked little government offices along the way that did not proclaim their allegiance.

A young man had a kind of hallucination of a being flying through the air. Notwithstanding, he became a respectable medical doctor. In his small city he participated in civic life, treated the sick, and talked to people about ethics and such. He knew most everybody. One day he went to the Mayor and said, “it is time.” The mayor nodded. Word quickly spread. The people gathered. The doctor and the mayor led them through an eerie rite. When it was completed, the city transformed with light and lifted higher and higher into the air until it vanished.

A businessman was on the road to meet a partner. Along the way he saw a light, brighter and brighter,until he came up next to it. There on the side of the road was a roaring column of fire. It spoke to him. He turned around and drove back home. He told his family to pack the car, they were headed into the desert. What’s in the desert? His son asked, frowning. If we head that way its . . . Albuquerque? They drove on country roads and then ranch roads and when the roads ran out they backpacked and they came to hills that no man had climbed and forests unknown and a land with a brighter sun.

A guy who owned a landscaping business was standing by his dually, looking at a site to prepare an estimate. A man came by. The man said, “you make landscapes green, but now I want you to make souls bright. Come with me.” The guy put his keys in the footwell and texted his wife to come get the truck. He followed the man. The man was charismatic and paradoxical and wise and bold—you could understand why the landscape guy went with him. But why did the man invite the landscape guy? The guy was rough and a blowhard and out of his element. But he became the man’s best friend. When the man died in a suspicious car wreck, the guy took over where the man had left off, seamlessly. The landscape guy turned the man’s influence into a worldwide organization and died in a suspicious car wreck himself.

There are phrases that stick in one’s mind. Here is one that sticks in mine. “The lord of Nin and the 3-cripple army.” Many years ago I dreamed that a young lord in China or some place like that came by a begging cripple and offered him a place in the lord’s army. The beggar accepted and went through the lord’s peculiar training. Two other cripples accepted. No one else would, because what the young lord proposed was dangerous. But these cripples were desperate—for a job or maybe just for someone who thought they were worth recruiting.
And then the lord did what he proposed to do. He and the recruits went to the very heart of the wicked invaders’ power, their very citadel. It had great blank walls of brass and was manned by men like wolves from the steppe. Who comes, yelled down one from the wall over the gate.
“The Lord of Nin and his 3-cripple army!” And then they attacked, and won.

A homespun boy who was faring along the way fell in with a homespun man who was faring along the way. The man scratched his elbows and rolled his joints and commenced to brag a little. Well young feller, he said, I may not be much to look at, but I am a preacher man and boy howdy can I preach. Every day, never missing a one, have I read in my bible, and every Sunday without fail I have preached the word. I can preach the bark off sycamore. I have saved nigh on a thousand souls.”
“I have seen the face of God,” said the boy, and laughed, and stooped down, and grabbed the world, and flipped it.