morethanenoughtruth

(This started as a dream.   Dreams can lead to strange places.)

I looked up and there was a building, inverted and emitting a plume of pink smoke__ bright, bright pink.  I stood in the street and everywhere there were children.  I pointed up to the smoke.  The children had better things to do. They looked up, shrugged their shoulders, and went on their way.  I wanted to stop them and make them see this strangeness with me, but it was useless.

So I thought.  And then I thought some more. Then it came to me: the building was my church, turned on its head and blowing smoke, and nobody even noticed.  The Catholic Church  has long blown white smoke on the successful election of a pope, but never this fabulous pink. The building was beautiful in its design and intricate complexities.  Even upended it spoke to me of all the bricks and mortar  of elegant reality time had built into this spiritual and material construct.

It was easy to see how the trinity came to be seen and acknowledged.  In the beginning was the word, primary abstraction of “is”ness; we glimpsed the concept of reality and we thought up a word for it.  We worshiped the word and called it God.  Time passed.  We worshiped the divine intelligence incarnate in our many prophets, as the word became manifest in human intellect and dwelt among us. Time continued to pass.  In the isolation of our land-masses, each human gathering declared the singularity of its insight, and religions took root and grew and branched and blossomed.  We delighted in the stream of our conscious thought; and named it Holy Spirit.  Our evolving brains operated on movements of energy surging through our ever-more-complex network of nerve cells which induced fields of knowing, now described by some physicists using holography.  Some people even claim that the entire reality we apprehend and defend doesn’t exist except as holographic constructs.  Maybe in absolute truth, we are complicit in some entity’s nightmare functioning in another dimension of space-time.

Such ideas are the bread and butter of science fiction.  Perhaps it has become science fact.  Teachers demonstrate similar fields of magnetic force with magnets and iron filings that array patterns of mesmerized iron particles lined up nose to tail on paper influenced by a magnet underneath.  Every science student registers the requisite amazement when confronted by this physical analogy of an even more abstract abstraction.  We dig a little deeper and postulate the congruency of religion and physics.  The deeper we go, the more they merge.  People who take all this seriously, work themselves into a tizzy about what they have envisioned.  They create hypotheses and write erudite theses, but no experimentation is possible, so they stew in their own amazement.  People call them odd, but the craziness lies in the expectation of acknowledgement, not in what they have come to believe.  Wisdom is expressed in knowing the difference.

I once asked my dad, Kelsey, why he was so reticent.  “Easy,” he shrugged.  “If you don’t say anything people think you’re smart.  As soon as you open your mouth and start talking, they know better.  Maintain a knowing silence, and they think you’re a genius.”

_Dorothy Jeanette Martin