From: CathB2-AT-aol.com
Date: Wed, 16 Sep 1998 11:39:21 EDT
Subject: Re: The Needful Sacrifice


"...I very gradually recognized that "truth" in general and in art
specifically is not an always imperfectly known but immovable quantity, but
that this quantity is constantly moving in slow motion.  It suddenly looked to
me like a slowly moving little snail that scarcely seems to leave the spot and
draws behind it a slimy trail to which shortsighted souls remain glued."..
."some parts fall away like the shell of a nut, time smoothes this shell; for
this reaon some people mistake the shell for the nut and bestow on the shell
the life of the nut; many wrestle over this shell, and the nut rolls
on..."Wassily K.

What bothers me about Christianity, and I am a Christian of a very strange
sort, is what Kandinsky( in a very Nietzschean mode I think) was saying about
Truth.  Compare Pascal, Kierkegaard, Mary Baker Eddy to marketplace
Christianity.  I live in a very Fundamentalist community where churches are
the center of social life.  Everyone who has chosen to go to be part of the
little tiny Thursday Ladies Club congregation has given up social
respectability, maybe even economic livelihood, constant subject of jokes or
"well-intentioned conversion attempts." (When my daughter was three, she used
to tell a kid in the carpool, "I=92m having someone over after school to play,
but it=92s not who you think!  If Clara F. gives me one more lecture about the
Holy Ghost, I=92m going to tell her, "Jesus is having someone to the afterlife.
You may be right about that, Clara, but it=92s not who you think!!)  But, as for
my church, instead of really getting good at the tightrope act, they=92ve
entrenched, developed alternative fundamentalisms, and sold out to the
marketplace in most cases.  Fortunately for me, when I was about ready to just
roll over and die, I met a couple of "noble adversaries" online , who gave me
a severe thrashing about the mind/body problem.  I come from a very militarist
background, so I=92m predisposed to say this, but it seems to me Freddy=92s
arrow=92s right on bullseye about that one.  It takes a real gifted
counterrevolutionary to spot the holes in your "Seamless Garment."  However,
as Mahatma G. said, "Don=92t convert.  Be tru-er to your school."  Taking into
account that the Indian Marxist at Brown University fell on the ground
laughing when my daughter raised her hand and said, "But sir, it was Gandhiji
who made a difference!"  The prof attributed the freedom of the Subcontinent
to the cadres lined up by the thousands standing in the shadows behind the
skinny Hindu, but as for me, I=92m not so sure.  I=92d give it about even odds at
this point in my personal mediashift.  Like Emerson=97and Nietzsche=97I go out in
the wilderness if and when "the inner voice" tells me to.  Not for persons,
not for creeds, not for Great Books.




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