A Formidable Barrier

Around this time, I bought some civil­ian clothes so that I could go down to Waikiki Beach, in the evenings, and blend in with the rest of the tourists. For the sake of my human­ity, I needed to get away from that menagerie of ani­mals back onboard the ship, as much as pos­si­ble, to avoid revert­ing back to the bush, myself. Hav­ing bought a pair of swim­ming trunks and a large beach towel with a woman in a bathing suit printed on the front, I wound up spend­ing most of my time down on the beach pin­ing away for bet­ter days while I basked in the sun, swam or body-​​surfed the small tidal waves that con­stantly licked the shore. Exhausted, I would often­times fall fast asleep on my beach towel till dusk, when I would awaken to a nearly deserted beach. After slip­ping into my shirt and the ten­nis shoes I’d bought, I would comb my hair before begin­ning my long lonely jaunts down the beach. Some­where along the way, I would stop to buy a lit­tle food and drink, or what­ever I could afford, to tide me over until morn­ing when I could fill up for free back onboard the ship. Occa­sion­ally, I might even meet a casual acquain­tance but most often roamed about alone, wish­ing Mary could be at my side with her hand in mine. For I used to think that would be heaven.

Alas, heaven seemed to be some vast dream that I could only skirt, at best, like the ocean. With the excep­tion of an occa­sional glimpse through the hole made by a dream or a fan­tasy, heaven kept itself ever so well con­cealed behind an invis­i­ble bar­rier of images, specif­i­cally designed for just such a task. Only on rare occa­sions, would it deem me wor­thy enough to be trans­ported up through this bar­rier, via some phan­tas­magoric beam of images, to catch a glimpse of this world from its per­spec­tive. Even rarer were the occa­sions upon which it might reveal to me the mean­ing of such phantasms.

As heaven con­tained me, so did I con­tain heaven. Only I did not yet know how to keep myself from get­ting car­ried away with some of the myths that came and went through heaven’s door, at their own behest. For I could stand up to only those myths I knew well enough to let pass with­out get­ting emo­tion­ally caught up as a pas­sen­ger on the train of images that would fly past me. Oth­er­wise, would I get sucked into tak­ing part in the dream or fan­tasy either in real life or within my imag­i­na­tion. In the lat­ter instance, I had the dis­tinct advan­tage of see­ing the myth before I acted, which gave me some lee­way, depend­ing upon my knowl­edge of the myth, to decide whether I wanted to hop onboard this train of images or not. I was free to choose only when I saw through the myth, a for­mi­da­ble bar­rier which pro­tects the truth from an unwor­thy intruder by dis­guis­ing it in images that appear mean­ing­less to the untrained eye. After all, was not I made in the image of a God Whose like­ness still remained hid­den from me.