Of Truth and Angels 1

(This begins Part 4.)
Things had slowed down a bit for Preston and Angie.
They were ready for that. It was good for them to have a period of adjustment without crises to force the sudden definition and redefinition of priorities in life. Time to think about things.
It was also time to consider a regular fitness program. Both of them had been operating on the strength of previous fitness efforts, but as part of their overall search for a norm, a baseline from which to operate, they felt the need to regain some control. But the private gyms were didn’t feel right. Angie was not used to creating her own guided program, having simply taken advantage of whatever training was included in the various sports in which she had participated. So it fell to Preston to come up with something for them until a better idea came along.
In their explorations and photography forays, they had stumbled across several playgrounds with substantial equipment. They concentrated on those closest to the vast Brunssumerheide, creating workout routines on them. While recent years had seen a lot industrial scraping in parts of it of the heath, there was still plenty of greenery left over and Preston’s memory from twenty years earlier served well. He and Angie established a pattern of mixing upper body exercises on the playgrounds with running in the sandy hills of the heath.
The ride out from Heerlen served as a good warm-up, and it was a decent cool down in the ride back. True to his promise, Preston began adding training in Taekwando. Not that he was really up to par himself, but he used what he could remember. Angie picked up on it quickly, despite her misgivings about the idea of violence. They had several weeks to settle into this routine.
That was largely because their hopes for kayaking in Dinant were squelched by an extended summer drought. There were a number of volksmarches that Preston felt were worth the effort simply to see the countryside. It gave them a chance to see places like Malmedy, Namur and Bastogne. Until further notice, they continued avoiding Liege and Masstricht as advised earlier that summer. But in general, while they were culturally more comfortable among the Flemish, it was the accident of history and geography that placed the most beautiful hiking areas in the hands of the Walloons.
During one of their hikes, Angie decided it was a good time to broach a question that had been tumbling around in the back of her mind. “This work we do is personal for me. At the same time, I’m highly motivated to work with you whatever it is you are doing. What drives you in this work?”
Before he could answer, she went on. “I know you just sort of stumbled into it. I was there. But you seemed to have a mission in your soul already, just waiting for a chance to do something like this.”
Preston grinned. “We don’t often talk philosophy and religion because our instincts are the same on most things.”
He slowed a moment to pet a friendly dog someone was leading on the trail. They moved on as the dog decided to stop for a nature call.
“I went to one kind of church or another for most of my life. Even while I was stationed here, I went to chapel pretty regularly. Back when it was called AFCENT Chapel, the staff would organize an annual retreat at Rolduc Abbey down in Kerkrade. One year we had a speaker who was an Iraqi pastor. Hardly anti-American, he was trying to get the message out that Christians in Iraq were badly hurt by American military activities. There was a lot of political posturing about having him speak to American troops so soon after Desert Storm. They wouldn’t let him come to the chapel, so we had to go outside the system to see him, but something told me to ignore all that crap and go.”
He was silent for a few minutes while they took an arduous climb up a hill. At the top, when he caught his breath, Preston continued.
“There weren’t very many of us there at that retreat, so it was very informal and much more interesting. The man spent a lot of time talking about seeing the world from a non-Western viewpoint. One of the first things he said was, ‘Christianity began as an Eastern religion.’ Then he went on to make the point that you can’t really understand the Bible unless you understand that Eastern point of view. Not like Hindu or Shinto Eastern, but Middle Eastern before Islam. So I did some reading. Most of it I didn’t really understand, but some of it must have leaked into my head, because it changed everything.”
They stopped to admire the view from a cliff overlooking a small river valley.
“American religion in particular is deeply afraid of anything outside the tight control of the conscious mind. Almost the entire field of evangelical religion is too cerebral, and that isn’t what we see in the New Testament. That has its place, but it should serve, not lead.”
Angie reminded him, “The Catholic Church has a wide range of different traditions feeding into it. In the positions I held it was easy to see a lot of infighting behind the scenes, but somehow things manage to keep going. Still, there is more than one grand tradition of mysticism. We have eastern churches I heard about only a little, so I can’t pin it down between east and west. Some of it was like psychobabble, but some of it seemed quite powerful.”
Preston nodded. “If you rely too much on emotion, you’re just an animal. If you rely too much on intellect, you’re just a smart animal. If you learn to listen to something higher, you at least have a chance to get involved in what’s really worthwhile. People who deny that there is anything higher can’t even be called Christian in my book. Even after those papers we read and the work we’ve already done, I don’t pretend to understand this business all that well. But inside of me is a very quiet, very hot fire, and it won’t let me ignore this problem. We already know we aren’t saving more than maybe ten percent of the kids caught in this mess, but there’s something in how we do this, something about simply exposing it, that seems to answer that fiery demand on my soul.”
They agreed it was something strong enough to keep them focused until the next episode.