Sometimes I forget how much things have changed during my lifetime. Wednesday, while I was visiting my granddaughter and her family in Richmond, we passed a small two-seater sports car. I’ve wanted one for most of my life. It just wasn’t practical when my own children were growing up and I couldn’t really afford one later. I voiced our standing joke, “He stole my car.” My daughter and granddaughter said I have too many great grandchildren to buy one now. As we discussed it, I realized my longing has been compromised.
My thirty year love affair with convertibles has been contaminated by maturity. The only way I would own one now would be if it had a roll bar. I’m not sure when the possibility of a rollover began to outweigh the wind in my hair. It must have been a gradual thing because I don’t even remember when it started. Perhaps its a side effect of too many movie crashes or maybe it is part of my recently acquired inability to feel secure in a moving vehicle without a seat belt. Now, I find myself reaching for one when I sit down in a theater.
I know where that one comes from. In 1996, I was driving to work one rainy morning. As I approached the section of road where the parkway becomes a surface street the car hydroplaned. Luckily there was still a concrete divider between the lanes, at that point, that kept me from sliding into oncoming traffic. However, that same barrier created a feeling of panic when the left front wheel began to climb it. I was desperately trying to steer the car back toward the edge of the road so, as soon as the wheel gained traction on the vertical surface, it turned and sent me back across two lanes to jump the guardrail and wind up on the grassy bank beside the highway. The vehicle landed right side up, but for an eternal moment, I had thought it was going to roll. It was months before I could drive or even ride in the left lane without flinching. ( Read more )
Bishop Spong is giving me much food for thought. I really don’t believe that God wants us to simply accept everything we are told about Him at face value. I feel “called” to dig deeper, to study, and also to use the brain He gave me to think about what I find and use the logic He also gave me to decide what is “True.” I can accept the idea that the men who wrote the books of the Bible were God inspired. Even the men who chose which books to include may have been God inspired. However, they were still men, subject to error in spite of that inspiration. They viewed the revelations they were given through the lens of their own experience. If you are exposed to an idea or vision outside your experience and knowledge, you must relate it to something familiar in order to understand it.
I had never thought of the day of Jesus’ Ascension as a holiday until this year. I’m not all that familiar with Catholic holidays, but I don’t think very many Protestant churches in the United States celebrate the Ascension. Oh, the minister preaches about it. We know it happened between Easter and Pentecost, and we don’t deny its importance, but it just kind of gets lost somehow.
One of the things I am getting from the classes I’m taking is a wider perspective on religion as a whole. The book we are using for my current class is God is Not One by Stephen Prothero. The text is broken into chapters that each cover a different major religion. Most of them are the mainline organizations we are all familiar with, but it concludes with a strange outlook.
That “Something” then led me to the Religious Studies program at Western Kentucky University. So, it’s been more than a year now. I feel as though I have barely scratched the surface of what I need to know. Still, Something is telling me it is time to begin. I still feel that it is too personal and I am not qualified to tell anyone else what to think about religion. So, I am trying to figure out where to begin and what direction to go in. It feels like the most dangerous endeavor I have ever embarked upon. I am not ready. I may never be ready.