HERE AND NOT HERE

Deciding where I would go was a matter of closing my eyes and pointing to a place on the map.  I didn't know what I would see at this place, only that it would be as far north as a bus could take me in the few days of my Spring Break.

The manager of the motel where I stayed when I got to Midland, Ontario, Canada, said that I should visit the Martyr’s Shrine just down the road, along with the nearby reconstruction of a Huron Indian village, and mission, called Sainte-Marie among the Hurons.  He said the shrine and the village commemorated the martyrdom of six Jesuit missionaries at the hands of invading Iroquois.  This was in 1649.

The shrine, it turned out, was a large, gray-stone church, Roman Catholic, with high steeples on either side of it.  It sat on the side of a steep grassy hill, the Stations of the Cross around a circular path leading to a lookout point up top.   From this lookout, when finally I got there, I could see, far below, the dark green Wye River winding inland, while beyond it, to the right, spreading to the horizon, Georgian Bay.

All this was fascinating to me, a non Catholic, even as my real interest remained in what was at the bottom of the hill.

The Sainte-Marie among the Hurons village was a faithful reproduction of the original.  At the entrance was a large shelter made out of brown cypress pillars, with a white birch-bark roof.  Clay was used to fill in the interior walls.  Inside the village was a chapel, a residence for the Jesuits, a cookhouse, a blacksmith shop, and a “long house” for the resident Indians.

This was all well and good, but I was not prepared for what I experienced next.

I learned that the mission priests suffered particularly gruesome deaths, by boiling water, burning at the stake, and flaying.  The Hurons and, for that matter, the invading Iroquois, fared little better, killing each other in the brutal way Indians did at that time, spears, clubs, arrows, and tomahawks.

Was it the souls of these people, or their ghosts perhaps, that I could feel so unmistakably in the air and that quickly had me unnerved?

All these years later I think of a talk by the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle where he says that the relative world can be thought of as being on the surface of a sphere.  The sphere represents the one Life, so called.  All life in the relative world is an expression of this one Life.

The relative world is made up of opposites.  As with all opposites in the relative world, life and death occur only on the surface of the sphere.

The one Life does not have an opposite in that it was never created, it never began, hence will never perish.  As expressions of this one Life, humans do not perish either, only relatively.

This means that the priests, the Hurons, and the Iroquois were gone only sort of, or as the motel manager put it when I told him what I had experienced, “Yes, the priests and Indians are still around, only they don’t live here anymore.”

I am left to wonder if there will come a time when I am still around but don’t live here anymore either.