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.