An ecstatic loneliness: Preface
By Michael Moriarty
web posted August 6, 2012
What was the reason I began my journey as an ecstatic loneliness? My pilgrimage as a blissfully wandering ex-patriot?
"Progressive" America.
I now liken that evolving United States of Progressive America to a burgeoning disease I now call The World War III Axis.
Then again The Progressive Oligarchy could also become a kind of Second Soviet Union. Or today's Red China for that matter. Or all three rolled into the Obama nightmare we now have in the White House.
Yes.
The Progressive New World Order is becoming an increasingly totalitarian Fourth Reich.
Roughly twenty-two years just passed within that last sentence. Its middle and recent years include my ecstatic loneliness.
Here's my letter of resignation from a Canadian "Progressive" magazine:
Letter of Resignation from Ottawa Life Magazine
I'm surprised I've been with OLM this long.
It's been nice but the end was inevitable.
I shouldn't hesitate to leave a Progressive Catholic editor who doesn't even pay me for my articles.
The dreams of Progressive Catholics and how they will change the Vatican are no different than Barack Obama's Progressive Megalomania that he will "fundamentally transform the United States of America."
You'd have to start paying me to put up with the Progressive censorship and, even then, I doubt if it would be enough money to justify work as a cover for a false sense of Liberality to Progressive Liberalism.
Liberal Fascism is more like it.
Goodbye and good luck.
You'll need it.
Michael
Now that I've cleared the decks of all potential readers on the Left?!
Allow me to introduce you to An Ecstatic Loneliness.
This journey will, with all its flashbacks to the past, comprise an autobiography … of sorts.
As I compose this preface from my blissful perch in Canada, I ponder the pilgrimage of my last twenty years and offer up prayers of gratitude.
"Thank you, Father Almighty, for every single thing that has happened to me!"
That actually includes every detail of my entire life, joyous, painful or indifferent.
Since, however, this memoir concentrates upon the last twenty years, I can frankly say that without the last, very, very Canadian twenty years, there would have been no gratitude possible.
That I am alive at all is entirely in the wake of miracles!
That could well be the other title for this: In The Wake of Miracles.
Such magic, however, doesn't appear unless, of course, one's life or, in my case, one's much more important sense of individual freedom has been profoundly threatened.
With freedom threatened, Life itself becomes vastly more unimpressive.
That might explain certain attributes of courage in the war to protect individual freedom and individual responsibility.
Why Canada, of all places, the most renowned experiment in Socialism on the North American continent, why she should have become my refuge and eventually my salvation?
It is only one of the questions I hope to answer with this book.
Chapter by chapter my whole life will begin to pore out, page after page, and then, upon the computer screen, story after story.
Since my writing and my music are inextricably bound together, who knows where my symphonic efforts may be led by this memoir as well?
I find such questions to be the most thrilling in my life!
Why?
For my entire existence I've dreamt of the life I now live.
Saving the best for last, the Almighty, with a few brush strokes, suddenly makes most of the dreadfully chaotic prelude to all of this, transforms it into sheer poetry.
It all makes sense now … well … most of it does.
What doesn't make sense now will soon be shaken into clarity.
Why do I know that?
Life has always been like that for me, filled with nightmares, the essence of which explodes inevitably into ecstatic transparency and perfection!
James Joyce called them "epiphanies".
I prefer to embrace them as God's Grace.
The magic that transforms the ugly duckling into a swan.
What then of old age and aging swans?
If they find a lovely corner of the pond in which to retire?!
The dawns and sunsets of life become divinely painful and painfully perfect. The coming first chapter invites you into the very meeting which eventually catapulted me out of my homeland and up into Canada. From there, I trust, each such encounter triggers an increasingly sensitized leap of faith into other, far and much more distant moments in my life.
The inner-connectedness of it all is what thrills me and, I hope, keeps my readers' eyes glued to the page.
I now see no reason why we shouldn't just, as they say, "get on with it!"
Next week in Enter Stage Right?
Chapter One of An Ecstatic Loneliness! 
Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor who starred in the landmark television series Law and Order from 1990 to 1994. His recent film and TV credits include The Yellow Wallpaper, 12 Hours to Live, Santa Baby and Deadly Skies. Contact Michael at rainbowfamily2008@yahoo.com.