Letter written to my missionary son on August 25th of last year on the subject of pain, suffering and love:

Lukas the Firstborn:

About my feelings for the human race.......
There is often love...of that much I am certain. Boundless effusions of kindness, of joy in the being of another human child, of gratitude and solace in the knowledge that a consciousness like mine, and other consciousness, have shaken off the eerie circumstances of their birth, and courageously put a shoulder to the wheel and started turning. Through the slings and arrows of childhood, over the fears and worries of young adulthood, through the pestilences and injuries of old age. They all, humbly, and meekly, and bulging with the can-do ardor of their father, even God, stumbled and lurched and sometimes even crawled fitfully through their demon days on earth.

The pain I sense in any other is often an evisceration of my own hope--the loneliness that howls like a cold northern wind through the skeletal hollows of a fellow traveler can be too much to bear, And so many of them! How lord do we survive the agony of our own condition isolated from thy home .....no less bear the agony accrued as we walk through the rest of us and observe the sadness that is everywhere?. How, father, is the groaning planet of own epiphany of sin, of anger and resentment and missed opportunities, to be stayed from rolling back on us, grinding our bones to dust and puncturing our eyes from our sockets, where they come to rolling random stops staring blankly at thy creation,.

Love of course binds all things, Love heals all things, And most important of all, love vanquishes all devils, inner and outer. When some of the church fumble awkwardly at the pretense of love, they commit apostasy. It is that simple, Love is delivered as a fearless arrow or not at all: counterfeit love burns the lips as it crosses into audition. Love has no fear—not of foreigners, not of terrorists, and of course not of sinners. Love is antithetical to fear—all beings wash anew in the water of love., Even terrorists can be transformed like Paul the terrorist into the absolute energy current of all that is good in God.

Such is the sanctification of the members when we are truly ready for translation.....when love drives all determinations and fear drives none. When our humility beneath Gods ‘both quantum and behemoth wisdom lets us simply be.....and simply love.

Follow the mystical root of the Hindi, who never ridiculed the blind who were so adamantly insisting on performing the ghosts and reflections of nonsense in their daily lives.....for even the ignorant are holy, in that they so passionately engage in the distraction we were meant to have here, and they do it well. Like the rare actors who become exactly what they pretend to be, and do it for the sake of the drama that MUST be played out, in Hindu mysticism it is the playing out of the drama that is holy—and includes everything—the commiserating arm of a friend around the shoulder, the finger stiffened arrogantly out of the cabdrivers window, the inability to find that part you need at the hardware store: all of these things are vitally important in the god-inspired drama of our lives. We should only smile, and try and make people aware that by getting too enmeshed in the details, they never have time to stand back and marvel at the god damn wonder of the whole thing. Excuse my language....but I could find no other expression that even marginally transmits the awe-strike of it all—the downright holy-to-tears rightness of the whole thing.

In the words of Arthur C. Clarke's Dr David Bowan: My god it is beautiful!

Dad