Although I have given the website name as holyshitgospel, this is a serious piece of writing with quite a long history. I don't wish to bore you with all the twists and turns its journey into the present entails but only wish to clarify what I have come to discover to be its primary issues, which to me are fear, desire, and practice. What follows are my thoughts around these issues.

            Fear, being afraid and unsure and confused, has been a part of my consciousness since I was a small boy and by the time I reached adolescence I was very introverted and lost. I felt I was disconnected from everything alive solely because I couldn't relax with my peers and felt awkward in most all my social behaviors. In short, I was the perfect alien in my own self-assessments and carried an aloneness as vast as the universe and as big as God. This was a part of my picture. On the positive side I had been given a fair share of skills and talents and learned to use my mind and skills in caring for things and was good at what I undertook to understand; this sustained my life and living.

             In the Book of Genesis, after the disastrous Flood that killed everything, Yahweh tells Noah that from then onward opposites will be forever. With fear and failure weighing heavily across my consciousness was its pole mate desire balancing the load I was given as a baby. I wanted, and wanted big time, not to feel afraid and not to be who I am. So I consciously and willfully became a religious because what I truly desired to have was love, self love, especially since I had none of that, period. I consciously began practicing religion after I returned from Vietnam and after I found that I was NOT able to love anyone, not a woman, not myself, and was attracted to the monastic way by Thomas Merton and over the course of some years doing all the mediations and all the ascetics a reasonable person under an irrational and indefinable desire might try and having made enough progress to understand that my journey was NOT to be a monk or some other body but my journey WAS with my body and its self and I had acquired enough courage to join myself with another and get a job and work like the rest of the world did and just get on with it; and so I did. Years later my world exploded and I discovered that in reality, my self-reality, NOTHING from my beginnings had changed. It was THEN that I discovered practice.

            Christianity was a discovery by those who practiced Judaism, by Jews. I didn't know that until very recently. I didn't know hardly anything at the time I began writing about my faith; but I was determined to write my feelings until I couldn't write any more and died. Faith is about feelings, its focus is feelings that are at war with each other, opposites, and its questions concern cause and blame and resolution and redemption. When I wrote Travels I was extremely angry at myself and at the Christian Church because I felt everything was a sham and although 2,000 years had passed NOTHING had changed and the killing has become so extreme that just about everything in creation is on the brink of extinction and church people everywhere are STILL arguing over the same old righteous nonsense that says nothing and does even less. I am still pissed, but my anger has lessened with the cessation of my fears and the attainment of my desires. So what is the practice of Christianity? The Gospels give two baptisms as practice, that of fire and that of water. Travels talks mostly about John's Baptism, that of water, and I will let you decide if you wish to read further and find out what Mark had to say about John's Baptism. That was my personal practice and it changed everything for me. I will leave this with the question Jesus put to the religious leaders of His time when they questioned him concerning His Authority: John's baptism, he asks, did it come from God or did it come from Man? The religious leaders refused to answer because they only practiced righteousness and so Jesus refused to tell them where he got his authority.

            Travels is my interpretation of Mark's Gospel with some rearrangements. I begin with the death of the Christ so that I might properly introduce Paul, who is one mixed up and confused and angry individual who is about to change. The story will speak for itself and I hope you will like it. I believe, as a Christian and as a concerned individual that a real change in direction is imperative and imminent for the survival of life as we hope to live it and direct it and my hope is that this piece of writing will encourage that change to happen. Sincerely Paul Thomas Wenzler