The Maitreya

The action of The Maitreya occurs some decades after the events novelized in The Gazebo and is Book II of the trilogy The Passing of Shadows, though it also stands alone as an independent work.

The setting of this work is the area around Dunkirk, Wisconsin, a little town south of Madison, which was the setting of The Gazebo, but most of the action occurs at the American Buddhist Communities Research Center located in the countryside between Dunkirk and Madison. There are some additional adventures in the northwest wilderness of the state on and around the Brule River. The time is sometime after 2015.

Of the characters from The Gazebo only two remain: Karl Redinius and Margaret Christofferson. They are in their eighties now and are the chief administrators of the ABC Research Center. As traditional religious, they have dispensed with their names and are known only as M’am and Sir.

As neo-agnostic Americanized Buddhists the two over the years they have superintended the building and maintenance of the huge complex that is the Center; they have recruited a number of scholars and artists whose duty is to ferret out and celebrate the hidden gnostic trends of the American experience (those better angels of our national nature); they have sponsored a teaching mission to create viable parishes whose outcome is to challenge many of the orthodoxies of the shadow side of the American experience, which has come very near to destroying the country and threatened the economic and ecological stability of the planet.

Their effort is to marginalize those orthodoxies in order to save the nation, the American people, the humans of the planet. It is their job to create a numerous and powerful parish American Buddhism in their native land as a leaven and bulwark against the destructive forces that threaten it. The very religious foundations of America are thought to need radical change. It is a confrontation the beginnings of which are dramatized here in The Maitreya.

At a certain point, a mysterious figure arrives outside the Center and loiters there. Those inside, encouraged by the prophesies of the often clairvoyant M’am, are led to believe that he is the Maitreya.

Steven Fortney is a graduate of a high school in Muskegon Michigan and then of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in philosophy. He attended Luther Theological Seminary for a year, without graduating or ordination.

He has been initiated in the Hindu Santana Dharma with the Himalayan Institute in Madison, taken Bod-hisattva vows through the Kalacakra initiation, and the Avalokitesvara Sad-hana, both with the Dalai Lama in Madison and at Deer Park, the Vajra Yogini Sadhana with Lati Rinpoche also at Deer Park near the village of Oregon, Wisconsin, participated in a Tara Retreat at Deer Park, undergone a naming ceremony in the Zen tradition in Fukujuji Temple in Miharu, Japan, and is a long term associate of the Jesus Seminar.

He was certified as a secondary teacher by the university in 1964. He taught 31 years in Stoughton High School, was a labor negotiator for 25 years and served as an alderman on the Stoughton City Council for 21 years. This is his fourth novel. He lives with his wife, Ruth, in Stoughton, Wisconsin. They have four children and six grandchildren.

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