Synopsis of Travels with Brother John
(c)
2005 Maarten Turkstra. (The
moral right of the author has been reserved.)
Travels with Brother John is
the story of a young man who wandered for four years in
the late 1960s through North and South America while obeying a personal vow of
poverty and a commitment to staying not more than three days in one place. From
a background of studying in Cape Town, South Africa, and after a period on the
Left Bank in Paris, the narrative begins with a sojourn among the Flower
Children at the height of the Haight-Ashbury scene in San Francisco. He then
finds a yoga teacher in Los Angeles who gives him the tools with which to start
an inner journey that can keep pace with his travels on an outer level. While
living with a community of craftsmen in the Californian countryside who live
out a Zen-Christian lifestyle, he begins to read the Four Gospels, The Little Flowers of St. Francis, and
several books on Zen Buddhism. One night, while sleeping on a hilltop, he
receives a dream in which St. Francis grants him permission to use his name and
to wear his robes as a protection against harassment by zealous policemen
during his travels.
Wearing
a single cotton robe and neither sandals nor a staff, the young pilgrim travels
the length and breadth of United States and Canada before returning to
California. On several occasions he is put in jail for vagrancy, but he also
encounters a higher form of yoga called Tantra and is eventually initiated into
this practice by a competent yogini. Back in California, he meets an Elf Lord
who introduces him to a book by Evans Wentz, which is a published version of
his doctoral thesis at Oxford on the Fairy
Faith in Celtic Lands. The Elf takes him in and trains him as a personal
attendant to the Gentry and gives him the title of Brother John, Wayfarer,
which he interpreted as: "one who makes fair the way for others who travel
on it.”
After
the Franciscan Order of Southern California grant him a proper, brown,
Franciscan robe to replace his tattered cotton garment, received from a costume
shop in Washington DC, he resumes his travels in the direction of South
America. It is during a three-month journey down a tributary of the Amazon that
true inner transformation begins to take place. He is defrocked by a missionary
in the jungle, who calls him a charlatan and a disgrace to the order, because
he happens to be travelling with a woman. Having been stripped of his outer
disguise, the inner structures of his persona also begins to unravel. He
becomes determined to seek his original face, the aboriginal man, before all
the cultural overlays of language, religion and society. The Indians of the
Amazon provide an excellent mirror in which to perceive the thick encrustations
of his education and this brings him to a major crossroads on his inner
journey.
In
Brazil John is invited to spend time in a Benedictine monastery and here he
discovers the contemplative and deeply mystical tradition that lies at the root
of Catholicism. The extra-ordinary abbot who receives him in the monastery of
Bahia introduces him to the Rule of St Benedict and the intricacies of The
Second Vatican Council, including the new openness of the Church in relation to
the other world religions. Brother John is sent on his way with a new off-white
robe, which the abbot has had made for him by their brother tailor.
The
next stop is in Rio de Janeiro for Carnival, where John falls in love with a
beautiful blonde Canadian woman who he had met further north in Brazil. After
dancing and laughing and falling in love with each other, the choice is
presented between this woman, who he sees as a true ‘soul-mate’ and his
vocation as a wanderer. She returns to her home in the North, while the pilgrim
continues south to Monte Video where he encounters a ballet dancer who leads
him to a new level of Tantric initiation in which he discovers what the
Tibetans refer to as the Diamond Body. This episode is described in all its
erotic and transformative details.
Walking
along the shores of Lake Titicaca, he meditates deeply on his role as a
‘street-theatre’ version of the Imitation of Christ and on all the temptations
and responsibilities that this performance carries with it. At the Festival of
the Sun in Cuzco John meets up with friends again, including the blonde
Canadian lady. He stays in the huge Franciscan monastery and is befriended by
an Inca man who is the prior of a Dominican monastery built on the foundations
of the ancient Temple of the Sun. This man is also an archaeologist and shares
with the wayfarer his knowledge of the rituals and customs of the Pre-Colombian
civilization.
A
young Basque man joins the wandering monk on his journey further north and they
travel as far as his friend’s home in Venezuela, but not before being thrown in
jail for forty days for ‘corrupting the public morale.’ After a week of fasting
in jail they are released with apologies. In Caracas, John again stays with the
Benedictines and is given a new white robe to replace the well used one he
received in Brazil. He is asked to appear on a popular Saturday evening
television show and becomes an instant legend in the country.
The
contact with St Benedict has rendered the pilgrim increasingly dissatisfied
with the limitations of Franciscan spirituality. But he knows that he made a
deal with Francis: if he wished to be released from his mentorship, he should
do the same forty-day fast that Francis had undergone. The threat of forty days
in jail prompts John to spend a forty-day period of retreat at a Franciscan
priory on the beaches of an Indian territory in Colombia. During this period,
he becomes embarrassed with his flashy image in a magnificent white robe and
abandons the robe into the hands of the prior at the end of that period.
His
imagination now turns toward India. He plans to find passage on one of the
sailing boats passing through the Panama Canal in order to cross the Pacific
and dresses in such a way as to look as if he might be useful on a boat. He
manages to hitch a ride on a yacht going to California and on the way they are
caught in a magnificent, full-blown, hurricane at sea. On the small boat he is
given another book by Evans Wentz called Tibetan
Yoga and Secret Doctrines. In the translations of those old texts and in
the detailed footnotes by the author he finds the information which allows him
to begin to piece together a picture that could bridge the gap between his
yogic experience and his exposure to mystical Catholicism.
Back
in California for the third time, he feels that he can now finally tie the knot
on a four- year figure-eight journey around North and South America. His
friends send him to a Benedictine monastery in the Mojave Desert where he is
offered a hermitage in which to pay his dues to St. Francis by completing the
forty day-fast, thus ending the pledge.
At
the simplest level, the book is a picaresque narrative that describes the
highpoints of culture in both North and South America at a time of global
transition in the late twentieth century. From a literary perspective, the
author reveals a personal and spiritual transition from a young educated South
African to a globally aware citizen, in touch with that higher consciousness
which is the potential of every human being, and which manifests in all
cultures whether advanced industrial or jungle subsistence.