A moving story appeared in our local newspaper recently about former Cistercian monk who has spent the last 50 years building a cathedral by himself near Madrid. The article was a reprint from the Times. There it appeared April 1 and there had to be assurances that this was not an April Fool joke.
There is much of the positive side of the April Fool in this story, however. He is referred to locally as “El Loco”, in the country of Don Quixote, who had the “great good fortune to live a madman, and die sane.”
El Loco de la Catedral (Madman and the Cathedral) by James Rogan
Somehow I have pressed a button or something and lost a lot of my text and links – if I don’t get to rewrite that, please click on the link to the Times (above) to get more of this fascinating story.
In Ethiopia, mystics have been known to live their lives carving chapels out of solid mountain rock with their bare hands and simple tools.
As ever, the line between prophet and mentally ill is so thin. While the secularists would use that fact to denigrate mystics, I rather find that it gives me more respect for the mentally ill.