(no subject)
F.X. answered, "Sometimes I close my eyes and walk, just to remember what it's like to feel blind. I feel at home in the dark. Probably that dog would tell you the same thing. He'd say, 'I remember my days of liberty before I was melded with this man at my side, my days of woof and howl.' "
"That's the way a lot of people describe life before and after they're reborn," Isabel answered him.
"Before and after they're reborn?" David asked.
"I mean before and after a religious experience," Isabel said. "They recall their lives before they found God and after they saw the world in His light, and they feel as if they've been two different people, in two different lives."
F.X. asked, "Is that how it seems to you?"
Isabel answered,"I believe that until we awaken to see God as He is, we walk around in our lives not truly born yet, not understanding the nature of the world or why we are placed here." Isabel sipped her half-glass of water, and asked F.X., "Are you a practicing Catholic?"
"No," F.X. answered. If I were a practicing anything, I'd believe in the Greek gods. They way they understood our petty jealousies and weaknesses! And their love of melodrama-- parents eating their children and children murdering their parents and jealous wives turning rivals into cows and trees and snake-headed women! We had so much to learn from those gods." F.X. leaned forward and said to Isabel in a confidential tone, "Or, I would have a religion where we recognize that life on earth is in itself an eternity. Isn't that so? We sleep and rise up and sleep and dream until the months seem endless and the darkness repeats itself like a trick deck of cards. A single loss, or even one long lonely night is enormous as death-- maybe vaster-- and so life is at least as big as death. Or bigger. Death is merely the obsidian mirror in which we learn to glimpse and talk to ourselves. Our births spread out like suns to the rimless rim of time and the far stretches of the black unfenced universe where the gods run wild."
F.X. thought to himself. "If God thought the way churchy people do, He could never have created the world. He would have been too narrow-minded to think it up."
"That's the way a lot of people describe life before and after they're reborn," Isabel answered him.
"Before and after they're reborn?" David asked.
"I mean before and after a religious experience," Isabel said. "They recall their lives before they found God and after they saw the world in His light, and they feel as if they've been two different people, in two different lives."
F.X. asked, "Is that how it seems to you?"
Isabel answered,"I believe that until we awaken to see God as He is, we walk around in our lives not truly born yet, not understanding the nature of the world or why we are placed here." Isabel sipped her half-glass of water, and asked F.X., "Are you a practicing Catholic?"
"No," F.X. answered. If I were a practicing anything, I'd believe in the Greek gods. They way they understood our petty jealousies and weaknesses! And their love of melodrama-- parents eating their children and children murdering their parents and jealous wives turning rivals into cows and trees and snake-headed women! We had so much to learn from those gods." F.X. leaned forward and said to Isabel in a confidential tone, "Or, I would have a religion where we recognize that life on earth is in itself an eternity. Isn't that so? We sleep and rise up and sleep and dream until the months seem endless and the darkness repeats itself like a trick deck of cards. A single loss, or even one long lonely night is enormous as death-- maybe vaster-- and so life is at least as big as death. Or bigger. Death is merely the obsidian mirror in which we learn to glimpse and talk to ourselves. Our births spread out like suns to the rimless rim of time and the far stretches of the black unfenced universe where the gods run wild."
F.X. thought to himself. "If God thought the way churchy people do, He could never have created the world. He would have been too narrow-minded to think it up."