My Uncle Gerald, a Basilian Roman Catholic Priest, presides over the Mass.  He finishes his humour-laced homily and invites my mother and father to come forward.    I look at my older brother Tim, who smiles with joy.  Beside him is Sandy, his lovely wife.  To her right are my mischievous nephews Corey and Sean.    To my right, my sister Kathleen, from Canmore, Alberta, bears a smile that will turn to joyful weeping with the slightest encouragement.  Her 3 daughters, Kylie, Emily, and Siobhan, athletic romantics all all three, are beside her.

Behind Kathleen is my lovely sister Peggy, her Harley-obsessed husband, Bruno, and their charming daughters, Josee and Marie.  My brother Sean, a good man and accomplished high school teacher in the tradition of Uncle Gerald is here from Vancouver.

A loving tension suffuses the old chapel.  A large wooden crucifix hangs over  the place where my mother and father, now in their late 70′s, grey haired and all, stand, adding to the mystic of what is about to happen.   Fr. Gerald cracks a joke and gets us laughing, his voice playful and full of joy for his older sister, my mother and his brother-in-law, my father.

He turns to my mother and father and begins the exchange of vows. In an instant, we are are witness in spirit to two young lovers in 1955 taking their vows at St. Basil’s Church in Toronto.   It is time warp glimpse backwards before my brothers, sisters, and I, my nieces, nephews, my cousins too, even existed.

My mother, not known for public displays of emotions, wilts under the drama and breaks into tears. My father, sentimental Irish Canadian that he is, joins her, laughing with squinty tear-filled eyes and broad smile.   Who knew all that would happen because Dennis James O’Connor of Belleville, Ontario and Catherine Margaret Lalonde of Capreol, Ontario said yes to each other 50 years ago?

The vows exchanged, the Mass finished, we gather outside in the sunshine like we have for the weddings of brother, sisters, cousins, and friends.  At Sunningdale Golf Club speech makers swallow lumps in throats.  Grandchildren offer tributes of genuine honesty in the shy and innocent way of children who love their grandparents.   Long-time friends bear witness to my parents love and devotion over the years – and to their epic parties.

The result of a man and a woman, agreeing to love each other in good times and bad, is manifested in the existence of family and friends that day.   My parent’s marriage, produced sons and daughters, and from them grandchildren; it’s is the ongoing process of  life generating life, from generation to generation.  This day is a celebration of the essence of marriage.   It is a very good thing and deserves to be held in highest esteem.

One night, however, he came to our circle discouraged and downcast.  Hanging his head, he declared: “I have made so much progress, so much growth, and again I’m right back in shame and pain of my little boy .” He was very angry with himself for what he called “slipping back” into his distress.  He believed all his growth was lost.

In navigating the masculine journey, we cycle through our issues over and over again.  Depending on the severity of our wounds, we are built up and broken down, each time getting stronger, thereby allowing us to go deeper into our wounds.  This can take a long time.

I told the man that his newfound strength was allowing him to go deeper into his wounds and that “affirmation then desolation” is the way of healing.  It takes strength of self to deal with difficult emotions.   Thankfully, after a certain maturity is reached, a man can cycle through the process quickly, returning himself to a healthy state of well-being on his own.

Men, don’t be discouraged if you find yourself struggling with the same old issues again and again.  Find a good counsellor, therapist, mentor, pastor or priest, and if one is available, a circle of men with whom you can be supported in the cycle of healing.  It’s worth it.

Nancy writes:

I am Ken’s mother and it has taken me a long time to comment on Pat’s beautiful recollections of the struggles and the victories of my dear Ken’s passing. This June it will be 22 years since that last day of Ken’s life and it still brings tears to my eyes and grief in my heart.

Ken was a strong, intelligent and determined man. Ken tried so many things to improve his health after his Kidney Transplant at the age of 20. Back in those days the side effects of the drugs he had to take to keep his Kidney greatly altered his Immune system and he fell prey to many serious diseases the worst of which was Scleromyxedema.

Ken gave his friends and his family so much strength when we would constantly witness his bravery, his humor, his love of God. Ken loved good food and his Aunt and I took him out to lunch one day and we ordered Shrimp and Ken said, ‘I can’t order that cause I am not supposed to eat that, but can I have some of yours.’ We said, “Sure”!! and he relished every bite with a big grin on his face.

Ken was dying and his Dad and I knew it, but that last day it was like he was reborn. He was joking with the Nurse and he said to her, “Better luck next time!” and she had to leave as she was crying. When Ken said to me and his friends, “There is too much love here I can’t leave.” We all backed away and I said, “Ken I love you, go in peace.” At that very moment it was as though I saw a stream of light and instantly Ken was gone. I will never forget that beautiful passing. It was as though an Angel had come and gently took his spirit to Heaven. I had never seen anyone die with such grace before or since. God Bless you Ken you are forever in my heart.

Pat has remained a very, very special friend of mine ever since the first time I met him, which was a couple of years before Ken died. His writing here is beautiful, accurate, loving and true. Bless you my friend.

Ken Story Part 1: Read more

Ken Bovey Parts 2 – 4: July 2011

Ken’s Story Parts 5 – 9:  August 2011

Ken’s Story Conclusion:  September 2011

Each word grows heavy with emotion until he can say no more.  The room is quiet, as if time is suspended for the work of this man’s heart.   Tears slip silently down his face soaking his shirt, and slowly his shoulders begin to quake as he erupts with sobs.  He is now in the land of tears.  I am in awe of his strength and the beauty of this moment of timeless grace.

Suddenly, a man reaches over, puts a hand on the weeping man’s shoulder, and it is over!  Like a door slamming shut, the man draws back from the uninvited intrusion and he stops crying.

In navigating the masculine journey, the land of tears is not accessed through the intellect, analysis, or abstraction.    When a man is walking in the place of his heart, touching him or speaking to him is a quick way to cut him off from his feelings.

Rule #1: when a man moves from words to tears, DO NOT TOUCH him.

Rule #2: when a man is in the land of tears, or is moving toward them, DO NOT INTERRUPT him with talk.

If he needs contact, he will reach out for it.  If he needs clarity of thought, he will ask for it.  Simply remain present and let him show you what he needs.

When she stepped on the bus , I thought, “Here is a beautiful woman.”   About 25 years old, she wore a cotton honey coloured winter coat, blue jeans, and calf high winter boots.  Her blonde hair was tied back on her head in a pony tail.  She had a natural girl-next-door beauty.

She smiled, said hello (with an Australian accent), and dropped coins in the fare box.   Her whole being radiated an interior spirit of contentedness and satisfaction.  I could not help notice her.

“Where you from in Australia?” I asked.

“New South Wales, near Sydney.”

“Ah, I just came back from there.  Beautiful country.  Great coffee.”

She rode the bus from Banff and got off in Canmore.  It was dark out.   On the opposite side of the road stood a young man wearing shorts and a winter jacket.  I signalled to him, asking if he wanted to get on; he shook his head and pointed a finger to the back of the bus.  He was there to pick up the woman from New South Wales.  Then it struck me,  “She’s beautiful because she’s in love!”

The next week, she rode the bus again, this time to Banff, so I asked her if the man in the shorts was her boyfriend.  She smiled widely, deeply content, and replied, “Why yes, he’s my fiancé, Matt.  He had just came from the gym and was picking me up.”

“If I may be so bold; you are a lovely young woman, and when I realized your man was there, I knew you were in love.”

She smiled again and said, “Yes, that’s it indeed.”

When a man loves a woman from his heart, and when a woman knows that her man is dedicated to her alone, she is filled with an interior confidence, satisfaction, and fulfillment that allows her to radiate her feminine beauty.   Take note, men.

It is normal for a boy to separate from his mother.  He does this to further his identity as a young man.  When navigated with wisdom and patience, it is a time of excitement and joy for the boy.   However, in a culture that does not support the masculine journey, a boy’s fundamental need to become a man can get very messy – for everyone.

The separation I’m talking about is the adolescent cutting of childhood ties to the mother.    This a time of great confusion for boys; his whole life he has identified himself with his mother, grew in her womb, sought her for food, affection, comfort, consolation, etc.   Her very gaze into his eyes as a baby, her tender motherly love, gave him his sense of being and a growing sense himself as a person.  It is a mysterious, profound, and holy phenomenon.

However, for a boy to become a man, he must cut his childhood ties to mother.  In his heart, he must navigate turmoil, the emotional storms of an identity crisis that is filled with anxiety, anger, and the fear of separating from the very person who gave him life!   We’re not talking about a cold indifference to ‘mom;’ we’re talking about the separation of identities of two deeply emotionally and spiritually entwined human beings.   The difficulty of navigating this crucial movement away from mother cannot be understated.  For the boy it can be as painful as death.

In days of old, when the bond between men and boys was stronger, this separation from mother was helped by the presence of supportive fathers, uncles, and grandfathers to whom boys could go for understanding, consolation, and affirmation.

Today with no rituals to help them become men, and living in a culture that values personality over substance, boys are left to navigate this crucial process alone.  They attempt to separate from their mothers through rebellion, angry blow ups, or by cutting themselves off emotionally from their mothers.   Being boys, it is all so clumsy, leaving everyone feeling hurt, angry, confused, and, often, ashamed.

Our culture needs to support the developmental steps in navigating the masculine journey.  Specifically, to acknowledge that it is painful and frightening for boys to separate from their mothers.  For mothers, that it is painful and frightening to let go of their sons.

Secondly, fathers and elders need to help boys make the painful cut to the ties that bind them to mother.  In doing so, young men need to accept their mothers as adults and as individuals deserving respect and honour.   And mothers need to know and be supported in the painful process of letting their children move into adulthood.

Boys, if they are to become healthy men, need to separate from their mothers; it is a fact of life.  It would make life so much easier, if we helped everyone along the way.

As I rode further on the Icefields Parkway south of Jasper, and away from my meeting with Sanryo Kim, I was filled with joy and delight.  Mr. Kim’s  joyful spirit, moved my own with with a desire for adventure, beauty, and of the possibilities of living in a new way.  He ‘inspired’ me, filled me with a joyful spirit.

As my sister Kathleen said to me recently, I had been living in “a velvet rut.”   Though I have a lovely home and wonderful friends, a golf membership at a prestigious country club, and a job that afforded me anything I wanted, my life had become stale.

I was going through the motions.   I was pushing myself to get my work done, pushing myself to be enthusiastic with my customers, and pushing myself to be content.  Though I reminded myself I was fortunate to have a job, I did not enjoy it.  I was pushing against a powerful current of boredom and it was exhausting.

In cycling, it’s easy to push against the peddles with great effort, to try to reach the destination sooner than later. You go fast for a while, but it’s tiring, not a lot of fun, and you miss things.  However, if you relax the force of the stroke, with attention you can sense the natural effort that is needed to ride along smoothly.   In Zen, this is called ‘right effort.’ It means to live life in the present moment, and to go about things with interior equilibrium.   It’s very helpful on long days of cycling, and especially on long days of life.

Sometimes pride works in one’s favour.  I had told so many people that I was cycling to Vancouver, when the time came to leave, and I was having doubts, I couldn’t back out.

On the afternoon of September 10th, 2012, just having learned from Travel Alberta that the campgrounds along the southern route I had planned to take were closed, a shot of fear went through me, ” I’m leaving too late!  It’s 1,100 kms to the coast and it’s autumn in the Rockies.  Who knows what kind of weather I’ll face.”

I knew the road ahead would be long and arduous.  I had at least 5 major passes to summit before I hit the Fraser Valley and Vancouver.  Physical challenges aside, the fear that I could get hit by a truck and seriously injured – 0r killed – was real to me.  I felt no better at kilometre 10 when I passed a roadside memorial for a Canmore cyclist who had been killed on the Trans-Canada Highway a few years earlier.   I was battling with a major case of second thoughts, fuelled by fear of the unknown.

There was no turning back now.  I had decided weeks earlier to cycle to Vancouver and, despite the risks my journey presented, I was on my way.  These moments of commitment, these leaps of faith, some big and some small, were made daily.  The truth was that riding to Vancouver was dangerous – not foolishly so, but cyclists do get killed on these steep mountain highways and my safety depended on hundreds of drivers seeing me and passing with caution.

I myself would need maturity when making decisions about safety.  But, I would also need to take calculated risks, to abandon myself to the people, places, and situations that I would face along the way.   I would have to embrace the risks my journey would bring me, because a journey without risk is no journey at all.

In Banff, I stopped at Our Lady of the Rockies Catholic Church.  I took off my helmet, walked up the aisle, cycling shoes clacking with each step, and made my way to the statues of Our Lady and the Sacred Heart of Jesus.  I lit a candle, knelt down in front of Jesus and his mother, and asked them to protect me from harm, to give me strength, courage, and wisdom, and to ease my way to the coast.

I was cycling the first leg of a 250km trip from Jasper, Alberta to Canmore, Alberta, through the most stunning scenery in the world, the Icefields Parkway of the Canadian Rockies.   While the Athabasca River flowed cold and grey to my right and the shear cliffs of mountains cut awesome figures on both sides of the valley, my aching legs told me my trip was going to be more difficult than I assumed.  So, it was with a little grey cloud of discouragement over my head that I cycled into the Mount Kerkeslan viewpoint.

There were people taking pictures, but it was the sight of someone at the far end of the lot, a mysterious looking man sitting beside a bicycle packed with gear that caught my attention.  “Who is this?” I thought as I cycled toward him.   He looked up at me with a joyful smile, so I stopped to greet him.

“Sit down, sit down,” his words thick with a Korean accent.   He had long hair and a beard sprinkled with grey.  His face was brown and weather worn.  His body was thin and lythe, like he used every calorie of food energy he ate.   His gear, all 100 pounds of it, was worn and well used.  I was amazed how much he carried with him.

He sat on a long green mat and motioned for me to sit down with him.  He seemed so ernest, I sat down obligingly.   In the same manner, he offered me a drink of water from an old pop bottle, handed me a loaf of plain white bread, a jar of peanut butter, and  knife. I thanked him for his hospitality and began making myself a sandwich.   As cyclists do on the road, I asked him where he was coming from.  His reply surprised me.   “Los Angeles, California,” he said.   I travel from Los Angeles to New York, then to Niagara Falls, across Canada to Edmonton, Jasper and now here.”

“Really?”  My eyes bugged out, betraying my amazement, and I confess, my alarm at the significance of  his journey.   I thought my trip from Jasper to Canmore was really something and here was a man cycling across North America!

“I’m 70 years old,” he said with an air of pride and joy.    “I travel around the world.  Korea, China, Europe, South America.”    He pulled out a small stack of pictures and flipped through them, pointing himself out in France, Spain, Peru, and Argentina.   Some included snow and others were of desert.    Now, I was really amazed.

“Why are you doing this?”  I had to understand what would compel a 70 year-old man to take on such an arduous journey.

“For meditation,” he replied.

“Are you a monk?”   He reminded me so much of my Zen teacher from Canmore in the late 80′s, that I felt a tremor of the Spirit wash over me.

“No, monks have big ego,” he said smiling.

I laughed out loud at his declaration.   I told him that I had practiced Zen Buddhism for 2 years and shared my Zen name “Do Chun” with him, (which means Dharma River).    I showed him my Zen initiation scar on my right fore arm, and clarified for him that I was in fact, a Catholic.   Now he was surprised.  Some time during our chat, a horsefly landed on my arm so I slapped it to the ground.  With the heal of my right cycling shoe I stomped it.  He scowled at me in disapproval.  I must have appeared to be a heathen, to his Buddhist re-incarnationalist mindset, I thought.

“Where do you sleep at night?” I asked him.

“Beside the road.  Wherever I stop,” he told me.  Now this really alarmed me even more.

“But there are wolves, cougars, black bears and grizzly bears in the Rockies!”    He kept his bread in a wire cage just behind his bicycle seat.   I instantly imagined a bear tearing his gear – and him – apart.

“No problem,” he said with an air of utter confidence, a response that did not make me feel any less alarmed.  I prayed for him every day for a week after that moment.*

We talked about many other things, took some pictures, and then it was time to move on.  We said a prayer together, exchanged contact information, and I climbed onto my bicycle.   “Just peddle, no push,” he advised me.   Yes, he was right about that peddling mind-body connection.  The more I thought about my sore legs, the more they tightened up.

I thanked him for his time and his hospitality and cycled 30 kms south to Honeymoon Lake.   It was that day or the next that I decided I would ride to Vancouver to see my brother Sean.   “If a 70 year-old man can cycle around the world, I can make it to Vancouver,” I told myself.   And so, 3 weeks later, I did just that.

*I checked this man’s website recently and saw that he had, in fact, made it back to the States.   I was relieved that my prayers of protection were heard….