Wonder of Stars
["I came to faith in middle age after I'd been in public life for a while." It looks as though David Brooks is more or less in line with me. I don't have a strict sense of Faith, but I feel better giving God power over Mankind than having Mankind having absolute control over Mankind, and that in itself is more than enough reason for Faith.]
["Religion is not like choosing to be a Republican or a Democrat. It happens on a different level of consciousness." I wholeheartedly agree that since God is that of broad strokes, and Man is more into the details.]
["When I was a kid, I was raised, like most people in our culture, on certain stories" The soul of the storyteller is more significantly so in the art of who we are. Those that don't understand why I would be upset over what Disney did to Star Wars fail to understand the weight the world of stories reach back to God and Faith and our place in the Universe.]
["During my decades as an atheist, I thought the stories were false" The sad truth about an atheist is their belief in nothing at all. Even if that were true, it is tough for me to imagine a way to lead a life by those means, like having a sky without the wonder of stars.]
["I applied to think through my opinions, to support various causes. Like a lot of atheists, I found the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr very helpful." I admit I have a blind spot with "Reinhold Niebuhr," a theologian best known for his "Cristian Realism," which emphasized the persistent roots of evil in human life. In his "Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)", he stressed the egoism and the pride and hypocrisy of nations and classes. I will have to read more about this to understand where David Brooks is coming from, and I hear others at The New York Times follow this sort of thinking.]
["About seven years ago, I realized that my secular understanding was not adequate to the amplitude of life as I experienced it." Very revealing. "There were extremes of joy and pain, spiritual fullness, and spiritual emptiness that were outside the normal material explanations of things." I often feel emptiness also, but that I thought was fueled by me being Bipolar. I was often reflecting on Death and being a God from time to time when I became manic, and then in the aftermath, and I would then reflect on what comes possibly be expected.]
["I was gripped by the conviction that the people I encountered were not skin bags of DNA, but had souls; had essences with no size or shape, but that gave them infinite value and dignity." Very poetic. It has always been my stance when I was graced with the POWER of GOD in my madness in and delicious delusions when I thought I touched the face of God himself. Those were the times I realized I had all the answers, and everything was at my fingertips, and I was a God among men who always knew so significantly less than I did. Being manic is the biggest power trip you see, and I thought if there was only a way I could pack it into a pill, I would be the wealthiest person on Earth. There would be no one who would not wish to leave such a state and pay with almost everything they ever had.]
["What finally did the trick was glimpses of infinite goodness." Now you are speaking my language. Caught up in the moment in Godhood that would not last more than two weeks, I saw things in frames that had no limits, and I was always the only one that could tie them all together. Such a force of will I was in my mind. Even now medicated, I can still feel the pull pulling me to that madness, or is it enlightenment?]
["The biblical stories from Genesis all the way through Luke and John became living presences in my life." I must admit that here I don't know the bible as much as I would like. It is hard for me to stress others to study such things when I have been so absent on the subject. We should all read out collective stories that are as timeless as the ones in the bible, and I know I will make more of an effort. Thanks for the kind reminder David Brooks.]
["Each person is made in God's image. Faith offered an image of a way of being, an ultimate allegiance." I feel this is like the story of the Wax Wings of Icarus, the weight of the whole world was upon me, and I was The Center, The Bridge that brought everything that ever was together into an "Ultimate Allegiance" with each person only a reflection in my mind.]
["I spent more time listening, trying to discern how I was being called." I spend my time listening too. What have I become, I ask myself? Perhaps not a God and only a man, and I wonder to this day is that enough, thinking of all the times I wanted to end myself because nothing, not anywhere, really mattered one bit.]
["But my basic moral values - derived from the biblical metaphysic." So do mine, only I have been God several times before, and you have only lived as a mortal man.]
["When it comes to thinking and acting in the public square, we believers and nonbelievers are all in the same boat - trying to apply our moral frameworks to present realities. Faith itself doesn't make you wiser or better." Yet when I was hyper-mania and being chased by the police, driving so fast, rapidly streaming information at ultra-high speeds, I was in a rocket boat skipping about while the rest of the world could only paddle. I had my framework. I was thinking about constructing my Religion. I would call it THE ONE. The idea that life is a many-layered extension of yourself and everything else. It is the thinking that any one thing connects anything to anything else. Apples and oranges are no longer different, for instance. They are fruit. They are food. They are roundish. More qualities bring people and things together than tear them apart. We are the Gods that we want to be. Look inside yourself and bring anything into your life. To get anything into your life, imagine that it is already there. Everything is nothing, and nothing is everything. The Black is white. The White is black. The moon turns to Sun, and Sun turns to the moon. "And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand. / Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand" (William Shakespeare) - Sonnet 60.]
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