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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (40264)	6/13/1999 1:01:00 AM
From: Edwarda	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

We are clearly on the same wavelength here. I'd even go so far as to say that when we (understandably--didn't Christ supposedly say, "Why have you foresaken me?) are revolted, appalled, and/or personally violated by the horrors that people can perpetrate or by the misery that can strike randomly--as E's child, as a friend my age who died of a brain tumor, as Chuzz's wife(he posted this on the DELL thread) had to undergo a mastectomy--or genetically (most obviously, Tay-Sachs, hemophilia, sickle-cell anemia), it is easy to get angry at "God." It is so easy to find oneself thinking, "How could a "loving God" hurt a good person so awfully? I suspect that you have had to wrestle a few white nights of this yourself dealing with RA. The problem with this kind of thinking is that one is thinking of God as some kind of human pal. It is intensely difficult to try to imagine that one can be in the awareness of and possibly contact through prayer and meditation a wholly different being. We have enough reasons to wonder if our awareness of ourselves is a weird feedback in the way our brains operate. We have (valid) reason to question whether even the psychological constructs are merely an illusion. And I have never forgotten the short story (if I remember who wrote it, I shall post it) about a little cyberworld that a professor creates on his computer of "imaginary people" who construct a "religion" about their creator while he watches and plays games with them. And then there is Teresa of Avila--who was far too sexual in her descriptions but was using the only words she had. There was John of the Cross. There was Thomas a Kempis. And if you want to get into the Jewish mystics--never mind the rest we'll be up all night! What I am trying to say somewhat clumsily here is that it is very difficult to convey what underlies faith to people who simply never have experienced it. And mysticism strikes most people these days as a weird disease of some sort. (One of the things that cheered me when seeing an excellent therapist here in NYC was that Eckhartd was in hia bookcase.