In some bit of serendipity relating to the last blog entry I covered, the very next night I was reading a book, "The Soul of Christianity" by Huston Smith, a reknown author of religion and spiritual matters, who is most famous for a series of programs he did with Bill Moyers about ten years ago inspired by his bestseller, "The World's Religions". I quickly came across this passage, which seems to relate exactly to the subject most on my mind:
from page 81:
"It remained for the 20th Century to discover that locked within the atom is the energy of the sun itself. For this energy to be released, however, the atom musty be bombarded from without. So too, locked in every human being is a store of love that partakes of the Divine...and it to can be activated through bombardment--in its case, love's bombarbment."
Professor Smith is apparently trying to get at how we transform outselves from guilt, fear and self-centeredness. We get the first clues in doing this from our parents, if we are lucky enough to have good parents and most of us, in the main, do. If that energy within us is bombarded constantly with something selfish and fearful and, in the worse case, evil, then we become susceptible to destructive behavior, as individuals or groups.
Odd but true I suppose,that the released energy of a tiny atom can be used for great benefit or extreme suffering. How like the potential energy of individuals!
I suppose from the picture above you might think of Huuston Smith as a "way, way out there" kind of guy. The kind of guy who hosts a show on the Sci-Fi Network maybe. But I have it on reliable authority he can be quite down to earth. On a visit to the First Presbyterian Church in Ashland a few years back, he was asked during a seminar to describe his view of the struggles of life:
"Life," he said, "for most of us, is like pushing a shopping cart backwards."
Wish I'd said that.
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