A Mille Lacs Messenger story about me [Thomas Dahlheimer] is presented below

A picture of me with the words Less is more were displayed on the front page of the October 24, 2007 edition of the Mille Lacs Messenger. The statement "Tom is still living the simple life" was also display near my picture.

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On page 2 there is a large picture of me with my small house in the background. And a picture of me sitting next to my computer is also display on this page. In addition, the words BIG GUY - tiny house are displayed on the top of this page.

The story begins with the words:
Thirty years after he first appeared in the Messenger, Tom Dahlheimer is still living as a "counter-culture Catholic

By Rob Passons
Messenger staff writer

A month ago I was perusing the Messenger archives of the 1977, and I saw a story on Tom Dahlheimer of Wahkon.

"Who the heck is this guy?" I said out loud. Oops.

Information was forthcoming from a variety of sources all seated within 16 feet of my desk.
"He is a prophet"
"Kind of a hermit"
"He's really smart"
"A Hindu Catholic"
"Kind of crazy"
"But he makes a lot of sense"
"Really a nice guy"

Then came the words I dreaded. "You should do a story on him." I looked up at the twinkling vistage of my lunatic editor.

"I don't wanna," I said reasonably.

"Why not?" he whined.

"He's a gall derned daffodil, a burned out hippy freak sitting out there smoking banana peels and praying to Ishtar," I explained.

"No he's not." A chorus of objections rose above the normal din.

"You're a journalist, for crying out loud! Where's your objectivity?" my editor thundered.

There it was. I knew I had a date with a daffodil. "All right, I'll go," I said. "But if he starts talking to his imaginary pet unicorn, I'm outta there!"

I called him. He was soft spoken and remarkably coherent for a total wacko. I was till suspicious. I set a time for our interview.

He said he lived in a small, red house, and wasn't hard to find. It wasn't small. It was tiny.

I knocked on he front door and Tom Dahlheimer circled round from the back door, which was 8 feet from the front door, to meet me. " I sealed the front door up for the winter," he explained.

He was taller than I thought he'd be. A smidge over 6 feet, I estimated. His beard framed a half smile that hinted of a distant 16th century Italian relative.

I shook his hand and followed him inside.

"Wow, this is a really little house," I said. Not much gets by me.

"Yeah," he said., looking around. He told me the floor plan was roughly 8x18 feet.

I quickly did some math. "That's 128 square feet," I said.

"Hmm, he said. "Well, it's bigger than the last one."

The last one?

Tom built his first house on the lot from scraps he found in a lumber yard dumpter. He lived in the strucure for over 20 years. "It burned down," he said.

I looked around. There was a hot plate resting on a small gas stove. A tiny pot-belly stove by the door. I figured it would hold one medium-sized log. There was a portrait of a young-looking Jesus hanging above a small desk where a laptop hummed expectantly. A picture of a slightly ironic-looking Thomas Merton sat by Jesus' right hand.

I had done my research. Prior to 1977 Tom had the theological known universe on his way back to the Catholic faith. He took a vow of poverty and celibacy. I looked around and saw nothing to indicate he had ever broken either vow. No Porsche in the drive, no panty hose on he shower rod.

Tom Dahlheimer is a devout counter-culture Catholic. Up until that moment I could not have imagined the words "counter-culture" and "Catholic" snaring the same sentence, unless the word "denounce" was lurking some-where nearby. I was wrong.

Tom hit the road in the late 60s and studied eastern religions in California. "I was into Thomas Merton," he said. Referring to a Catholic priest who sought to make the Catholic religion palatable for hippies. "I got into the ecumenical movement,"

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I stopped him. "OK, uh, what's that?" I asked.

Tom described it as a movement to find the commonalities in different religions, to bring people of different faiths together instead of driving them apart. "Christianity had been refracted through the Greek and Roman facets of human civilization," he said. "It needed to be refracted through the eastern and Native American for it to come to its fulfillment."

Whoa. This guy was definitely no daffodil.

"I came back to Christianity and Catholicism, but I stayed counter-cultural," he said.

His beliefs and observations are a braided cord of logic and intuition, or faith. It's apparent he has incorporated the Buddhist heart/head connections into views on religion.

"There are treasures in all religions, and they came into existence by divine providence," he said. "It's important for Christians to find those treasures."

He's speaking my language now.

We compared theological metaphors for a few minutes before he smoothly switched gears from the heart to the head. "It goes against logic to blindly follow the edits of the Pope or the bishops," he said. He supports his thesis with tales of the atrocities committed against native Africans in the 15th century, all with the blessings of the Catholic Church. "The Pope told the explorers to take everything they had and put them in perpetual slavery."

Tom finds an undeniable irony in the concept of evangelical mega-churches as well. "Wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many are those who will walk in it," he said, quoting the book of Matthew, Chapter 7. "That's what Christianity is for a lot of people - they aren't searching for truth, they are fining safety in numbers."

He sat comfortably silent for a moment. "Faith is not without reason," he mused.

I nodded in agreement. "There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as religion," Sir Arthur Conan Doyle," I said proudly. Once a decade I am able to pull an applicable literary referrence out of the cluttered library of my mind.

"Yes, he agreed with a slow nod. I was pretty sure he just filed the reference away into his own catalogue.

Our conversation came back to his lifestyle. "I have no regrets," he said. "I have everything I want."

He shook my hand, and I left him standing in he doorway of his tabernacle, his shrine, his sweat lodge, his tiny cathedral. I headed back to the office feeling peacefully agitated.

"So how did it go?" my editor asked.

"Well," I said. "If he's crazy, he's my kind of crazy."

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"There are treasures in all religions, and they came into existence by divine providence. It's important for Christians to find those treasures." - Thomas Dahlheimer

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