Mar

I am listening this Sunday morning to Christoph Cardinal Schonborn on C-Span 11 on the subject of his book Chance or Purpose at the Dominian School of Philosophy and Theology in Berekley, CA.  A few interesting distinctions:  science purifies religion from superstitions, and religion challenges science as absolute.  One of his responders distinguishes evolution of matter as materially driven from an evolution beauty-drawn.  Cardinal Schonborn tells the story of a 14 year old girl playing in the park and accidently running into an old man.  The man falls to the ground and looks up at the girl and laughs.  The girl sees him other times in the park and one day brings him a snail shell and hads it to him.  He looks at it and exclaims, "Ah, the spiral of the universe."  This was the last time the girl saw him in the park.  Much later she saw a picture in the paper and realized it was that of the old man.  She learned his name - Peirre de Chardin.   

I have become aware of so many spiritual giants suffering substantive depression - Mother Teressa, Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King and other lesser knowns.  Today on Religion and Ethics Krista Tippet speaks of her pain.  She is asked, "You who started out wanting to repair the world now speak of Mystery?" Tippet finds that mystery and the intellect are akin to each other.  She writes in her book, Speaking of Faith, about her serious psychological depression.  It can also be a spiritually enriching experience, she says.  Her theology is that life is not perfect; that she has to acknowledge that she has all kinds of flaws; has sadnesses and problemes; has experienced a divorce.  Ralph Abernathy asks what were the lessons of the pain of divorce.  She answers that divorce is a death - and a failure - at least that is how it feels; that is just another way that life is not what we wish it to be; we have to live gracefully with what it is.  She reads from her book, "If I have learned anything it is that goodness prevails not in the absence of reasons to despair but in spite of them; people who bring light into the world wrench it out of darkness and contend openly with darkness all of their days; they don't let despair have the last word, nor do they close their eyes to its pictures nor deny the enormity of its facts; they say yes and, and they wake up the next day and the day after that to act and live accordingly.

A quote by Aeschylus: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."