Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Faith
My brother the born-again had a good laugh over Jake going to Catholic school. “They’ll make a Christian out of him yet,” he said, or something like that. How little he knows my son! More likely he’ll have the other kids doubting their faith by the end of the school year.
Me, on the other hand? I suspect I’m a true agnostic, inasmuch as atheism feels as much an act of faith as believing in God. Yet the only concept of God which has ever felt right to me is a God who is absolutely foreign and unknowable yet also deeply personal. Some thing inside me which I can never fully understand. Some thing I can talk to, appeal to, yet God only knows if it hears or understands. My God, I suppose, is synonymous with all that is mysterious.
This concept runs afoul of all religious absolutism.
On the drive home, I listened to a radio call-in program with a Brother Something-or-other who has predicted the Rapture to occur in 2011. (Yes, he had an exact date, but it didn’t register with me.) After that, he said, the Salvation Era in our world will come to an end, and the Earth will be transformed into a realm of punishment. Et cetera. Anyway, what really caught my attention was one fellow who called in. Brother So-and-so said, “Caller, what’s your question?” and this dude said, “I have no question. I am beyond questions. I accept everything without question.”
Even Brother Looney who thinks the world will end in two years didn’t know what to do with this guy. “Thank you for sharing,” he said, and quickly moved to the next caller.
I’m not sure why, but I have a fondness for these people who live with absolute certainties; they’re precious, just as cloudless, smogless summer nights are precious. But that fondness ends when these folks try to inflict their certainties on the rest of us. If they would only keep their absolutism to themselves, they would be a delight for those of us who live our lives on spiritual quicksand.
D.
It’s odd how these people never come back on radio after the (non)event to explain why it didn’t happen…
Amen!
Love your last paragraph.
Good poast.
I would say ‘I agree with this poast’ except that I don’t, entirely, because people who are certain of things about which no rational person can be certain scare me a little.
Keith: yup. And as for your avatar — you’ve aged! And become rather estrogenic, from what I can tell . . .
Hi Sis!
Dean: Only scary when they get up on their soapboxes. I say keep ’em on black felt like precious stones, to be admired from a distance for their surface perfection.
Ha… I don’t know how I became Mrs Elms by my avatar. She’s a character I came up with, mainly to add some fun to the Hadegsate Publishing newsletter. She’s a befuddled old dear on her deathbed at number three.
She’s on Facebook, so I’m guessing it comes from there somehow. Either that or I’ve changed it myself in the past and am clearly going the way of Mrs Elms!
Sorry, Myspace, not Facebook…