Out here in my forty day lenten wilderness contemplating // Jesus' forty days in the wilderness resisting temptation // Moses' forty years in the wilderness with thousands of maddeningly whining escaped slaves.  Contemplating a favorite Bible scholar and theologian (don't know that he calls himself a theologian), Bart Ehrman, recently retired longTime professor teaching Bible subjects at UNC Chapel Hill, NC. Dr Ehrman's personal religious history took him on quite a wilderness journey. Starting as a fundamentalist Christian, he evolved as he explored questions and acquired doubts. For a while Dr Ehrman was in the Episcopal Church, until his conscience and integrity triumphed over saying the Nicene Creed and facing the theodicy question, "If God is all powerful and all loving, why is there suffering and pain in the world?" Dr Ehrman chose to be a nonbeliever, atheist, agnostic (not sure what he calls himself). He is a scholar and thinker. Dr Ehrman's doubts...

An email that arrives by free subscription in my in-box is titled "Big Think newsletter" (a pricey membership is also available with more to read and think about, but I'm a cheapie who prefers free stuff - - in fact, I've cancelled automatic paid subscription renewals on everything that comes to me except NYT and we'll see how that goes).  Anyway, I'm a religion contemplator, and, besides bringing me fascinating writing to read even if I weren't such, this email newsletter helps me in my SEEK THE TRUTH, COME WHENCE IT MAY, COST WHAT IT WILL quest for religious Truth in a constantly changing life, Earth, galaxy, universe, Time & distance apparent reality, where I'm wandering and wondering whether Truth itself is also constantly changing, something to observe relatively rather than something to know objectively and be done with it.  My mental personally staggering religious foundation of "You Are Here" - - as a speck person on a speck plane...

  Summer 1963 we moved into a small house in an area of Yokohama called Bayview. Military housing, sitting on a hilltop, it was on a cul-de-sac but a bit off to itself, with a high stone wall on the west side, and looking south over Tokyo Bay. Immediately below us, down a steep hill of rocks and grass, was a small Japanese temple with monks who cared for the cemetery that was on the other side of the high stone wall, and a typical Japanese neighborhood of wood and paper houses and shops, cobblestone streets.  It was a Time before everything was air conditioned, and our house was not, so we slept with open windows. Mornings very early, in the darkness just before dawn as things were waking up, we would hear, coming up from the neighborhood down the hill below, the wail of a flute-sounding instrument along with the sound of geta,  those traditional Japanese wooden shoes' clop clop clop on the stone streets. It was the noodle man, announcing as he pulled his cart throug...

\ Some days Fr Richard's meditation (scroll down) is too thoughtful not to pass along, all days it's better than anything I think or say or read or write.  His meditation today hits me head on as I sit here looking out across the Bay at a cloudless clear blue sky beautifully wretched bitter windy day, with a new bandage and freeze spots on my head from this morning's visit to the dermatology clinic and another long wait for the biopsy call.  Oft told before but I'm never going to repeat it because the farther it recedes in my rear view mirror the less certain I am about all of it and the more skeptical - - the evening of February 13, 1984, which would have been my grandfather Weller's 112th birthday, in my several-years-long spiritual, vocational, mental, emotional, physical, state of being transition from Navy to Church, I had a Moses experience that explained and righted everything that seemed to be going bad at the Time. "I AM speaking to you, Tom Weller....