Today's session of To The Best of our Knowledge interviewed a Californian who made it a personal pilgrimage to visit the sites associated with his states visionaries. The second part on maps was also very interesting since I have always enjoyed reading maps and they are a large part of my work.

Erik Davis, a fifth generation Californian, tells Jim Fleming that geographically and culturally, his state supports diversity and exploration. Davis is the author of “The Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape.” The book features photographs by Michael Rauner, some of which can be seen at ttbook.org. Also, Peter Turchi is the author of “Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer.” He tells Steve Paulson that both map-making and writing place great importance on the empty spaces.

I found it quite interesting that the first book begins with the ancient rock carvings that must have been created by visionaries. I want to make it out to China Lake sometime to go on the tour they have there.

Scholars try to reconcile 'problematic' religious texts
This is typical of the Saturday morning religion articles in the LA Times that I find interesting.

Experts cited "problematic" passages from the Hebrew Scripture, the New Testament and the Koran that assert the superiority of one belief system over others.

As an example, the Rt. Rev. Alexei Smith, ecumenical and interreligous official of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, quoted from the Gospel of Mark: "Go into the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned."
. . . .
In explaining the passage from the Gospel of Mark, Smith said that the troubling portion was appended a century after it was written -- when the four Gospels were compiled.

He said the longer ending, which added 12 verses, was written at a time when Christians either were questioning their faith in the resurrection of Jesus or defending it against skeptics and nonbelievers.

When I started writing, I had planned to write my spiritual autobiography as my profile on this blog. I have not gotten beyond my original entry and my strategy now is that the autobiography will be embedded in the blog.

That autobiography would include my understanding of theologians as someone who is trying to destroy your faith. This was my understanding when I was involved in the Jesus movement in my last years of high school. I don't remember anyone saying this exactly but I picked up the idea that this was the main job of scholars of the bible. It can be seen in this description of Jesus Movement Pastor Chuck Smith who "deemphasized theological sophistication."

During my college years, I found scholars (in person and through books) strengthening my faith. Unlike now, I still thought that there was "Truth" out there that some folks had and I wanted to find or understand.

I remember one day in biblical koine Greek class where our college professor, Dr. Cain, was helping us to think more critically. We read a passage that seemed troubling or a challenge to our faith. I don't remember what that might have been but after we floundered around for a while, he supplied more information that made more sense of the passage.

Over thirty years later, I now find myself wondering how scholars or just anyone who has been to seminary remain believers. This is where I find Marcus Borg and Bishop Spong helpful. Not that I have read that much by either of them but I see them as wise and experienced with a great deal of theological education. I often long for a sustained retreat to read, write, and reflect such as I mentioned in this blog entry. The retreat would contain time to ponder but also time to just meditate and let go of all thinking.

Bishop Spong wrote the following answer to a question about the pagan beliefs and practices that Christianity appears to have borrowed.

It is now quite obvious that as Christianity moved out of its Jewish womb into the Mediterranean world, it was introduced to, conformed with and shaped by the culture.

For example, the virgin birth did not enter the Christian story until the 9th decade. There were lots of virgin birth stories in the pagan religions of the Empire. They were clearly mythological interpretive devices. The cannibalistic ideas associated with the Christian Eucharist in which the flesh and blood of the savior figure are eaten and drunk clearly have pagan origins. The account of a hero figure dying and returning from death is also present in many ancient pagan sources. Easter was a pagan word for spring and the return of the earth to life after the winter. That is why the crucifixion of Jesus was moved to the season of the Passover so that his victory over death could be celebrated at the same time the forms of life showed victory over the death of winter by coming to life again.

Christmas and Hannukah were attached to the return of the sun from its retreat into darkness. Hence both celebrations come at or near the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere.

Every religious system is layered over ancient roots. Christianity is no different. That is why anyone who literalizes the Jesus story or the Bible is revealing little more than profound ignorance. That is also why it is my experience that studying the Christian faith requires a lifetime. None of these things, however, distorts the basic Christian message that God calls us to live, to love and to be.

John Shelby Spong

Thomas Merton's name attracted me to this review. The first two paragraphs were interesting.

BOOK REVIEW
'Ghost,' by Alan Lightman

By Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 17, 2007

The Trappist mystic Thomas Merton once remarked that, if he were walking down the street and a miracle occurred on the sidewalk in front of him, he'd cross to the other side and do his best to ignore it.

Merton wasn't expressing skepticism about the existence of the miraculous, simply a reservation about its relevance to the lives of men and women, who must work out even their salvation in the world of reason and the five senses. There's a trusting, austere kind of heroism in that, especially for those -- like Merton -- who believe that reason and the senses are inadequate to the task.

I enjoy reading the newspaper. I would like to read more books but I often don't finish them because I forget about them and then when I remember what I was reading, I've lost the flow. So I read "about books" especially reviews in the LA Times or on NPR.

I see lots of items that interest me. Was it Thomas Merton who wrote that our minds are like crows, attracted to bright, glittery, shiny things even if they are worthless pieces of junk we just stuff in our nest.

Nancy Mairs' new book is reviewed at the end of a review of a Norman Mailer book. I have highlighted the paragraph that caught my attention similar to the meaning of life I noticed in The Peaceful Warrior.


A Dynamic God: Living an Unconventional Catholic Faith
Reviewed by David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 16, 2007

The vagaries of faith, on the other hand, reside at the heart of Nancy Mairs' "A Dynamic God: Living an Unconventional Catholic Faith," which in some sense picks up where the author's 1993 book of essays "Ordinary Time" left off. In Mairs' view, faith -- and, for that matter, "God Godself" -- exists almost entirely beyond conscious comprehension, but then, that's exactly how it ought to be.

"The need to reduce God to a person having mental states with which we are familiar -- desire, anger, retribution (but seldom, alas, a sense of humor) -- does God little service and ourselves even less," she writes in this stunning collection. "We would do better to stand before God in silence, allowing the Holy to open to us without our definition or direction. Only God can say what God is. We can only allow ourselves to be taught."

"A Dynamic God" owes its power to Mairs' sensitivity, her attention to detail, her honesty about herself. In previous books, she's taken on child-rearing, infidelity and her struggle with multiple sclerosis. (Wheelchair-bound, she is increasingly unable to care for herself.)

Throughout the essays here, she touches on these and other issues to get at not just the roots of her progressive Catholicism -- Dorothy Day is a favorite role model -- but the nature of faith in a world where it often doesn't seem to be rewarded, where "most of us face, from time to time, more than we can handle."

For Mairs, this is the whole idea: not that good people are blessed or bad ones punished, but that the universe itself is a question mark in which we choose to believe that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. It's messy, inconvenient, even illogical if we look at it intellectually, but if we want to come to terms, what other option do we have?

"My life is a lesson in losses . . ." she notes late in the book. "Thanks to multiple sclerosis, one thing after another has been wrenched from my life -- dancing, driving, walking, working -- and I have learned neither to yearn after them nor to dread further deprivation but to attend to what I have."

What Mairs is after is a quality of "mindfulness," which is how she frames her faith. It's a quiet thing, personal, the province of heart as much as mind.

God, after all, defies the intellect; that is the nature of belief. As Mairs affirms: "Believing as I do that God is the Whole of It, that our every atom bears God into being, I cannot experience myself as truly apart."

david.ulin@latimes.com

David L. Ulin is book editor of The Times.