““He broke fresh ground—because, and only because, he had the courage to go ahead without asking whether others were following or even understood. He had no need for the divided responsibility in which others seek to be safe from ridicule, because he had been granted a faith which required no confirmation—a contact with reality, light and intense like the touch of a loved hand: a union in self-surrender without self-destruction, where his heart was lucid and his mind was loving.16 The crux of the story of Parzival and his quest for the Grail is suggested in his first encounter in the Grail castle. After various adventures, Parzival has sort of stumbled into the Grail castle. This is the wisdom of innocence. The purity of the simple fellow gets him into the Grail castle. In the castle lives a king who is sorely wounded. The king’s illness has brought devastation to the kingdom—it has become the Wasteland. The theme of the Grail is the bringing of life into what is known as ‘the wasteland.’ The wasteland is the preliminary theme to which the Grail is the answer…It’s the world of people living inauthentic lives—doing what they are supposed to do. Joseph Campbell Parzival can redeem the king and kingdom by asking a simple question. The wounded king is brought before him, and Parzival wants to ask, “What ails thee, brother?” But he has been told good knights don’t ask a lot of questions. The decisive moment for him is the choice between acting spontaneously from his heart or conventionally from his role as a knight. He fails; innocence is not enough, for he has already been socially indoctrinated. It has caused him to doubt the promptings of his heart, and as Wolfram says in the very first line of his Parzival, “If vacillation dwell with the heart the soul will rue it.”17 Life’s most urgent question is, what are you doing for others? Martin Luther King, Jr.””
