The Mushroom Apostle

He was sitting on a bench at Bell Park, reading a book about Padre Pio, with a backpack and a hand-lettered sign at his feet that said: Art for Food. I was caught up short, thinking that my son is also out in the world somewhere, making music on street corners and depending on the kindness of strangers, and suddenly, I had to take care of this young man, as if my caring for him would be caring for my son as well.

I went home and packed him a lunch and returned to the park and gave him my offering. Then we talked for a bit. He said his name was Demitri. I told him about Ben and the Jugtown Pirates. Then he told me he was 35 years old, and that for the past 15 years he had wandered the United States from coast to coast, just so he could tell the people he met that god was Love and god was real, just so he could live his belief, and live in absolute trust in god.

I was blessed to be in the presence of such faith. Demitri fired my own determination to speak about my god, and gave me renewed hope that there are, indeed, people who know the same god that I know, the god that loves before all else, that asks us to love one another, that provides in abundance for all, that has created in us a spirit of kindness and the desire to care for one another.

Perhaps, I thought, there are not only these two of us, sitting on a park bench. Perhaps there are others, hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands of others, who hear the voice of Love, and reach out in love, and desire only kindness, and reject possessiveness and fear, and find security in friendship, and would gladly give up cheap sneakers and SUVs and the latest techno-toys so that we could have a world of peace and abundance for all.

Maybe we’re like mushrooms, I thought.

Did you know that mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of organisms that exist underground? Some species of mushroom can live for thousands of years and grow to the size of thousands of acres. Perhaps, under the ground of the dominator culture, deep beneath the marketplace and the religious institutions, in the quiet and the darkness, there lives and grows a community of loving humanity. Perhaps, someday soon, we will see the fruits rising to the surface and breaking through like mushrooms in a fairy ring. Like magic mushrooms, the society that eats of these fruits will be transformed—from violence to kindness, from fear to love.
Blessed be,
Lilly