The Sacred Journey: Reflections on a Life Wholly Lived [Hardcover]

'If you have the wisdom to see life as a journey... Mike Riddell makes for one heck of a guide.'

This title is for anyone who has ever asked "what now?". Here the author identifies the malaise particularly common in midlife, and shows how to successfully make it a time for refocusing on what really matters.

Mike Riddell is the author of Godzone, Deep Stuff, alt.spirit@metro.m3 and two novels, The Insatiable Moon and Masks and Shadows; he also has a regular column in Third Way. He is internationally known as a speaker and storyteller on spiritual themes. He lives in Dunedin, New Zealand, where he writes and lectures at the University of Otago.

The story is told of an adventurer who set out from a small village on an island in the pacific Ocean. He paddled his solitary canoe over the horizon, and was not seen again for more than 20 years. His family had given up on him, long considering him dead. Then one day he startled them all by returning. His face was lined and dark with age, and his eyes deep and penetrating. After the welcoming feast, he sat with the other villagers around the fire and recounted some of the adventures of his travels. He spoke of far lands where people lived in high towers and wore clothes which covered most of their bodies. He told of great mountain ranges and lands so big that the sea could not be seen from even their highest point. He described the way he had navigated by the stars to find his way back to the island again.

The villagers were greatly excited, and wanted to hear his stories again and again. When he grew tired of entertaining them, they insisted that he draw them a map of the lands he had visited and the way to get there. This map was mounted on a pole in the centre of the village and became the object of a great deal of veneration. Some of the older ones began to tell the stories of certain places as if they themselves had been the ones who had seen them. But one thing the villagers never did: they never took the risk of crossing the wide seas for themselves, to learn if the stories were true.

The unknown is the realm of possibility. In the known world everything is fixed and certain. Freedom requires the prospect of novelty; without it there can be no genuine freedom. Surely that is why we resist the notion of a blind and fixed fate. We know that it confines us to conformity and the tyranny of the fixed order. Our souls know, even if we do not, that we humans are born to freedom. Only in freedom do we become who we are. It is the element in which we are truly at home. Deprived of it we are like fish out of water, flopping uncertainly in a slow gyration of death.