Prelude

Past gatherings of the Order of the Love Monk had never been like this. There had been tears, but usually they were tears of happiness or joy or ecstasy. Solemn words were spoken, but never for this purpose, and never interrupted by sobs. People touched each other, but never a hand heavily placed on a shoulder to try to bring comfort. Hugs were common, but never so desperately comforting.

And unlike other gatherings, there was no one leading. In a sense the leader was dead, but Brother Joseph had never led gatherings, he just made them exist out of his brilliant, crazy mind.

The mourners formed a circle around his ashes contained in an urn of earthenware made by one of the initiates, green flecked with white with three gold rings, one at the base, the second at the widest part of the belly and the third where the lid sat on the cup. Ten mourners had one of his ten books in which Joseph had created and developed and refined the Order, and among the eulogies improvised, they randomly quoted from them.

There was every reason to grieve. Joseph had not made it to fifty when he died. From the age of sixteen when he broke out of a shell of loneliness, he had made many friends who loved him, many of those attending his funeral loved him as much or more than any one else in their life. Though a serious man, his liveliness and passion and surprising sense of humor made his untimely death that much more difficult to bear. The fact that the source of his death was the source of his presence among his people, his peculiar and unique brain which had an ability to do things no one else could do, at least at the level he could do them, and which conceived and propagated and expanded his philosophy into a substantial though discrete and, in terms of society at large, peripheral cult basically exploded; even though it was called an aneurism, the people surrounding him agreed his brain just got too big for his skull, dwelling on the irony with typical humor. That remarkable brain had been extracted before the rest of his body was turned to ashes, to by studied by his friends and acquaintances in a well respected neuroscience research clinic in Montreal.

What was surprising about the funeral as it proceeded was not that the solemnity gradually transformed into laughter and celebration, but the first instigator of the transformation was Andy, the owner of the field in which the funeral was taking place, the back yard of his mansion in Thunder Bay, Ontario, who himself was losing his battle to stay alive, Parkinson's disease grabbing and shaking him a couple years earlier. He was not only suffering from a frustrating disease but was suffering from Joseph's death nearly as much as Joseph's common law wife and their three daughters or Andy's oldest daughter and her oldest son, the first of two conceived by her and Joseph, the younger one, estranged, would have nothing to do with such a godless, unchristian gathering despite it being his father's funeral. The story Andy told, the description of Joseph fleeing Andy's home young and scared and hiding it as best as the honest to a fault 18 year old could made him chuckle, and Andy's daughter remembering the event extended to her scaring Joseph nearly shitless sent her into paroxysms of laughter infecting the rest of the gathering. From then on everyone tried to top each other with funny stories.

A pan flute and a beautiful voice singing wordlessly broke through the laughter as two of Joseph's daughters performed musically and Devi, the oldest, a thirty year old, tall, lean and elegant mocha skinned beauty took hold of the urn and danced with it, breaking through the circle and moving spritely and sensuously throughout the yard, spreading ashes in small amounts all around the lawn and in the garden as the gathering followed her. When the urn was empty, she set it on a pedestal just outside a door leading to the gathering room where the Order's main religious event, the orgy took place. The mourners may have managed to lift their spirits during the funeral, but no one was in the mood to cap the celebration with sex. That would wait until the following day, when the 30th Annual Gathering of the Order of the Love Monk would officially commence. Many of Joseph's friends couldn't believe, despite the debilitating vicissitudes of time and aging, 30 years had passed since Joseph had first given them the gift of his bad mad monk self.