We have just returned from a 10-day trip to the Southeast, including beach time in Florida, which ended – figures – with a last hour-plus drive through a very heavy snowstorm. Within an hour of unloading our gear at home in the white-out, I found that I had come down with a nasty cold or flu, damned if I know which nowadays that we can’t get decent mercury thermometers, and that’s the way it is at this very moment, eyes watering and mind marching to some wobbling drummer. So this will be very brief. I hope to be back fully online by Cinco de Mayo, a day which can bring a kind of mind-spin of its own (Jose Cuervo, you are no longer a friend of mine.)
For now I have two things in mind, to maybe discuss more fully at another time. One: while stopped at a gas station in Tennessee, a woman approached my side of the car and knocked on the window. I opened the door as she began this wild story about her and her husband, how they had been unwittingly stuck without money on their way to visit her mother in an old-folk’s home and now needed cash for a hotel or gas or something that was never quite clear. This she spilled out in a torrent of self-deprecation and pleading that was down-right annoying, but also guilt provoking. Here she was humbling herself to me, who had instantly become The Man with the cash, secure and conceited on his vehicular thrown, deciding whether or not to throw a few silver coins to the humble peasant. And this king, me, was judging: her clothes were not too bad but still slightly tattered; her face looked prematurely wrinkled and her back teeth were blackened with rot. These were strikes against her, even as I thought, “Oh, look at you, mighty king, only willing to give to those who already have!” But, no, I was looking for signs of drug addiction. Rapid irrational speech, bad teeth and an insane nervousness spoke of crystal meth, and we all know not to give to alcoholics and junkies. But I did – five bucks, which I had had my hand on from the beginning, having already decided to take the middle course. If she really were in trouble, the fiver was small but something; if not, then it was not enough to kill her, or so I reasoned. But, if she had been in trouble, I had a few twenties sitting right there in the car. Cheapskate?
She promised to “pay it forward, “leaving me thinking: pay a measly five dollars forward? I don’t know. I will never know. What troubles me is, what does it say of me? Which also troubles me – what about her? Why am I always thinking of me? Yes, I don’t know.
Two: My son brought up religion last night for some reason, and how he thought some things worthwhile in (more specifically) Christian mythology, but not others. As he described it, with his analytical mind, all those things from Leviticus and whatnot seemed silly. I told him, well, the outward rules had been done away with by Christ, but he waved my standard explanation off. Look at it, Dad, the whole picture of the Bible and Christianity. Do you think it’s reasonable? And there, in my virus-addled mind, I found myself saying exacting truths.
For one, I was the one who had taught him about mythology, about how it spoke from another aspect of mind apart from the logical. I then found myself telling him that I had come from the epitome of the rational concerning social forms. I had been schooled well in the hard materialism of progressive social science. But something happened, gradually at first, and then almost like the lightning bolt that hit Saul on the road to Damascus. I suddenly began to understand the Bible, not in rational/sociological terms nor in moralistic terms couched in promises of hell or heaven. Rather, I began to understand in ways that it was meant to be understood, not as something opposing the rational, but as something extra-rational. That is, it began to make perfect sense apart from blind belief, with a different, more profound tact. I told him that I, too, was and would be skeptical without this gift of understanding that was a gift of grace. I also tried to tell him that he cannot work himself into this grace, for that is for Sprit to decide, but he can make himself available, which is all we can do. I tried to tell him this, but he was already moving out of the room to do something more important on a Sunday afternoon.
Which has brought me to verbalize the following for myself and for my readers: to convert people to any religion is and has never been my intent. It has been, rather, to help keep people open to extra-logical or miraculous or spiritual things. In my effort in this, over the years I have been brought to a point that I never expected: to a deeper understanding of Christianity that literally thrills, and that is so alien to my normal thinking pattern that I often doubt what I experience and have experienced. It’s a tough row to hoe, but the insights are so fantastic that I cannot stop writing about them, however poorly. This is no longer about someone else’s experiences with UFO’s or ghosts, but rather my own experiences with something that is perhaps extra-dimensional. It is an amazing thing, a phenomena so common that it is hard to believe that the world as we understand it doesn’t break up into fine pixy dust and blow away into the heavens.
But it doesn’t, and I, too, am left standing on my feet of clay again and again. But I’m telllin’ ya, just like I was with my son – something is out there, something that is way beyond us, something that works on levels that we cannot even imagine; and it is interested in YOU.
The snow has melted and now it’s raining and the land has become alarmingly green. I am going back to bed, with one of my favorite Gospel quotes in mind: “The wind blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (from Jesus in John, 3:8).
We have just returned from a 10-day trip to the Southeast, including beach time in Florida, which ended – figures – with a last hour-plus drive through a very heavy snowstorm. Within an hour of unloading our gear at home in the white-out, I found that I had come down with a nasty cold or flu, damned if I know which nowadays that we can’t get decent mercury thermometers, and that’s the way it is at this very moment, eyes watering and mind marching to some wobbling drummer. So this will be very brief. I hope to be back fully online by Cinco de Mayo, a day which can bring a kind of mind-spin of its own (Jose Cuervo, you are no longer a friend of mine.)
For now I have two things in mind, to maybe discuss more fully at another time. One: while stopped at a gas station in Tennessee, a woman approached my side of the car and knocked on the window. I opened the door as she began this wild story about her and her husband, how they had been unwittingly stuck without money on their way to visit her mother in an old-folk’s home and now needed cash for a hotel or gas or something that was never quite clear. This she spilled out in a torrent of self-deprecation and pleading that was down-right annoying, but also guilt provoking. Here she was humbling herself to me, who had instantly become The Man with the cash, secure and conceited on his vehicular thrown, deciding whether or not to throw a few silver coins to the humble peasant. And this king, me, was judging: her clothes were not too bad but still slightly tattered; her face looked prematurely wrinkled and her back teeth were blackened with rot. These were strikes against her, even as I thought, “Oh, look at you, mighty king, only willing to give to those who already have!” But, no, I was looking for signs of drug addiction. Rapid irrational speech, bad teeth and an insane nervousness spoke of crystal meth, and we all know not to give to alcoholics and junkies. But I did – five bucks, which I had had my hand on from the beginning, having already decided to take the middle course. If she really were in trouble, the fiver was small but something; if not, then it was not enough to kill her, or so I reasoned. But, if she had been in trouble, I had a few twenties sitting right there in the car. Cheapskate?
She promised to “pay it forward, “leaving me thinking: pay a measly five dollars forward? I don’t know. I will never know. What troubles me is, what does it say of me? Which also troubles me – what about her? Why am I always thinking of me? Yes, I don’t know.
Two: My son brought up religion last night for some reason, and how he thought some things worthwhile in (more specifically) Christian mythology, but not others. As he described it, with his analytical mind, all those things from Leviticus and whatnot seemed silly. I told him, well, the outward rules had been done away with by Christ, but he waved my standard explanation off. Look at it, Dad, the whole picture of the Bible and Christianity. Do you think it’s reasonable? And there, in my virus-addled mind, I found myself saying exacting truths.
For one, I was the one who had taught him about mythology, about how it spoke from another aspect of mind apart from the logical. I then found myself telling him that I had come from the epitome of the rational concerning social forms. I had been schooled well in the hard materialism of progressive social science. But something happened, gradually at first, and then almost like the lightning bolt that hit Saul on the road to Damascus. I suddenly began to understand the Bible, not in rational/sociological terms nor in moralistic terms couched in promises of hell or heaven. Rather, I began to understand in ways that it was meant to be understood, not as something opposing the rational, but as something extra-rational. That is, it began to make perfect sense apart from blind belief, with a different, more profound tact. I told him that I, too, was and would be skeptical without this gift of understanding that was a gift of grace. I also tried to tell him that he cannot work himself into this grace, for that is for Sprit to decide, but he can make himself available, which is all we can do. I tried to tell him this, but he was already moving out of the room to do something more important on a Sunday afternoon.
Which has brought me to verbalize the following for myself and for my readers: to convert people to any religion is and has never been my intent. It has been, rather, to help keep people open to extra-logical or miraculous or spiritual things. In my effort in this, over the years I have been brought to a point that I never expected: to a deeper understanding of Christianity that literally thrills, and that is so alien to my normal thinking pattern that I often doubt what I experience and have experienced. It’s a tough row to hoe, but the insights are so fantastic that I cannot stop writing about them, however poorly. This is no longer about someone else’s experiences with UFO’s or ghosts, but rather my own experiences with something that is perhaps extra-dimensional. It is an amazing thing, a phenomena so common that it is hard to believe that the world as we understand it doesn’t break up into fine pixy dust and blow away into the heavens.
But it doesn’t, and I, too, am left standing on my feet of clay again and again. But I’m telllin’ ya, just like I was with my son – something is out there, something that is way beyond us, something that works on levels that we cannot even imagine; and it is interested in YOU.
The snow has melted and now it’s raining and the land has become alarmingly green. I am going back to bed, with one of my favorite Gospel quotes in mind: “The wind blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (from Jesus in John, 3:8).
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