​The author of the latest book that has graced my computer, Lee Strobel, has already garnered some attention in Hollywood with the making of the movie, “The Case for Faith.”  The real-life story is this: as an adolescent, young Lee heard the standard biology class matter-of-fact explanation for life’s variety: Darwinian Evolution.  Grasping at this, Lee found himself liberated at last from the moral strictures of religion.  Since there was no need for God – random chance took care of everything – there was no God, and Lee could then happily do as he pleased.  This worked fine in his youth as he furiously climbed the ladder at his job as a journalist at the Chicago Tribune, until his equally modern wife suddenly developed a passion for Christ.  How, he thought, could this intelligent woman do this?  Didn’t she know that religion was all fabricated by primitive minds out of ignorance and to keep the masses in check?  But after seeing improvement in his wife’s happiness, he decided to check out the current science on faith – and thus a book and a movie.
 
He moved on from there to write Finding the Real Jesus, and the book I have just nearly finished, The Case for a Creator.  Obviously, to make the books (and the movie) special, Strobel found in his research a continual “come to Jesus” moment.  The new evidence for God, he was surprised to find, has vastly increased the chances that God does indeed exist – that miracles are possible, that they were performed by Jesus, and, in the book I am reading, that the likelihood for intelligent design has become overwhelming.  He indeed was converted, he claims, by the evidence.
 
Reading Creator would have convinced me, too, if I needed convincing.  I do not and never have, even though I taught evolution at the college level as a graduate student.  The gradual flow of animals from the simple to the complex, all interconnected, seemed a very god-like way to populate the world.  What I refused to believe because it seemed so unbelievable, was the way Darwin and the neo Darwinists believed this change took place – by random chance and environmental selection.  What, I had always thought, were the odds that everything came from nothing, and then a section of this “everything” became self-conscious in human beings?  How does one get a rock from nothing, and then make that rock think?  The only trouble was that I was not a biochemist or bio anthropologist or a cosmologist.  I could not fight for what seemed so obvious to me with the hard scientists, for what did I really know of DNA, of protein construction, of the composition of the universe ten thousand years after the Big Bang? 
 
Strobel, however, goes to the great minds of our time to find out just how this belief in a creator really pans out in science.  He proves, or nearly proves, that the idea of a creator fits the Occam’s Razor test – that it is the most elegant and complete explanation for the appearance of the universe and then the life forms on Earth.  I had read some of these people’s books before – for instance, Michael Behe, who wrote Darwin’s Black Box.  Here, this biochemist explains his idea of “irreducible complexity” in organisms – how even at the single cell level, the functions of the cell are simply too complex to have been arrived at by gradual trial and error.  The case is this: that without the functioning of all sectors of the cell, none will function; that is, that there could not be room for periods of trial and error - and that even if there were, the time it would take for these functions to naturally arise would count in the trillions and trillions of years.  Thus, a creator.
 
On and on he goes, smashing one scientific article of faith after another.  The Cambrian explosion of species that happened over half a billion years ago not only brought forth most of the known phylum of today in a few short million years, but left no fossil evidence of the transition stages from the earlier simple life; the sum of bones of all the missing links for humans could fit in a shoebox (this I had known – the vision of proto-man given to us by paleoanthropologists is more a psychological Rorsach test than science); and the elegance of math somehow, inscrutably, describes the laws which govern our universe.
 
I include the last not because it is the most exciting to us who are not mathematicians, but because it reminds me of something strange I heard on a book audio while driving a month or so ago.  The book was Born on a Blue Tuesday, by an author I apologize for not remembering.  He (the author) is an autistic mathematical genius much like Rain Man, although he was able to bring himself mostly out of his shell (a very rare feat, we are told).  He tells of his incredible mathematical skills and how they appear: for instance, numbers have touch and color to him (thus the color of his birthday in the title).  He merely has to feel or see them in his mind to know what is what, arriving at conclusions to complex math problems by simple intuition, much like we would see that a tree is green.  His greatest love is prime numbers, whose texture gives him an internal joy.  These are numbers that can only be divided by themselves and one, and they are very hard to calculate, but he can do it automatically out to several dozen, or hundreds, without effort.  He was not taught this; rather, once he became aware of their existence, he understood the visions in his mind that were already there.  He was born with numbers and their meaning already in his head. 
 
Thus to the elegance of math and the need for a creator.  Math, it seems, is not an abstraction created by civilization, but rather an order implicit in the human mind that was brought forth by a sort of conscious awakening.  If, in the phrase once used, an “idiot savant” already has the most complex programming in his head at birth, what else can we say?  This author said of his skills and condition that portions of his brain did not function as well as “normals" – thus leaving the other parts of his brain uncovered, much the way that less water in a lake leaves the rocky ground uncovered.  But that ability is already there, inborn, for most of us.  What does this say of the human design?
 
And what does it say of the creator of the human design?  Apparently, that we were meant to discover the elegance of His universe.  Going back to Strobel, we find that many mathematical formulas that later were found to describe important physical phenomena were discovered by physicists and mathematicians not through experimentation, but through the working through of formulas for their brilliance – for their exquisite design.  It was only later in some cases that it was found that these abstract beauties so accurately described real-life phenomena. 
 
Says one scientist interviewed by Strobel, “we are positioned in the universe to give us maximum advantage to observe it – and learn from it.”  So it seems that we were given our intelligence not as an accident of evolution, as some anthropologists say, but because we were meant to learn of the brilliance of God.  According to Strobel and his many experts, it is apparent that we are made in His image, and have been given the tools to discover what that image is.  The evidence for this, they say, has never been stronger, and is getting stronger all the time.  FK
 
 
 
 
 
   

(Note: See Cal Roeker's comment posted on the previous blog below)

​Sometimes ghost stories reach the big press.  This one was in the March 2017 edition of National Geographic, involving a young man named, of all things, Maykool Acuna, from Chile.  He had gone on a tourist jaunt to the big jungle in Bolivia, to Madidi National Park, cared for by a vigilant tourist company that was well used to tenderfoots who were oblivious to the ways of the jungle.  At base camp, before a walking tour into the jungle, they had a local shaman lead a Pachamama ceremony that praised and asked for protection from the “earth mother” still worshiped by the locals (and much of Peru and Bolivia), where candles were lit and instruments played, all good stuff for the tourists.  But Maykool refused to participate.  Getting up from the circle that had been formed, he stalked out of the ceremony, but did not go back to his room.  Instead he ran into the jungle, and that was the last that was seen of him for over a week. 
 
The tour company, very upset at having lost one of its customers, and set out to find him at once, but soon had to give up.  Something more had to be done, so they hired a husband-wife shaman team to try to get to the bottom of the disappearance.  The shamans quickly pronounced that Maykool had offended Pachamama, and having lost her protection, was quickly attacked by a local duende (a forest spirit), who it is said could whisk the unwary into a different dimension, hiding them in plain sight.  The duende had used a powerful tree spirit to accomplish this, and the shamans were very worried.  A team of expert forest guides searched for days, but could find nothing.  Finally, an article of clothing was found, and at this, the shamans pronounced that the duende had been convinced to let the man go, and that shortly he would be found.  The following day, he was, and this is his story:
 
At the Pachamama ceremony, he had become anxious and confused, and had panicked at being in the jungle.  Irrational, he had tried to run away from it by going straight into the forest.  To lighten himself, he had even thrown off his sandals and his cell phone.  When finally he came back to his senses, he was beneath a tree, utterly lost.  He tried to find the nearby river, but could not.  To survive, he followed a troop of monkeys who dropped fruit to him from the trees, and led him to shelter and water at night.  Still, he weakened, and was found exhausted and covered with bug bites at last. 
 
He did not know why this had happened to him, and still did not believe in the spirits, despite his mental confusion and apparent disappearance from experienced trackers.  He had been less than a mile away from camp when found.  Putting it all together, the rest were convinced – the duendes and the other spirits of the forest were real. 
 
I know of them – in the Venezuelan Amazon, they also believe in the duendes, and also in a dark, often malevolent forest spirit called Mawadi.  I must admit that I felt the malevolent side to this spirit myself, although, obvious to us racionales, there are psychological explanations for it.  I heard many stories of spirits and shamans while there, but one in particular comes to mind.  A criollo (what a typical, mixed-race Venezuelan is called), Don Quero, who had come from the Llanos (the great flood plains of Venezuela north of the forest) to run a small store in the Amazon told us of his father, who was a shaman himself.  For the criollos, there are two main types of shamans: the curandero, or healer, and the brujo, or bad sorcerer who is paid by his clients to either make someone fall in love with them, or to harm their enemies in some way.  Don Quero claimed that his dad was a curandero, although some work both sides of the fence.  In any case, due to a clash of interests in clients, his father came to battle a local brujo, and Don Quero as a child witnessed much of it: tables suddenly upturned by invisible forces, the presence of and howling of demons, and the projection of magical darts that are able to harm or even disengaged the spirit from the body (causing illness and death).  The story was a true ghost story – the details were harrowing, and one could imagine the child that he was cowering in the corner of his house.  The father came out victorious, but Don Quero wanted nothing more to do with any of it.  It was real, and too much to handle.  The Indians in this area fully agreed, except that many had taken up the task of dealing with the forest spirits.  For some, it was a way to social power, but for many, they felt they had to deal with them.  They lived among them, after all, often miles upriver in a canoe while fishing, or miles away from home while hunting in the forest.  It was, to them, not an option to ignore them.  They were real.
 
In my humble opinion – and it has to be humble, because I haven’t the faintest idea how to deal with such things – they, these spirits, are real.  Just from my experiences alone, too many people have encountered them who were otherwise rational adults.  Some even swore that sometimes the duendes would come to party with them during their yarake (fermented manioc) fests.   But I would stress to New Agers who want to contact them that, whatever they are – aliens from another dimension, nature spirits, demons from hell, or all of the above, many are not benign.  They may be mischievous and relatively harmless, or they may embody a will of enmity towards one or all humans. 
 
Lesson: don’t mess.  When in Rome, perhaps it is best to call out the best in the spirits along with the locals.  However, don’t try this at home.  Even experienced shamans are often, and I mean often, harmed, and sometimes even killed in their dealings with the spirits.  If it is all psychological, so be it – it can still cause illness and death.  But I think not – this is a broad universe, fully capable of housing other types of beings not perceptible to us with our ordinary senses and states of attention.  To believe in them – Jesus and the people of his time called them evil spirits or demons – is not to become a heathen.  It is simply a recognition that something, in probable fact many things, exist outside our normal knowledge; and that we know so little about them, it is best to avoid contact.  Except if you cannot; except if you live in the deep forest where Mawadi reigns.  FK
 
 
 
   
 
           
 
           
                       
 
            

​After reading several heavy, heavy books about the heavy, heavy load Christianity (and others) says we have on our path to God, I searched Kindle for a lighter inspirational book – a summer reading of the Divine.  Such are not hard to find, and might well be one of the major categories of books sold today, right up there with mysteries, adventures, and bodice ripper.  But this also makes the choosing harder: which one might be serious about its subject without being pedantic?  I believe that the book I finally chose, Intimacy with God: One Man’s Journey, by Rob Oberto, fits the bill perfectly – and literally, as the “bill” on Kindle was only $5.99.
 
It starts a little too simply – a run-through of a guy’s ordinary life as he grew up in the 1970’s, looking for a path to success from the perspective of a successful family.  He has been raised a Sunday Catholic and sent to Catholic schools, not because the family was religious, but because that is what one did in an Italian-American family in Boston at the time.  Poised for a great job in computers at the beginning of that era (1979), we expect some sort of conversion – but not like the one he tells us he has.  As he is walking the area around Boston University, he hears a voice – a very special voice that is different than mere thoughts in the head.  It is the voice of God.  “Is this what you want?” it tells him in so many words.  The voice continues to plague him over several days; he thinks he might be going crazy, but finally he must admit that it is God, and he must follow the thought: no, it isn’t what he wants, not really.   The lives he sees around him are shallow and unhappy, and he knows that awaits him, too, if he were to follow what he thought he wanted.  Now he knows what he really wants: to follow God. 
 
And so we run through his life, a series of ups and downs – divinity school, marriage, work, disappointments, insights, failures, and bouts of poor health – and occasional, undisputable (to him) talks with God and Jesus.  And more than talks; at one point, he is driving his car and suddenly, he is gone, a mere presence before a dark and swirling cloud.  It is God, who again is directing him in his life.  He feels, out of the darkness, a heat that almost burns him, that then shows him how he appears to God:  a skeleton with a small bit of meat attached to his ribs.  This little flesh is his grace, what he has accomplished towards the holy in his life.  It is a beginning, but not enough.  There is much to do. 
 
He moves with his wife to the Pacific Northwest and there is given several ministries.  The last saps his energy to such an extent that he has to stop, sick and listless.  He shuts off his inner self from God, angry at what he believes is a betrayal.  12 years go by, and he becomes extremely ill again.  After nearly two years of medical exams, they find that he probably has cancer in a cyst on a kidney.  He goes in for a biopsy and the probable removal of the kidney, standing beside the bed in which he will become a patient, when he is taken in his senses to a large room with a table at which God is seated.  They converse, and here he is told, “You will be leaving this place.”  He wonders: to heaven?  To where?  He returns to his body, has the operation, finds that the cyst in non-cancerous, and at its removal, returns to health.  A new ministry, one that will not take too much time, comes his way.  He moves, as God has foretold, and then finds his other task: to “tell people that Jesus loves them.”  To tell them in a book – this book.
 
He is also left with the need to understand the trials of Elijah.  In the Bible, Elijah is sent to win the people back from Jerusalem’s back- sliding into paganism when the king, Ahab, marries Jezebel and wishes to incorporate the god Baal into the people’s religion.  It involves group sex and the blood sacrifice of infants.  Elijah is sent to dual with the sorcerers of Baal on Mt Carmel, where he brings back rain after a two year drought and slays the sorcerers.  Jezebel then tells him that she will have him killed within a day.  He outruns Ahab’s chariots and makes his way to Mt Horeb, aka Mt Sinai, where he meets with God, who tells him: Why are you here?  Elijah responds, “Because I have failed you.  Only 7000 Israelites have come back to you.”  Replies God, “That is all I called from you.  I will manage the rest.” (my approximations of the dialogue)  It is then that Oberto understands his anger with God, and his real success: that he was not meant to change the world, but only a bit of it; that God will take care of the rest.
 
And so a bit of his “bit of it” is found in this book.  An excellent read for those who want to find a common man who has uncommon talks and appearances before God, now, in our current era.  The idea is that the age of miracles, of God’s immediate and human-like presence in our lives, is not gone, but ever- going.   And we are convinced: Oberto is astounded and frightened for his sanity in his experiences, and often asks, begs, that they go away.  He then follows the voice, and then not, and then learns of life through his trials and errors.  He is us, if we want to be – flawed but called, if we listen, called to do that one bit that is our service, be it small or large.  The size and success is not for us to judge; rather, our trial is in having faith in what we are called to do, and faith that God will do the rest. 
 
At times in all of our lives, I am sure that this message – that God is as present as ever, and that our small lives are enough if we follow the inner voice - is just the balm we need to keep on going, to keep on believing that we count, and, as God had said to Oberto, to rest assured that we are loved.  FK
 
 
   
 
           
 
           
                       
 
            

​It will come as no surprise that I wait with anticipation for any “God” movie that rolls out to the video store, and The Shack was another one of those.  I had read the blurb: a man who was cruelly beaten by his father as a child comes to learn to live with his past in some shack in the forest where odd, magical people – perhaps divine - help him through his trials.  Ah, I thought, probably saccharine and filled with clichés, but what the heck.  I love miracles and the promise of salvation.  So this weekend, when at last the video made it to our little backwater here, I rented it.  What came out in the first minutes of the movie were surprising and not a little upsetting.
 
I will give it away, as the nastiness is done within the first part of the movie: the father of our hero as a child, an Irish-American drunk, did indeed beat this poor child and his mother, but there is much, much more.  Frustrated with his inability to protect his mother, the young boy pours strychnine into his father’s bottles of whiskey.  The father dies, but there is no trial or investigation that we know about.  Instead, the movie quickly transports us to the present, where the boy has become a man with a loving wife and three children – one a loveable little girl of seven.  The man, “Dad,” still suffers from nightmares, but his wife understands and comforts him.  He is apparently able to live a good life otherwise.
 
And so we are brought to Dad and his children – sans wife, who must work – going on a camping trip.  They come to a beautiful lake surrounded by mountains in a crowded campsite, and all is fine.  At one point, the two older children go out in the canoe while Dad stays with the youngest.  Dad calls to the children in the canoe to come in, and the older daughter stands to give him a wave.  This capsizes the canoe, and the boy suffers a hit on the head and is trapped, drowning, beneath the canoe.  Dad must swim out to save him and bring him back, pumping his chest on the dock to make him breath as everyone in the camp watches.  The boy is saved, but what then of the little girl?  She has mysteriously disappeared.  Searching does no good, so the police are called.  In time, the police discover that the little girl has been kidnapped by a crazed wilderness man who has struck before.  The hounds trace him to a shack, where they find the torn dress and blood of the little girl.  She is never found, but presumed dead – raped and killed by the crazy man.  This comes as a horrible shock to the viewer, amidst all that loving-family stuff, never mind to the mom and dad and remaining children in the movie.  It is the worst fear of a father made real. 
 
Months later, we find Dad clearing the driveway in a late-winter blizzard.  His life and that of his family is a mess, the remaining girl tortured by her fault in the episode, the wife alienated, the son distant.  As Dad haphazardly clears the driveway, he checks the mailbox to discover a typed note from “Papa”, what his little girl had called God.  Papa is inviting Dad back to the shack. 
 
After some twists and turns, Dad goes to the shack, almost getting hit by a semi because of his distraction (this is relevant, but I will not say why).  He finds the shack as before, broken and littered, the blood of his little girl still staining the floor.  He sinks into despair until a young Semitic-looking man comes strolling by with an arm of fire wood.  “Come with me to our cabin and we’ll have a nice fire” he says, oblivious to the Dad’s pain and weirdness of the situation.  Dad follows – and walks into a summertime paradise where the cabin is beautiful and perfect.  There he meets the ‘father’ of the young man – an elderly black woman – and their associate, Syria – a woman whose name means “The wind.”  And there we have it: the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.  We are now ready for the man’s healing. 
 
Here the dichotomy of sweet and bitter continues.  The Holy Family seems too familiar, too pedestrian and nice.  Yet the issues raised are high-stakes.  The man has to learn to forgive, not just his father but also the murderer of his daughter, and most importantly, God, who he blames for it all.  The reasoning is fairly sophisticated and, try as I might, I could not find anything in it that ran counter to scripture.  In giving free will, God does not stop horror, but he is painfully sorry for it.  At one point, Dad meets “Wisdom” where she steps down from her throne of judgment and forces him to take the seat.  “Since you have left yourself to judge God, you also judge everyone else.  Take the seat.  It is where you sit anyway.”  There he is confronted with the image of his two children.  Says Wisdom, “Your two children are sinners; the daughter has withdrawn her love from you, and your boy is lying and doing bad things.  You who are judge must choose: one must be sent to heaven, and the other, hell.”  Of course, Dad cannot do this and finally offers himself for the sins of his children.  We, and he, get the point: in the theater of divine justice, someone must pay for sin, and it is God in His love who finally gave himself so that none should go to hell. 
 
Still both saccharine and bitter, we come to the most touching point.  God, now in the guise of an old Indian, leads him to the body of his daughter, where she is wrapped in linen and buried.  His pain comes to a climax as does his reasoning – and his sorrowful passion, of both tears and love. 
 
Touching, corny, harsh, superficial, deep, the movie is a mixed bag that will probably please only those into theological issues.  For us, it gets the job done in a most unlikely way.  It is, in its quirkiness, almost like our own lives, filled with banality and heavy duty harshness almost at once, in the maddening dance of “normal” and “real” that we all live.
 
As a note: the book from which this was taken was self-published and has gone on to sell 10 million copies.  The movie has not been a blockbuster, but it is obvious that the work has touched a chord.  FK

(note #2 - a new comment was added by Roosen for the last blog, "Ghost Stories," below)

 
 
           
 
           
                       
 
           
                                                                                      
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
  

​You never know how a story might start.  We were sitting outside with a friend Saturday evening, the wind blowing so hard the Tiki lamps would not stay lit, when I mentioned the biography of St. Faustina that I had just read: “She went to pray for a man who was dying, and saw him surrounded by all manner of hostile demons.  She was able to dissipate them with her prayers, and so save the soul.  She then asked Jesus (she had a direct line of communication, saint as she would become) where those demons had come from. ‘From the dark hearts of Man’ he had replied.”  I brought this up to underscore the nastiness we see on the internet – how impossibly mean people can be when anonymous.
           
Instead, though, we ended up with demons.  It turned out that our friend had had more than a few bouts with haunted houses, which she attributed to having played with the Ouija Board as a youth.  I have my doubts about that, but it is then that the stories came out.  
 
The first she told began, innocently enough, in a “Sears Catalogue” house, the kind that one could buy and have delivered in the early 20th century, in a small city in northern Minnesota.  It was, she said, a cute house, and it seemed perfect for her and her two kids.  But things began to happen.  She came home one night with a “wheat blessing” fan and as soon as she took it out of its bag, several light bulbs burst in the kitchen, so many and so quickly that she and the kids dropped to the floor.  At other times, she heard the heavy sound of running down the steps; at others, the collapsing uphill of books along the staircase.  After she began redoing a room downstairs, the dog could not turn into a doorway without his back legs being forcibly shoved against the hall wall.   And one night, her daughter came into her bedroom where she was reading and told her that she had felt that someone was in her room.  A few moments later, her son came into the same room dripping wet with a towel wrapped around him.  He asked if someone had come to visit, for he had heard someone come into the bathroom, and then had seen his feet and lower legs.  As our guest said, “that night all of us – the kids, me and the dog - slept in my bed.”

There were many other encounters not mentioned here, and she discovered from the neighbors that a woman had lived here for decades along with her husband and only child, a son.  The son had died when 16, then the husband had died.  She was known to be a perfectionist, and our friend, “P”, reasoned that the woman was upset that she was not keeping the house “just so” and that the son was being a teen-aged brat.

She moved from that place, “thank God,” a year later without telling the new buyer of the hauntings.  Smart.

Some years earlier, she had moved with her then-husband to Japan, where he was enlisted in the Navy.  Her children were toddlers, and her husband gone for long periods because of his work.  The apartment she had was surprisingly large, for the place was outside the big city in what P described as a beautiful area.  The trouble was, things started to be moved around the house.  Talking toys would roll across the floor and then emit their recordings, “cow” or “pig.” Utensils were moved about the kitchen, as were various knickknacks about the apartment.   She was bottle feeding the youngest, and she would sometimes find in the morning that the daily bottle liners – five – had been lined up neatly on the kitchen table.

In Japan, they don’t have central heating, so when winter came, she got a portable propane heater like everyone else.  The first night that she had it working, the door to her room began to shake.  When she finally touched it to stop it (she had reasoned that it was the wind, even though it was an interior door), the door forcibly pushed back.  She then thought that maybe some upper open-air panels beyond the door had been left ajar and were letting air in.  She found that they were not, but that the air in the house was chokingly stuffy.   She opened the panels to fresh air, and the door stopped shaking and everything was fine.  The next day, she found out from her Japanese neighbors that the panels were exactly in place for this reason, to ventilate, and that without them open, one could die.

Over time, she told the neighbors of the mysterious happenings. They nodded, saying only (in broken English) “grandmother knows best.”  She was to discover that the Japanese believe spirits of people often hang around their old homes, particularly the older women who had cared for them.  The neighbors told her to simply do as the grandmother wanted things done, and all would be OK.  So she left the toys where they were rolled, left the knickknacks where they were replaced, let the kitchen be reordered and so on – and the movements and knockings and all those things ceased.  Grandmother indeed had known best. 
 
Ghosts and demons and wee people and aliens: what are they?  I have read a ton on them, from anthropological literature to campy Ufology, and in sum, it seems this: that these entities from another world are varied, with varying reasons for appearing and doing things, often beyond our own reasoning.  Some certainly are evil, as were those seen around the dying man.  But I think many religions often conflate all that is supernatural into two categories: good and from God, and evil and from Satan.  From what I have read, most apparitions, fairies, and so on are incongruous – that is, are beyond our manner of thinking, neither evil nor good.  The Japanese grandmother was pretty straightforward, but most are not.  Oftentimes, they, an alien or leprechaun or goblin, simply pop up, do something strange, and then go.  Sometimes they leave curses or sickness, but usually not.  Nowadays, they might take us into operating rooms to do uncomfortable things, although this is only nowadays and obviously a reflection of our own times. Is this good or evil (and how and why do they change to reflect our times)? Some merely pop up to join in a party, or appear as humans in strange places for no apparent reason.  It seems, indeed, that there are simply many other realities that sometimes coincide with ours, bringing in that element of strangeness.
 
Of course, their very existence tells us how strange our reality really is, and how incomplete is out knowledge.  It is as if we were frogs who live in a small puddle where all seems knowable, and then, oops!, a demon or ghost or something (let us say a human) steps into the puddle and upsets every known fact.  And then disappears again, leaving the frogs to either speculate on what they cannot possibly ever know, or simply dismiss that human step or whatever as a hallucination.
 
As for my research - with such things I have hit a wall, just like the frogs.  Because of that, I read less and think less about such things.  But that does not mean they do not exist, and in that, tell us something sublime about the complexity of the real reality.  Worth investigating, if one thinks they can take one more step out of the frog pond into that larger someplace.  FK   
 
 
           
 
           
                       
 
           
                                                                                      
 
 
 
 

​A few years ago, I saw a picture of my grandmother as a child in the early 1900’s standing by a huge tree by her house in New Haven, and I believe I wrote about the tree here in the blog.  But there is also my grandmother, who was wearing the kind of puffy dress that little girls wore back then.  There were some grownups in the picture, too, and all were dressed in what we would call “dated” apparel.  In fact, it is probable that everything about them is dated, from speech inflections (they said “idear” around there back then – I did too, until I was corrected in college) to ideas of politics, race, and religion.   Most or parts of what they thought have been either forgotten or re-written to suit the social/political movement of the moment.
 
            In a very recent article, we are told that Homo sapiens remains have been found in Morocco that date back 300,000 years, 100,000 years earlier than the earliest previously found in the Rift Valley in Ethiopia.  Although they were slope-headed, they are enough like us to have been labeled our species, which to this former student of anthropology is stunning.  The researcher then said something that, to some not in the know, would have been unthinkable 30 years ago: that humans did not come forth fully formed, as was written even a few years ago (the Eve Hypothesis, stating that we all had a common mother dating back to 150,000 years ago in Africa) but evolved piecemeal over many thousands of years in different areas of Africa, not in East Africa as all have assumed. 
 
            This is huge.  In my department at Michigan, it was gospel that we all evolved together, in one place.  There are different reasons why this is important, but I, as a cultural anthropologist, focused on the one that was very much front and center: if we had evolved in fits and starts over Africa, then we are not necessarily a unity species; and if this is so, we may even have evolved separately outside of Africa.  Both of these relate to something that was very important to Bio Anthros, for if we evolved piecemeal over different periods of time and in different places, we could have legitimate racial differences (as opposed to superficial ones).  Bio Antrho once luxuriated in the superiority of the Anglo Saxons as late as the 1930’s.  The “one out of Africa” movement was not only based on evidence of the time, but also on the desire to expiate the sins of earlier racist anthropologists.  If we were all from one mother, then we were all the same.  No racism would be possible.  But now, such ideas, as distasteful to us as they might be, might just be salient.
 
            The new evidence and its conclusions will be fought, but we cannot help but think: what else of our knowledge is also motivated by abstract desires, some not even understood by the researchers themselves?  “Climate change” is an obvious one (again, this says nothing about the objective facts, one way or the other), but what of our notions, say, of alien life on other planets?  As a kid, the idea that Mars had “canals” or at least ancient natural waterways, was ridiculed.  Today, the presence of surface water on Mars is almost taken as a certainty.  We were also told, incredibly, that it was improbable that there were any earth-style planets anywhere, if there were other solar systems in the universe at all.  Today, even alien life is almost taken for granted, given the size of the universe and the absolute certainty now that there are other planets in other solar systems.  While much more knowledge of such things is now available, even as kids back then we complained that there MUST be other earth-like planets in such immensity. 
 
            I suspect that the reason for denying this much more rational approach was two-fold: one, that scientists did not want to be linked with sci-fi pulp paper backs; and two, they feared (in some part of their minds) the backlash from many religious communities who still argued that human life was the necessary center of the universe, and therefor unique. 
 
            What, then, of religion itself?  It has been a while since I read of the Parsi religion, so perhaps parts of what I will say are inaccurate, but the overall gist is that the Parsis, once found in Persia and now almost exclusively in India (in small numbers, driven out by Moslems centuries before), have a belief system that pre-dates Zoroastrianism, which itself may go back 7,000 years (no one really knows.  It was made famous in the west by the conquest of Alexander the Great but that was fairly recent, @350 BC), and the Parsis claim that it was from them that the ideas of Zoroastrianism were formed. Of the latter, there was one great God who had several sacred aspects, and one great Devil, who fought with him for control of the world.  In the end, God would win, and raise people from the dead in the final judgement, after which the world would be nothing but peace and glory.
 
            Of course, this is all very familiar stuff, and the encyclopedia claims that parts of Judaism came from Zoroastrianism, which flows directly to Christianity – meaning that at least three of the great religions of the day have their roots in Persia, that may go back more than 7,000 years.
 
            Does this, then, make our religions dated?  Zoroastrianism and the Parsis are nearly extinct.  Will Islam and Judaism and Christianity go extinct as well?  Are they, too, “dated?”
 
Here, too, we find conflicting opinions informed by interior desires.  Materialists use the history of religion to show that they are just abstract ideas anchored to a culture and nothing more; some religious claim that theirs is the last word, from the final “father” or prophet, and to think otherwise is sacrilege.  However, it seems to me that the duration of the ideas of the Parsis – as well as those of some other religions such as Buddhism – counts for an interior truth that goes beyond history and culture, to the depths of humans found in mythical thinking.  Why did these ideas catch on and remain for so many thousands of years, beyond culture and contemporary history?  To me it seems obvious – they approach an integral truth or truths that answer on various levels the problems and solutions for human kind.
 
            These do change superficially.  Zoroastrianism is not Christianity is not Judaism.  There is movement in time, an deletion of one smaller myth, an addition or subtraction to another.  Indeed, Christian theologians believe that they see movement in the Bible, not of God, but of people’s readiness for God, as their consciousness expands to be better able to understand God.  Jews probably disagree with some of this, but they, too, see movement towards enlightenment in the Pentateuch, the 5 Holy Books.  It is probable, then, that we will see major changes in the religions of the world over the centuries – and certainly, over the next 300,000 years. 
 
            But not, perhaps, of those core issues.  These may never become dated, for in answering them, we answer the riddle of the cosmic sphinx, of our own perplexity as we are given reason to wonder, but not quite enough to figure it out.  If dated, then perhaps the prophesies would have come true – that time and history as we understand it, will have ended. 
 
            I have my doubts about that, but do not doubt that, should we fly in Star-Trek type ships in some time to come and interact with aliens and so on, our technology will not have caused the eternal questions to become dated.  Hair-styles, yes; and perhaps even notions of what it is to think.  But never will it settle the score to the many riddles – why this way and not another?  Why our longing for what we cannot understand?   In these, only the great myths promise an answer.  FK
 
 
           
 
           
                       
 
            

​I probably don’t have to tell most of you that early summer is a busy time of year.  If you own property, there are gardens to plant and maintain, grass and brush to cut, houses to paint, even wood to cut and begin drying for the next winter (why did I go there?).  For everyone else, there are graduation parties, weddings, and plain old backyard, or terrace barbecues to hoist a beer and catch up on neighborhood happenings.  There are vacations large and small, from day trip outings to the beach, to that really important, gotta-do trip at last to Yosemite, or Bryce Canyon.  So many things, in fact, that most of us choose to have light reading, the kind you can pick up and leave on a moment’s notice, where the sleuth or warrior or the love-struck can fit right back into your busy schedule. 

Sometimes, though, we start a really heavy-duty project that traps us for week after week: the new tool shed, for instance, or in my case, the book Faustina (The Mystic and Her Message) by Ewa Czaczkowska.  Picked up at the Milwaukee Diocese church in Milwaukee, which was built and paid for by Polish immigrants, it is the painstaking biography of a Polish peasant girl born in 1905, who lived only until 1938, dying right about the time that Poland was cynically divided up in treaty (and then fought over in war) by Hitler and Stalin.   Painstaking, in that the author is writing to true enthusiasts of her life who really, really want to know exactly what she was doing on, say, Sept 7, 1922. 

That is not me.  I had never heard of her before, and was surprised to find that she was officially proclaimed a saint by Pope John Paul in 2000.  The lives of saints are generally spectacular, and so I bought the book.  Her life was spectacular, and the new Feast of Divine Mercy was proclaimed from her work, but one would hardly know it from the first two thirds of this book.  Slog, slog and more slog, with little interspersions of divine revelation thrown in, just enough to keep readers such as myself going, on and on.  But it builds; and somehow, in the slog, something is created.  Is it as sense of how God works or may work?  Is it a subliminal spiritual lesson that is learned somehow, somewhere beyond the normal thought processes?

I think so.  Three quarters of the way through, we are now moving with greater speed, with Jesus directing Faustina to have a portrait done, to start a new congregation, to have the Church proclaim the message that Mercy is at the very heart of Jesus.  And more so, we are seeing her commune directly with God over long periods of time – so long that it is becoming her life, her only life. 

Fascinating stuff.  Interestingly, and now so common that I come to expect it, church service this last Sunday was exactly about the path of Sister – now Saint – Faustina.  I am not a hard-core religious observer, only understanding bits of what I supposedly profess, and I largely have no idea what’s happening in liturgical time, so it came as no surprise to me that I did not know it was the Sunday of Pentecost – or the 50 day mark after the resurrection of Christ.  It’s big news in the Church, taking place on the same day of the year that the Torah was proclaimed to Mosses, making it a magical number, and Pentecost is magic indeed.   For Christians, it is the time when the Holy Spirit, or Paraclete, was breathed into the disciples, and made available to all followers of the spirit of Christ.  It gives magical powers, so that one may be understood in all languages, so that one may heal or cast out demons or prophesize.  To be filled with the Holy Spirit is to have any abilities that God sees fit, and that might include anything.

St. Faustina was given the gift of prophecy (as well as some others, like bi-locality, or being in two places at once) after struggling through a fairly short Dark Night of the Soul, where God seemed to abandon her.  Here we learn that the Dark Night is not an abandonment, but a purification of the very concept of God and self, without which God cannot be embraced.  We find afterwards that St Faustina’s other earthly faults are finally combed through until only God’s will is to be done through her.  It is the ultimate objective for the mystic, and she found it in a relatively short time. 

That is where the Pentecost and my readings of Faustina came together: the will of God being done as if it is one’s own will – which, if properly purified, it is. It is, we find from Pentecost, the way of life of the mythical first humans, Adam and Eve, whose every actions came from the will of God even as their own will welcomed it.  And then, at one point, their own wills didn’t.  And then humankind lost the Holy Spirit.  And then it was returned to us, as it is believed, through the coming of Jesus Christ and the great and final epiphany of his life and death, the Pentecost.

The will of God, for Faustina, for Adam and Eve, for the Disciples: one thing, one meaning out of all the other stories.  And it came to me then somehow, as Pentecost and Faustina came together, that the truth of Christianity is not important for the facts of history, that which makes so many skeptical; but rather in the myth itself, quite apart from history.  Whether Jesus really rose from the dead, or even really existed, while important, is not the nut of the issue; it is, rather, the idea of separation from God, and the possibility of closing that gap.  We see through the book on Faustina’s life, slowly but surely, how it is done, and then to what it leads: a bliss without comparison, so strong that only the force that comes itself can keep the mortal flesh alive when it is present.  We see that it leads to a direct and never-ending conversation with God that moves beyond the verbal; and we see all manner of powers arisen, for what can by denied from God? 

We see, in a way that still mystifies me, that the Christian myth is true, not from factual history, but in and of itself (to reiterate as I always do, this might well be true for many other religions. I speak here only of what I experienced).  We see it enacted in the life of a saint just as we hear of it among the now-ancient apostles, and once, among the first humans in a time unknown.  The movement of God, of the Paraclete, of sin and redemption, of burning and remaking the bridge, all of it true, regardless, only waiting for the breathe of the Holy Spirit to  breath it alive in one and then another; only waiting for the repetition of Pentecost, which is possible now, regardless of time or of place.  Dependent only on the soul, which we see only because mercy is given us, for that, as St Faustina learned, is the greatest gift of the Holy Spirit.  Mercy: defined by Pope John Paul as the pulling of the divine soul out from darkness, from error and confusion and blindness, by a power, a spirit, which one does not deserve but gets anyway.  Mercy, the Pentecost, Saint Faustina, all together in a living, breathing myth.

​A long slog.  And worth it, as it is that the longer the journey, often the more its memory might last.  FK