I\u2019ve been reflecting on the Eido Shimano situation (read more <\/span>here<\/a><\/span>\u00a0and <\/span>here<\/a><\/span>). There\u2019s a lot to the story. Sex, power, enlightenment, denial, self-righteousness, pretense, etc.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n And then there\u2019s the Roshi.<\/span><\/p>\n Anyway, the above image keeps coming to mind.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n You might be scratching your head about now wondering, \u201cWhat the heck, Dosho?\u201d Or \u201cAre those really snowshoes?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Let me assure you, they are snowshoes and this is a post with a moral \u2026 so first we need to take a trip to a big lake.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Last summer, I was on vacation, driving through the Upper\u00a0Peninsula\u00a0of Michigan (separating two big lakes) and I stumbled on the shrine for the \u201cSnowshoe Priest<\/a>,\u201d Bishop Baraga. Ever hear of him? I hadn\u2019t.<\/span><\/p>\n Turns out that in the mid-1800\u2019s this Slovanian priest travelled many hundreds of miles in winter with snowshoes from native village to native village, establishing and visiting missions.\u00a0<\/span>One of them was about where the above statue sits.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n He had a cousin known as the Mosquito Priest who did the rounds in the summer (not really).<\/span><\/p>\n Baraga really learned Ojibwa and Ottawa and wrote the first Ojibwa dictionary. He also wrote a bunch of respectful stuff about native people for his superiors. Despite his mission to missionize them, it seems like he was a pretty level guy. Then he died.<\/span><\/p>\n Sometime in the 1950\u2019s a group formed dedicated to getting him declared a saint. Think of all the meetings with weak coffee and bars (this kind<\/a>)! I don\u2019t understand why anybody would want to do that (tourism?) but they raised money and built the above monument, almost completing it in 1972. <\/span><\/p>\n But it\u2019s hard to be a priest, even a dead one that others wanna-be-a saint. As the Roadside America.com link \u00a0says, \u201cAs the Bishop\u2019s statue was being lowered onto the cloud, a portion of the statue\u2019s hemline caught on one of the beams. When an acetylene torch was used to cut it away, the polyurethane lining within the statue ignited, and in moments smoke and fire engulfed the sculpture.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Here\u2019s Father Baraga on fire:<\/span><\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/_0uPSljNE9f4\/TSDTjImF3lI\/AAAAAAAABCI\/4dPvNFSpHFY\/s1600\/101_1551.JPG\")
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