Balance Point: Searching For A Spiritual Missing Link

by Joseph Jenkins
Jenkins Publishing
298 Pages

reviewed by Christine Hall

On a spring morning in 1999, a delivery van rattled down the long driveway to Joseph Jenkins’ country home in Pennsylvania to deliver a manila envelope. Inside the envelope was an official looking legal document and another envelope, this one white and letter-sized. The legal document was from a group of lawyers in Montana, informing him that his Great Aunt Lucille Boggs had died on April 26. Following her instructions, they were forwarding the enclosed envelope to him, which contained a letter from Aunt Lucy, along with a check for $10,000.

Jenkins had only met his great aunt once, for about two minutes at a family funeral twenty years earlier, so a sizable check and letter from beyond the grave was totally unexpected. The letter, rather cryptic and with indications that the writer was possibly paranoid, instructed Jenkins to travel to her home in rural Montana where he would find further instructions awaiting him.

Although Jenkins figured that his aunt was probably just a crazy old woman, he decided that he couldn’t keep the money unless he paid heed to her request. He soon found himself in Montana, where in the study of her home he found another check, payable to him for $30,000, along with another cryptic letter explaining that she needed him to finish her work. If he was successful, he would receive her estate, worth over a half million dollars.

Thus begins the saga of the self-published book, Balance Point: Searching for a Spiritual Missing Link. Based on fact but told in a fictional manner, Jenkins paints a picture of himself as a self-employed roofer who lived with his wife, Annie, and daughter, Penelope, in rural Pennsylvania. There, they indulged in their passions for beer and wine making, with little else to distinguish them from any other typical American family. At the story’s beginning, neither he nor his wife had much interest in ecological issues or in New Age spiritual practices.

All of that changed rapidly, however, when they attempted to unravel the mystery left to them by his great aunt so they could claim the half million dollar prize. Almost immediately after finding the second check, Jenkins got involved with a coven of witches in Ohio, who had worked rituals with Aunt Lucy. Next, he and Annie were off to St. John’s, Newfoundland, where they met with a college professor associate of his aunt who’d been studying a phenomenon among bees called the “robbing frenzy,” which Lucy had thought might explain the way that people were treating the planet’s natural resources. There was a stop-over in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where they met another associate, also an academic, who eventually remembered that their great aunt had frequently visited a shaman in the jungles of Peru.

During their travels to Ohio and Canada, they received a crash course in our ecological predicament. They learned about global warming, the subsequent shrinking of the Earth’s polar ice caps and the damage that rising ocean levels have already done in places like the Bahamas. They were given facts on the rising numbers and levels of toxic chemicals found stored in the body fat of people across the globe – even when they live far away from civilization. They also learned of a computer study indicating that unless drastic changes are made, the planet will not be able to support human life at the current level by the year 2040.

None of this is new. All of this information, and more, is already well known to anyone who is paying attention to environmental issues. In fact, if this scientific evidence was all that this yarn had to offer, there would be little to recommend here. The story would play like a standard movie-of-the-week “with a message ripped from today’s headlines.”

The tale takes on an important new dimension, however, when Jenkins and his entourage made a trek to the Peruvian rain forest to meet with the shaman Eduardo. At this point, the story begins to examine the spiritual shortcomings that have led to our present environmental predicament, a subject that’s seldom broached whenever ecological issues are discussed.

Jenkins makes the case that misdirected spirituality is largely responsible for our misuse of the environment. We have ceased being awed by the mystery of life, he says, and have come to see our planet as nothing more than a lifeless rock that is ours to do with as we will. At the same time, we have developed a sort of species-wide philosophy of manifest destiny, and have come to believe that we human beings are the greatest and most important form of life on the planet. According to Jenkins, unless we change our viewpoint and start relating to the planet as the living and nurturing mother that she is, we are doomed to possible extinction. At the very least, we will become an endangered species.

In addition to Balance Point, Joseph Jenkins is the author of two other books: “The Slate Roof Bible” and The Humanure Handbook. For more information, visit the web site of the publisher at http://www.jenkinspublishing.com.

To read an excerpt from Balance Point click here.