Budo, the Pursuit of Excellence, and the Goal of Practice There are many who take up Budo for the wrong reasons. Often, especially for young men, it has something to do with wanting to be tough or the desire to be the “baddest man” in the neighborhood or something of a similar nature. Many who do take up the Budo for this reason, however, find that it ends up giving them something much more than they had realized at first. It not only gives them purpose, but it aids in killing the ego rather than building it up. In my last “regular job,” after I had retired from working in Engineering and before I took up my love of writing as a full-time profession, I worked at a non-profit with “at-risk” young men, ones who had been in some kind of trouble with the law or who had been incarcerated for one reason or another. The non-profit I worked for helped them to find jobs in various sectors and then trained them i...
One of the best known of the Desert Fathers of fourth-century Egypt, St Sarapion the Sindonite, travelled once on pilgrimage to Rome. Here he was told of a celebrated recluse, a woman who lived always in one small room, never going out. Skeptical about her way of life—for he was himself a great wanderer—Sarapion called on her and asked: “Why are you sitting here?” To this she replied: “I am not sitting, I am on a journey”. I am not sitting, I am on a journey. Every Christian may apply these words to himself or herself. To be a Christian is to be a traveller. Our situation, say the Greek Fathers, is like that of the Israelite people in the desert of Sinai: we live in tents, not houses, for spiritually we are always on the move. We are on a journey through the inward space of the heart, a journey not measured by the hours of our watch or the days of the calendar, for it is a journey out of time into eternity. * ...