Cleaning out the files, again, while responding to the reawakened effects of Good Friday, I suppose ... (once a Catholic ...)

Subj: Re: At the Schoolhouse
Date: 97-10-15
From: CBreaux

Fascinating class at Starr King School for the Ministry today. We were still dealing with Breech's "The Silence of Jesus" (and I had not read the assigned pages) and everyone was filled with questions about the symbolism represented by the parables. My head was still back with Hawking; and the interesting ways those images of the nebulae have been playing against the back of my eyelids all week ... .

Not sure how my mind made the leap, but at some point in the discussion I found myself realizing that -- despite my atheism -- I really have no particular quarrel with either the Jesus-centered stories or with any of the prophets that time has delivered to different places at different times in history. At some subliminal level I must have found that the only times I have trouble with organized religion and theocratic dogma are those times when I've forgotten that the historic Jesus may have been less teacher than seeker, as I am -- as we all are, and that the important thing for me is to try to discover is just what it is that I already know, and that when that great truth (for me) is revealed, it is my suspicion that it will be elegantly simple and that I'll realize that I've known it all along. ("The kingdom of God is within you?")

Maybe that's the fascination for me with Hawking, Einstein et al. They may have tapped into a place that I stumbled upon years ago while crossing that line which "The World" claims for "sanity" and into the realm that the world defines as "madness." It was in that place (during a mental breakdown/breakthrough) that -- for a period of time -- I found myself blessedly out of sync with time. That state of being may be what is required for a full understanding of the universe and those dimensions that we can get brief glimpses of -- only if we are either mad enough, or (as in Hawking and Einstein et al) brilliant enough to transcend the limitations of our humanness.

Betty