IMAGES FOREVER IN MIND
There's never a reason I can't start with a car picture if I want to. And by no means does the car have to relate in any way to whatever the magic dancing fingers produce. It may simply be that, having loved cars all my life, a car picture begins my effort with a smile.
An image forever in my mind - - the early 1940s, a dark night as we head home to Panama City from visiting beloved family in Pensacola - - a small boy maybe five years old, standing up behind my parents, in the back seat of our car as we drive that long, dark, empty stretch of two-lane US Highway 98 through the woods somewhere east of Destin and well before rounding the curve past Camp Helen to the Phillips Inlet Bridge, our car is overtaken by a faster car coming up from behind us. By the custom of the day, the driver blinks headlights as the car passes us. Now ahead of us, as it pulls back into the eastbound lane ahead of us, I observe loudly, "a Packard with a trunk rack!"
I was four or five. The image is forever in my mind.
So is this one
More than any other evil in life, I hate bullies. In all my years, never in my worst fears or nightmares did it occur to me that the total contempt of sheer, seething hatred could define my view of my country's national government.
Our own Geheime Staatspolizei, how could people have done this to us? Coming out of WW2 we thought it could never happen here. As I watch sin unfold, my grief is overwhelming because my own feelings are sin itself.
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As many friends know, my favorite Bible books are Genesis, Mark, and Revelation. Genesis for its holy stories from Israel's memories, all of it, but especially the so-called "Priestly Creation Story" of Genesis One, a post-Exile story told to dismiss the absurdities of Canaanite naturist religion (the sun is a god, the moon is a god, the stars are deities, there is a god who brings terrible storms, there is a fearsome god of the sea, a god of fertility controls whether crops flourish or wither and must be appeased, &c) that left-behind Israelites had accepted as they integrated with the Canaanites while the Israel's leaders (actually the Judeans) were away in Babylon. This morning, Fr Richard's essay on Genesis (below, scroll down) is quite good.
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So, is it better to admit my truths or to pass my Time quietly?
RSF&PTL
T90
In the Beginning
Inviting Good Questions
Thursday, January 15, 2026
Father Richard describes why the book of Genesis was so important to the people of ancient Israel:
Although many of the stories found in Genesis were passed down from generation to generation among the Israelites, they were not collected and put into their final form until after the Babylonian exile, around the mid-5th century BCE. In the aftermath of their national calamity, the Jewish people realized that their heritage might indeed be lost if it were not written down, and their religious leaders were inspired to gather together many strands of their oral tradition and weave them into a continuous narrative. They attributed the authorship to Moses, meaning that the authority for the wisdom of this tradition goes back at least as far as Moses’s time. We don’t know the actual names of the scribes who wrote it in the form we have today. They were less concerned with putting their names on their work than with preserving the wisdom of their religious heritage.
The religious questions they were wrestling with are questions that thoughtful people ask in every age: What is the meaning of life? Where does it come from? Where does it go? What is the relationship between God and humanity? Why is there evil in the world? Why do good people have to suffer? These questions were especially disturbing for the Jews after their return from exile. They thought they had known who they were and what God’s purpose was for them, but the shattering of their dreams forced them to think again and to think more deeply.
Perhaps the most important thing to bear in mind when reading the first eleven chapters of Genesis is that it is written not only about the past but about the present— the perennial present that is always with us. The authors of Genesis wrote down the Word that came to them in their time, but in doing so they were putting into human words the eternal Word which speaks the truth for every generation. They were writing what is always true about God and human beings, about the goodness of the world, and about “sin” which causes suffering.
Put in theological terminology, the story is saying that everything is grace, everything is gift, everything comes from God. God is the one who makes something out of nothing and gives it to us, not only then, but now. God created both the natural universe and our own human nature, and all of it is good. All of it is to be enjoyed, if we can receive it as a gift.