An Account of My Life Called “A Pilgrim’s Progress,” by Marvin Wexler (2026)

It is the Winter of 2025-26.

It is also the Winter of my life. I turned 79 early in February 2026.

It’s time to put this account of my life to bed. I’ve been working on it, on and off, for almost five years.

And I could use a nap myself.

In 2023, I published an earlier version of this account on my poetry website, www.poetryfortheelderly.org. I call it my poetry website even though I am not a poet. Rather, during the past two decades I have tried to use poetry written by ‘real poets’ to help some people who need help.

I set up that website a dozen years ago to encourage and assist others to establish therapeutic poetry programs to help nursing home residents or other aged people in their communities who have dementia, Alzheimer’s and other disabilities. As discussed in Part II of this account, I began such a poetry program in a nursing home in Mamaroneck, New York back in 2011, and, fortunately, I’m still conducting that program today.

I published that earlier version of this account of my life on my poetry website because poetry and my work with poetry are important parts of my life. And also because I did not know how to publish it otherwise.

That earlier version was not a finished document. It contained many large holes that I labeled “Redacted Material.” The earlier version had holes because I was struggling with how much I should say about my marriage and my divorce. I nonetheless published that unfinished, earlier version on the website because I thought my life might be finished before I was able to finish the account of my life.

This revised 2026 account is a finished document. It contains no redactions.

I am publishing this revised account in three installments. The first installment is Part I, is titled “Beginnings” and is available now, in February 2026. The second, Part II, is called “Beginnings in the Middle.” The third, Part III, is called “Endings — and New Beginnings.” New beginnings, I believe, are important to personal progress. Parts II and III should be available later this year.

In publishing in installments, I follow Dickens. I understand that Dickens published his novels in installments in order to build dramatic tension, increase readership and thereby enhance revenue.

This account of my life differs from a Dickens novel in several significant respects. For one, I have worked hard to make this account something other than fictional. Second, this is a not-for-profit piece of work; there’s no financial cost to the reader. Third, despite my efforts to inject a good amount of humor, this account is not as good a read as a Dickens novel; well, to be fair to myself, maybe it’s on a par with “Bleak House.” Finally, Dickens is pure prose. This account, on the other hand, contains much poetry.

Poetry became important to me in the second half of my life, and how that happened and what poetry has done for me, and what I have tried to do with poetry for others, is a significant part of this story. I cannot tell that story without quoting and talking about poems.

Except for a few of my third-rate attempts at the poetic, the many poems reproduced in this account were not written by me. They were written by the likes of Longfellow, Dickinson, Whitman, Oliver, Rumi, and Hafez, to name but a half-dozen of the many poets whose poems appear in this account. Some of those poems helped me at various turning points on my journey, as explained in the account. All those poems are relevant to the story I tell. To what I call my Song.

The principal theme of the Song I sing in this account is Progress. The Progress of an individual on his journey through life. Which is why I call the account “A Pilgrim’s Progress.”

That title is a play on John Bunyan’s famous 1678 Christian allegory “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Bunyan wrote there about the theological progress along classical Christian lines that Bunyan’s main character, named Christian, experiences on his fictitious journey.

Bunyan began writing “The Pilgrim’s Progress” while in prison in England, having been convicted of the offense of preaching Christianity without possessing a license to do so from the Church of England. The entire book consists of a dream sequence in which Christian journeys from his hometown, named “the City of Destruction,” i.e., this material world, to his destination, “the Celestial City,” i.e., the world to come.

Christian’s journey is motivated by the existence of a great burden that is so unbearable that Christian must set forth on a dangerous journey to seek Deliverance from it. That burden is the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. The so-called Adamic Sin in the Garden of Eden. You know, the snake, the apple, Adam and Eve – and God.

Christian in Bunyan’s allegory is Everyman. That’s why Bunyan called his book “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Not “A Pilgrim’s Progress.”

I am not Everyman. I am only myself.

I am not a dreamed character named Christian. I am a flesh-and-blood person called Moishe in Yiddish, Moshe in Hebrew, Marvin in English.

I did not write this account from prison — although I began writing it early in a pandemic that confined me to something like house arrest.

I do not hail from the “City of Destruction,” or any place of the kind. I hail from Yonkers –“Yonkers, where True Love conquers,” as the great old song-poem about Manhattan says.

And the journey in my account does not end in the Celestial City. The journey described here ends, for now at least, in New Rochelle. Which borders on Yonkers. Which represents for me a kind of return. And, as this account makes clear, in my view Return is a road to Progress.

My journey was not motivated by need for relief from some great burden of guilt. But my journey has in large part been a search for Meaning, and maybe Meaning is the same thing Bunyan and his character Christian were searching for.

My story is not wedded to theology. As my account tries to explain, I do not consider myself to be a religious person even though I embrace and am proud of my Judaism and attend religious services regularly. This account contains a fair amount of story and commentary from and about Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and also about religion in general and interfaith relations — all as they relate to my roots and to my journey.

And because I practiced law in Manhattan for about 45 years, the Law is another important character in my account. As is Justice. As is Manhattan. As is Poetry. As is America. As is, of course, Progress – both personal (“A Pilgrim’s Progress”) and societal. And as are some important pairings, including: Learning and Unlearning. Head and Heart. Dealing with Authorities and Self-Authority. Armor and Vulnerability. Beauty and Brokenness. Alienation and Belonging. Insanity and Sanity. Resistance to Society and Assistance in Society. Masking and Authentic Identity. Success and Failure. Beginnings and Endings. And the Trifecta: Love, Purpose and Gratitude.

Also important to this account are seismic cultural changes that I perceive having taken place about every fifteen or twenty years in America during my lifetime, and my reactions to those cultural changes. As the story unfolds, we move from the Age of Conformity to the Age of Cultural Confrontation and Experimentation, to the Age of Greed, to the Age of Distraction, Disruption, Misinformation and Absence of Attention and Presence, and then to the present, which I perceive as the Age of Grieving Over the End of Normality.

But the essence of the story, of my Song, does not concern changes in the Nation or in the World during my lifetime. The essence of my Song is the change, the movement, the evolution within my self.

It is necessary to that story that I speak about my marriage and divorce. What happened during the last quarter or so of my marriage was central to what I perceive to be my mid-life crisis, and that crisis and how I responded to it are important to my story. Further, what happened promptly after my divorce had a significant impact on my closest relationships and that, too, is important to my progress. I have tried to relate those events as briefly and unhurtfully as possible.

I have the chutzpah to think that I have made some measure of Progress as a person and a pilgrim, and to imagine that there are things in this account that may prove of value to a patient reader.

I have been advised that it is not prudent in today’s world to publish all the personal information in this account to the world at large. I have therefore been persuaded to use a password in order to keep this account on the private side of the ledger. So if you want to read this account, contact me by email at [email protected], and we’ll talk. Then you can click on the links at the end of this Introduction and enter the password for each of the three Parts of this account as they become available in three installments.

My post-2023 revisions to the earlier version of this account resolved the difficulties that were embodied by my prior redactions mentioned above, added more thoughts and poems, and was a rather unsuccessful effort to shorten this account. It was also an effort to clean up typos and other such errors. I have no editor to help me with such human error, and I ask you to forgive such errors that remain.

Those post-2023 revisions did not include an effort to update this account. This revised account remains an account through Summer 2023, when I was a tender age 76-year-old.

I should explain something I have not revised. In the earlier 2023 version, I referred to Donald Trump as “the Former Guy.” I did that because in 2023 he was no longer President, and the earlier account reflected my relief, during the period from the liberating presidential election of 2020 through that earlier publication in 2023, that he was no longer in power. Unfortunately, now in 2026 he’s been back in power for more than a year, and with a vengeance. I nonetheless continue in this revised 2026 account to refer to him as “the Former Guy” in order to preserve the integrity of the description of my emotions as charted in this mostly chronological account and thus properly to reflect the relief I was feeling after he was defeated in 2020 and while I was writing this account through Summer 2023.

I should also explain the pictures on the cover pages of Parts I, II and III of this account, because their meaning is not obvious.

On the left side of each of those three cover pages is an image of Bunyan’s character Christian that I lifted from an illustrated commentary on Bunyan’s book by the noted Victorian Baptist clergyman C. H. Spurgeon. That picture, which Spurgeon drew, shows Christian searching for the right road on his pilgrimage path.

On the right-hand side of those three cover pages are pictures of yours truly that represent the three stages of my own pilgrimage – my beginnings, i.e., my Youth; my Middle Ages; and my years as an Elder. Thus, on the right-hand side of the Part I cover is the picture of me from my first passport. I got that passport when I was 16 so I could leave for a summer in Israel with a B’nai Brith Youth Organization group of teens. As discussed in Part I of this account, that trip was an important early step on my path.

I am imagining with this Part I cover picture that Christian, too, is in his youth and that he has just discovered both the Beauty and the Suffering in the World – as I did in my youth, including as concerns The Vietnam War and racial oppression, as discussed in Part I of this account. And I am imagining that Christian, like me, is setting out on his Search for Meaning and Sacredness. And I imagine further that the book Christian is holding in his Part I cover picture is a copy of Longfellow’s epic poem “Hiawatha,” which was one of the first poems that fascinated me in my youth, and the book is open to the chapter on Hiawatha’s childhood that contains these lines:

Then the little Hiawatha

Learned the names of all the creatures,

How they built their nests in summer,

Where they hid themselves in winter,

Talked with them when’er he met them,

Called the Hiawatha’s bothers.

Ancient wisdom first encountered in Youth that remains present for us to return to later in life. Ancient wisdom that many — particularly in their Middles — would call foolishness.

As to the Part II cover picture: On the right side of the Part II cover — opposite that same picture of Christian on the left — is a picture of me taken in my Middles. With this cover picture, I am imagining that Christian, like me in my Middles, is emerging from a mid-life crisis. And I imagine further that the book he is holding is now a book of poems from the 13^th century and that (as Bob Dylan writes in “Tangled up in Blue”),

And I also imagine that the poems in that book were written by the 13^th Century Muslim sage Rumi, and that Rumi’s poems are guiding Christian to new awareness — as my Muslim cousins from long ago and their mosques and poems and actions helped me in my Middles. All, and more, as discussed in Part II of this account.

And on the right side of the Part III cover is a picture of me as an Elder. I imagine that Christian on my left is also now an Elder. That he is coming to grips with Endings, in himself and others, and living though a Covid19-like plague. And now in his hand are two books: One book contains two of Pope Francis’ encyclicals, “Laudato Si” and “Fratelli Tutti,” and the other is the Jewish wisdom book “Pirke Avot” (in English, “Sayings of the Fathers,” or perhaps better translated as Sayings of the Ancestors), which books Christian has turned to in his old age as guides – all, and more, as spoken about in Part III of this account.

Christian valuing the Jewish Pirke Avot? Christian valuing Islamic poetry?

Heresy?

Bunyan probably would have thought so.

But maybe Christian’s pilgrimage has given him a broader perspective.

I evolved. Why can’t Christian?

Since I put down my pen in Summer 2023 and stopped working so intensely on this account, I have kept my pen busy on some other projects. Those new projects all are extensions of work discussed in this account, and they deserve mention here because of that connection if for no other reason.

The first such project is embodied in a document I wrote (and distributed to interested organizations around the country) in 2024 called “A Poetry Program for Victims of Commercial Sexual Exploitation and Trafficking.” My work through Summer 2023 concerning such victims is described in Chapter 4 of Part III of this account, and the new 2024 Poetry Program for those victims is an extension of that earlier work. If you are interested in this new poetry program for victims of commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking document, you can find it under the About Us tab on the home page of my poetry website.

The second major project I undertook after publishing the 2023 version of this account bears the following too-lengthy title and sub-title: “A Teaching Through Poetry about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict over Jerusalem and ‘The Holy Land’: Jerusalem and ‘The Holy Land’ as Seen Through Selected Jewish, Christian and Muslim Poetry – with the Hope that, Poem by Poem, We Can See the ‘Other’ and Help End the Violence.” That document also was published on my poetry website (and still appears there) and was otherwise distributed in 2024.

That Teaching was a response to the protests and counterprotests on university, college and high school campuses in Spring 2024 (and continuing thereafter) concerning the Gaza War. I called it a Teaching because I thought the document or some part of it could be used in some formal or informal class, or in a kind of teach-in or otherwise to educate and perhaps redirect both the protesters and the counterprotesters to more respectful, intelligent and constructive dialogue and action.

This Teaching concerns several subjects discussed in this account, including Judaism, Islam and Christianity, Israel, religious prejudices and phobias, interfaith relations and the healing power of poetry.

As suggested by the last part of the title of that Teaching (i.e., “…with the Hope that, Poem by Poem, We Can See the ‘Other’ and Help End the Violence”), I have continued since 2023 to dive enthusiastically into projects that people more sensible than I am might well consider foolish – and that in fact might well be foolish. That curious pattern of behavior is another subject of this account.

The other projects I undertook since publishing the earlier account in 2023 all concern Trump. In April 2025, a few months after he took power once more, I wrote and distributed a document I called “A Proposal for Organizing America’s Elders to Oppose Autocracy and to Show a New Path Forward.” In Fall, 2025, I wrote and distributed a satire concerning Trump’s Executive Orders that I titled “A Satire on Trump Executive Orders that Every Day Becomes Less Satiric and More Real.” And early in 2026, I penned a song called “Old Mad Donald” — a take-off on “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” Those three documents are my most recent public response to what I and many others see as the profound danger that Trump presents. That 2025-26 work flowed naturally from what I describe, beginning in Chapter 2 of Part III of this account, about my response to Trump through Summer 2023, which includes a poem I wrote about Trump during his first Administration that is reproduced in Chapter 2 of Part III.

If you want to read my 2025 satire on his Executive Orders or the 2026 “Old Mad Donald” song, they, too, are on my website under the About Us tab.

As this account unfolds, my hope is that it will coherently describe my current beliefs about three different Worlds that we human beings all simultaneously inhabit, how I came to those beliefs, what our relationships to those Worlds are and could be, and how that relates to my life, and perhaps also to yours.

I hope you will find that discussion not to be dry or pedantic, but rather one laced with some humor and much good poetry, and with an emphasis on such life-affirming concepts as:

Wonder and Beauty (despite the ubiquitous mud into which many faces have been pushed or have surrendered to).

Meaning (despite pervasive, soul-crushing feelings of meaninglessness).

Joy (despite much surrounding sadness and depression).

Personal Liberation (despite the abundance of various kinds of slavery).

Love (despite all the hostilities and armor).

Compassion (despite much surrounding indifference).

Learning (despite all the misinformation and craziness).

Listening and Hearing (despite all the shouting).

Healing and Hope (despite all the suffering and injustice).

I don’t mean to suggest that I am a stranger to the conditions in the parentheticals above or that I have internalized more than a modest part of the conditions or states of being that precede those parentheticals. Quite to the contrary — as I think this account of my life makes clear.

But this account has something to say about movement from those parentheticals toward what precedes those parentheticals, and I hope that this account will be somewhat helpful in such movements by others.

Be well.

Be kind.

Be patient.

Happy reading.

Marvin Wexler

[email protected]                                                         February 2026

PART I:     Beginnings

PART II:    Beginnings in the Middle

PART III:   Endings, and New Beginnings    (not yet available)