Open Letter

A blog about the entire history of my struggles with religion would turn into a book. That isn't a book i want to write. The same conflicts i always had, i still have. Not much has changed. So for my "second step" i will relate a current experience as a recapitulation of all the rest of it. i just read a definition of "recapitulation" to make sure i knew what it meant. then i read a definition of recapitulation theory. i think i understand the gist of it...the stages of embryonic development mirror the evolutionary stages that preceded. Is that correct?  i also recall a theological work which talked about how the life of Christ is the recapituation of the history of man. i must have misunderstood. that cannot possibly be, unless now is the time of the passion and death of mankind. i am depressed today and experience everyone as being critical and rejecting. which only means of course, that i am criticizing and rejecting others. if so, it is only out of the ...

For years I believed that as a child I had seen JFK in person, maybe at the airport in the neighborhood where I grew up. I held an image of him passing by, waving to the crowds; an image taken, no doubt, from old news reels and documentary footage. My parents may have contributed to this by relating a story in which JFK was mentioned. Maybe they weren't even talking to me, maybe I just overheard it...Later I found out that John F. Kennedy had been dead for a long time before I was even born (in 1964). I was genuinely confused and astounded, so deep was this false memory.  There is also a memory of a real movie which somehow got conflated with the idea of the "pound of flesh" in The Merchant of Venice...in this old film, there was what I thought was a gob of meat or flesh on a scale, and the tortured face of a man in agony who was witness to what was presumably a carnage or atrocity of some kind. I have no idea what this movie was but I am pretty sure it had no...

This morning I awoke dreaming of a blackbird whose wing was broken. I always loved the song by the Beatles and identified with the bird of sunken eyes and broken wing. My first year of college at University of Texas at Austin, it was cold and I was walking thru campus and one of the landscape trees caught my attention: it was exactly half dead. One half was alive and the other was dead branches. The sight of it stopped me in my tracks and I gazed at that tree for several long moments...I identified with the blighted tree. The avatar for this blog is a Blessed Virgin Mary called The Madonna of the Dry Tree. I was so happy when I found that she existed. Any Divine Mother of mine has to be barren and without fruit or child. [I dont' know why but I am having problems putting paragraphs in so I will use a different strategy]******************************************************************************************************************************************** I haven't w...

Tales of the Hasidim p.113  "Origin They say that the Great Maggid had purified and unified his body and spirit so utterly that his body was as his spirit, and his spirit was as his body.  Therefore in the hour he begot his son, a pure spirit from the world of angels entered his wife's womb, and from there it was born for a brief space into the world of man." [Abraham, the Angel]. How is this unlike the Virgin Mary conceiving by the Holy Spirit and bearing Jesus?  Hasidim p. 121  "The Breaking of the Vessels  Rabbi Pinchas said:  'We all know that very long ago, when God was building worlds and tearing them down, the vessels broke because they could not endure the abundance poured into them.  But through this, light penetrated to the lower worlds and they did not remain in darkness. It is the same with the breaking of vessels in the soul of the zaddik.'" 

Tales of the Hasidim . 106  "The Ball  ...'And before you lie down at night, you add up everything you have done during the day.  And when a  man calculates his hours and sees that he has not wasted a moment in idleness, when his heart beats high with pride, then-- up in Heaven, they take all his good works, crush them into a ball, and hurl it down into the abyss."  Yesha'yahu (Isaiah) 64 (The Jewish Bible) "All of us are like someone unclean,  all our righteous deeds like menstrual rags..." Romans 3  "So what room is left for boasting? None at all!...Therefore, we hold the view that a person comes to be considered righteous by God on the ground of trusting [faith], which has nothing to do with legalistic observance of Torah commands." 

I once asked a Rabbi, when the Messiah comes, are Jews and Christians gonna sit around arguing who was right (is it the return of Yeshua or the appearance of Another)? Or will they be caught up in their epiphany?  Tales of the Hasidim p.105-106 "The Rabbi and the Angel ...How are we to undstand this?  Has any one of us ever seen an angel, so that we could compare the rabbi [the Great Maggid] with him?  But that is just what is meant! You have never seen an angel, yet, if he stood before you, you would not ask him questions, or examine him, or demand a sign, but believe and know he was an angel .  It is the same with the true zaddik. If there is someone who makes you feel such as this-- from his lips you shall seek the teachings." 

Tales of the Hasidim, Martin Buber p. 104  "The Between Stage  The maggid of Mezritch said:  Nothing in the world  can change from one reality into another, unless it first turns into nothing, that is, into the reality of the between-stage.  In that stage it is nothing and no one can grasp it, for it has reached the rung of nothingness, just as before creation. And then it is made into a new creature, from the egg to the chick. The moment when the egg is no more and the chick is not yet, is nothingness.  And philosophy terms this the primal state which no one can grasp because it is a force which precedes creation; it is called chaos.  It is the same with the sprouting seed.  It does does not begin to sprout until the seed disintegrates in the earth and the quality of seed-dom is destroyed in order that it may attain to nothingness which is the rung before creation.  And this rung is called wisdom, that is to say, a thought which cannot be ma...