Johann's real name is actually Hans. He isn't a Catholic priest or a Buddhist monk; he's a Methodist pastor. I meet him in Chiang Mai, Thailand's second largest city, rather than the isolated village where I had been expecting to find him.
Which shows that causality and chance can coexist. It's an effect of the uncertainty principle coined by Heisenberg, one of the legends of my personal cosmology, of those mysteries that I don't understand but which lend themselves to many interpretations. Not to mention that the very name is extraordinarily fascinating and evocative.


Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Photograph: Alamy

But let's start at the end (which isn't actually the end). So, I meet Hans or Johann, who turns out to be neither whom nor where I expected him to be. How it happens and why is the plot for a story that is waiting to be told. A story that begins in an Italian restaurant in Bangkok, where I hear a priest or a monk, who for almost thirty years has lived "somewhere near the Burmese border", moving between the Karen villages dotted around the mountains in the area.
This is just the start of a series of events that kicked off then and continued in an apparent cause and effect link. But they were also entirely random, determined by my freely made personal choices, and often pure impulses. The uncertainty principle magically brings with it a concept of self-determination.
That's how it happened for Hans: many years ago he chose to be a missionary in Thailand because he was interested in Buddhism and had read Siddhartha. He came to the isolated Karen village, even more isolated than where I looked for him, by pure chance. "There were so many open doors," he says. Once through the door to the village, still protected by the Spirits, he had to find a point of contact with the Karen people, a way of communicating the Word. He found it by studying their legends and their dreams, which he compares to those in the Bible (there are actually many similarities, beginning with the name of God: Y'wa, for the Karen).
So, at the Thai-Vietnamese restaurant where we spend the early afternoon, I am reminded of Jung's archetypes and Freud's dreams, Jeremiah's lamentations, the wi and the k’thi thra, the Karen prophets and shamans with their Spirits. Interesting and engaging company.
I mull over and slightly regret the meetings and characters that preceded them and that led me here. The Italian calling himself an adventurer with many stories to tell, the young Karen priest who doesn't understand what I'm looking for, the apparition of a charming Bernadette.
"The funny thing is I don't know who I'm looking for, but it's good to set off at dawn to do it," I noted down on the morning I began following this story. It was as though, for the umpteenth time, I were trying to trigger my own personal butterfly effect. By getting on an old bus rather than with a flutter of wings.
"In the end, it's about believing in God," says Hans.
I believe. And I thank him for this story.

Les Philosophes, by Joan Mirò