Pardon the lateness on this.

Other journalistic pursuits precluded me from looking around anywhere in time for Earth Day. It’s fitting that the son of a secretary would wait until Administrative Professionals Day to provide any pennies for my random thoughts. I prefer “secretary”, by the way. It sounds more human and less droid.

Being a more spiritual human is a thought that still leaves a bit of a comet tail in my mind, even as Easter is a wrap until next year. Cleansing the spirit for the long haul can be a heck of a journey. Humankind (yeah, I’ll give PC a chance every now and again) has had an interesting journey with different methods of spiritual cleansing.

Holy water as a cleanser and protection against evil has a storied history among several Christian denominations. It’s a sacramental object in the baptismal ceremony and is considered so sacred once sanctified by a priest that it’s not allowed to be disposed of the same way you’d simply let dishwater out the sink.

In 2009, as panic spread across Italy from H1N1 virus, an innovative guy named Luciano Marabese merged the concept of sanctification and modern-day “convenience” when he developed a holy water font that worked like an automatic faucet common in restaurants, rest stops, hospitals and more. Me, I’d rather take the risk of a little, nasty germ instead of flailing my arms to and fro like folks do to trigger the faucets at highway rest stops.

Native Americans used white sage and other herbs to smudge for spiritual purposes. No fear of viruses there; they had the spirits on their side until viruses were, of course, introduced to their world.

Some peculiar choices of spirit stimulation have crossed the path of humanity. There was the curious case of Mary Ellen Tracy, a self-proclaimed high priestess of a religious sect that gained a bit of fame in late ‘80s Los Angeles for using sexual acts as central sacramental rites. The Left Coast is a fine incubator for that sort of diversion, I think. Then, you have the Blackfoot Nation. They were native to the modern-day U.S./Canada border — the perfect climate to have caused young males in their old tradition to do their spiritual cleansing in a sweat lodge. It must have felt great to get out of the cold with other dudes, leave camp for four days, have a vision of the future, then be ready for their society. Ol’ Mary Ellen would have set up a camp on the periphery of the territory, of course.

What piece of user-friendly, common-man spiritual advice moves me? It’s in a speech by another curve ball of a name I’ll throw in here — the late, legendary college basketball coach Jim Valvano. In a speech at the inaugural Espy Awards in 1993 that can move even the hardest heart to tears, Jimmy V concocted a spiritual medicine not with an elixir, but with words. It had something to do with laughing, thinking and crying.

“But think about it,” Valvano said, standing on the sports world’s dais weakened from the cancer that ended his life not two months later. “If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.”

And with your spirit, Jimmy V.

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Danny Barrett Jr. is assistant managing editor and can be reached by email at danny.barrett@vicksburgpost.com or by phone at 601-636-4545.