When Robin Hood became King John, his successors inevitably turned into Joseph Stalin. The Vatican anticipated that and declared 'Liberation Theology' anathema to Christ's meaning. Very few Catholics listened. All Christian churches were fraught with Marxist priests and ministers who thought themselves Christian because, in their minds, Christ was a Robin Hood. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Christ asked the wealthy to give away their riches, because with financial independence, there was no way they could see the real mystery of God's presence on the earth. Unless made helpless before the Creator, one cannot even see the love He brings you, one second at a time. Seek merely your daily bread. God, Christ, the Holy Ghost and Mother Nature will see to it that you receive it.
Michael had experienced that himself when homeless on the streets of Toronto and Whistler, British Columbia. He was profoundly grateful for the experiences. Now, at the destination point of a long, eight-year journey across the vast expanse of Canada, Michael was prepared to collect the entire course of his life and view it in light of what he knew had to happen. Only the Good Thief and Christ's other, bravest disciple, Mary Magdalene, could show Christian sinners a new road back to the Way, the Light and the Love that God had intended all along.
As for Michael, lashed to the sins of a man he could not possibly be, falsely entombed as a boy within the sin of Judas, none of the agony and self-doubt he would face drew him even close to suicide. It would not be until 1964, when he confronted the subterranean Marxist world and its deprogramming centers in England and Europe that Michael would consider ending his life. Some part of him, at that moment, had sensed the long and arduous journey he would have to take to come close to any real sense of home. This desire to end it all at age 22 would be his first and last contemplation of a self-willed end. Perhaps only his Jesuit education had saved him. The 'Black Robes' and their vision of Christ was inculcated in him with such intensity that not even an increasingly diabolical world could drive him to either recant or despair.
"Has my boy been playing with himself?," asked the burly, snowy-haired priest with the smell of stale cigars and morning mass wine on his breath.
"No," lied Michael.
That was one of Michael's first impressions as a freshman at the University of Detroit High School. Mass every morning at 8 with the Black Robes prowling about the pews like jail guards and staring at the inmates with thumbs hooked in the belt of their cassocks and looks that pierced like bullets - that was Michael's initial experience with Catholicism. He'd spent two years in a highly-disciplined, Anglican prep school but none of that academic militancy could compare with the plight of a young, Catholic flock, trapped in the zealotry of Jesuits.
These guys are serious, thought Michael. They're scary.
"You can accuse a Jesuit of everything," said one priest. "Everything except humility."
The young 'Jebby,' as they've nicknamed the Jesuits, had spoken it without the least bit of embarrassment.
Not until he was 60 would Michael appreciate the justification for such biblical certainty. Life was tough. All knew that. God, however, particularly the Deity of Revelations, was so frightening it made the everyday sorrows of humanity look like a mild bout of the flu.
Crucifixes, with Christ's tortured body exposed to everyone's view, were daily reminders of the one great sacrifice yet to be equaled. Those who would not acknowledge His innocence, nor pay tribute to the sinless man's divine love and forgiveness, would suffer, and suffer greatly. It would not be God enacting His wrath, but the Creator not intervening when a legion of devils arose to punish the unprotected. Hitler prevailed for over a decade, because God saw no reason to stop his diabolical progress. Europe had grown so corrupt, so hypocritical that it seemed to be praying for the Fuhrer to appear, and appear he did. He erupted. The death toll in his wake seemed unsurpassable. That was, of course, until Joseph Stalin began enacting his Purge - 80 million Russians dead -- and Mao Ze Dong enforced his Great Leap Forward - 30 million Chinese dead of starvation. Add in Pol Pot's two million dead Cambodians, hundreds of thousands dead in African socialist federations and the starvation toll in Kim Jong Il's North Korea and you have over 120 million dead within German, Russian, Chinese, Cambodian, Yugoslavian, North Korean, Rwandan, Zimbabwean, Congolese and Muslim socialist federations.
The formula for such destruction, the common denominator was clearly the unsurpassed power and tyrannical speed of a full-blown socialist federation, a one-way economic highway that would not entertain the smallest desire on anyone's part to move in the other direction.
"You shall know the tree by its fruit."
The death toll on the tree of socialist zealotry makes the crimes of the Catholic Church, at its zenith, look like a gang that couldn't kill straight.
The 14-year-old Jesuit high school student, sitting in his Latin class, was neither the least bit aware nor interested in those facts. He, like his father, Dr. George, thought taking Latin was a pointless exercise.
"It's a dead language," said the Doctor.
And when the faculty wished to enroll Michael in the Classics Major of Latin and ancient Greek, the Doctor saw absolutely no practical reason for it, although he was overruled by men he had always greatly admired - priests in the Order of St. Ignatius Loyola.
And so Michael spent most of his teenage years hovering over ancient histories - giving him an appetite for the cosmic that rendered everyday life almost irrelevant. The phenomenal, genocidal stakes of humanity's millennia-long history were listed for all to see. Most of Michael's peers, however, weren't the least bit interested. If anything had made Michael feel like an outsider, it was his Jesuit education. It lifted him to a dream world of myth and prophecy so magnetic that he never entirely returned to the 'real world'.
Decades later, in the private dining suite of a Washington Hotel, his telescopic education would return to haunt him. Because of it, he would know with certainty that one of the true faces of the William Clinton administration, Attorney General Janet Reno, held a zealot's shortcut to utopia so unrelenting and maniacal that the death toll at Waco would prove only a warm-up for the long-term goals of a Marxist/Leninist Democratic Party of America.
Michael's cries of alarm and protest would prove worthless, as the country continued its love affair with history's best imitator of Tom Sawyer, President William Jefferson Clinton. Wrapped in the veneer of a Mark Twain favorite was a classic Billy The Kid.
"Liberalism is another man's idealism at my expense," quipped Michael in New Orleans to the comedian Bill Maher, host of the Politically Incorrect talk show. The price for Liberal good intentions, Michael soon found out, was higher than progressive taxation. To protect his freedom would require the loss of his job, his marriage, his city and his country.
His friend - the great jazz bassist Ron Carter - knew of Michael's battle with Janet Reno and asked: "Michael, are you winning?"
"No," replied Michael, "but I'm free." That says it all.
Now almost indigent, Michael still held to his freedom, but it was actually a blissful servitude to the Way that Christ had paved for everyone. The abundant life that the Lord promised could not be measured in possessions but in the freedom of surrender to the metaphysical laws of the universe, a miracle governed by God, the Father; Christ, the Son; the Holy Ghost and Mother Nature. Because of that surrender, Michael found the reality of life becoming more beautiful and miraculous every day.
However, on the football playing fields of a Jesuit high school, Michael only felt his ineptitude. Too slow to be an end or running back, and too tall to ever really be effective on the line, Michael had to admit defeat before his father's grandest hopes for a vibrant, athletic male who could walk through life with absolute animal certainty. Michael was too sensitive, too artistic and, well, just not male enough to feel comfortable around.
Michael had noticed his father's growing nerves and his efforts to expose him to as many male pastimes as possible. There were sports bars and hockey games, football games, baseball games, and a highly encouraged relationship with a former teacher at Michael's earlier prep school. This faculty member had been a United States Marine and football player.
Later, the Doctor discovered why this Marine Major had been relieved of his job at all-male schools so frequently. His 'attentions' had been lavished on a number of students at the prep school, including Michael.
Michael credits his chronic defenselessness to that Marine. When a child's privacy and boundaries are not honored, the man he grows up to be will never be able to entirely protect himself from other people. He has already given up on any effort to keep the outside world away. His sense of self-respect has been ripped away before it even had a chance to stand on its own two legs.
It's not a bad flaw to have as an artist but it does not bode well for long-term survival. Resigned to that fact, Michael's faith in Christ and his all-protecting power became his only hope. So far, Michael's Lord has not let him down once.
Much of Michael's high school study time was devoted to the history of Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire. Homer and Virgil in the original Latin were on the reading list. It was because of a great priest, Father Samuel Listermann, that Michael was introduced to his greatest influence, the plays and poetry of William Shakespeare. Hours of immersion in rehearsing Macbeth, while reviewing the heroic events of the Trojan War and Caesar's campaigns in Gaul, left Michael stranded in time, with one foot in the 'real world' and the other in an Olympic field of superheroes and super-villains. The eternal war of good and evil on a timeless plain had been etched upon Michael's soul with Jesuitical acid.
He would graduate an overly intense dreamer whose only real wish was to become a musician. If that failed, he'd enter the theater and become the best actor he could be. The latter became the only choice, since his father gave him not the least encouragement in his music.
"You've got to practice," he said, "what your piano teacher orders you to. If you don't, I'm taking away your lessons!"
Michael wanted to be a jazz musician. His father enlisted a jazz piano teacher to instruct him but, according to the doctor, his progress wasn't fast enough and so the lessons ended. Many of the same accusations would follow Michael to college as his father endeavored with great effort but eventual success to enroll him in Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.
The Jesuit faculty's hair stood on end when they learned that Michael would attend Dartmouth and not Notre Dame or Holy Cross. After only two months on the Dartmouth campus, Michael understood why. The entire student body looked and acted like the classic, biblical pagans he'd been warned about in catechism class. He would have to spend four years in what the National Lampoon finally named the Animal House.
Next