“What will it be like, how will it feel when, if ever, I find meaning in life?” I asked Brother David.

“You will feel at Home,” he said patting me softly and reassuringly on my left shoulder. “At Home, at Home,” he repeated, and I knew he meant that the whole universe was this Home. And that there was nothing other than Home.

A few minutes earlier, he had taken a ripe peach out of his small plastic bag and, with a sharp knife he had brought with him, cut it into two perfect halves. I took the half with the stone. Sitting at the edge of the little wooden dock, I started eating it slowly while admiring the sunset at the grey horizon of Cayuga Lake in upstate New York.

“This is the sweetest peach of my life!” I exclaimed. I was about to stand up to get us some napkins, but he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out some for us.

“You are self-sufficient, Brother David,” I said with a smile. “You are a whole universe unto yourself!”

After this small snack, I asked him a few questions. Then silence, calm, peace. For the first time in many years, I began to experience a homey feeling – the one I was sure he was talking about. I felt I was truly at Home and that Brother David was my father, my mother, my brother, my whole extended family.

Here I was, on the 23rd of August 2005, at the quite late age of 42 (he was 79, almost twice my age) with the first True Man I had met in my life, the first person who had turned out to be greater than my expectations. The first person in whom I could feel and experience Being. He was a man at absolute comfort in and with the world. He was truly at Home, behaved as one who was at Home, and let everybody else around him feel it too. All of his movements and gestures, his voice, his words, exuded an air of, how should I describe it?, well, “Authenticity.” Whatever he said and did flowed effortlessly, flawlessly, naturally. But this authenticity was not something that could be rationally deduced by observing the expression of any number of his qualities, such as openness, honesty, or the harmony between uttered words, facial expressions, and bodily movements. It was something that could be experienced through his living Presence. Actually, Being, Authenticity, and Presence seemed to be the three fundamental elements of the constitution of this True Man. I did not experience them as distinct, but as one – a totality. There was such a natural flow in his behavior, in every little thing he did or said, that nothing could be isolated as an instance of any of these three – everything merged into one continuous stream: Being – Presence – Authenticity.

The gratefulness of having met him two days earlier, after I had just found an amazing cottage on this very lake, had now turned into great-fullness. Never before in my life had I felt such indescribable fullness for being alive, for the privilege of being immersed in this incredible Existence that also included this great person. How pertinent that although the main teaching of Brother David Steindl-Rast is about Gratefulness, which I was at the time trying to practice in my everyday life (with some success), I ended up experiencing its very peaks when I met with him in person! The term “Gratefulness,” which he coined, is different and more expansive than gratitude: it describes a state of Being that does not depend on external circumstances; it is a deeper and unconditional experience of gratitude.

My six-month-long American journey, which had brought me for the first time so close to all of the ideas of Brother David that I had discovered in his books a few years earlier, this journey that allowed me to experience many moments and even whole days of true gratefulness, was now coming to its magnificent conclusion with events that I never anticipated and with gifts that were beyond my wildest imagination. How could I have imagined that after meeting him, I would still, that same day, be even more surprised by finding the perfect resting place on the shore of the lake with the kindest landlady, Diane? And who could have imagined that Brother David would have accepted my invitation to visit me at this place in order to enjoy the sunset together? And then there was the arrival, the next day, of my newfound soulmate, Jane, who was coming to show me around the area she knew very well because she had studied there. All these events were followed by a remarkable week of even more unforgettable moments in this magical resting place.

Were all these extraordinary events the result of setting the wheel of my new life in motion by departing from Europe to travel around the world, or were they a wholly divine gift? Well, maybe it was both: it was the divine gift which was given to me because of the courage I had to follow the inner voice and leap into the unknown. I now felt the truth of the saying that “when one follows his dream, the whole universe conspires to turn it into reality.” During those few days at Cayuga Lake, I felt for the first time that the universe (my universe, like my lake and my dock!) was dancing to my personal tunes; that I was the maestro of an orchestra whose music extended to infinity. Yet, paradoxically, I also felt that I was not in control of the music. That somehow all these gifts bestowed upon me were not the result of any effort on my part. I was conducting a piece that unfolded while I was conducting it! All the events seemed to unfold in spite of my own volition, for they went far beyond what I had envisioned: I had wanted to meet Brother David, not the greatest man I had met up to that time; I had wanted to find a nice cottage in the countryside to relax, not an earthly paradise; I had wanted to feel at home, not at Home. Everything surpassed my wildest expectations. I was within an unfolding process that did not distinguish between myth and reality. I felt grasped and consumed by the myth that had guided my first steps into the larger world – a myth that now seemed to materialise into a Real Myth:

Suddenly, Brother David became my father Laertes, Jane became my Penelope, the modern nearby town of Ithaca became the ancient Ithaca of Homer, and I was transformed into the eternally reappearing Odysseus.