Miscellaneous Rambling
I have more to ramble about and yesterday's blog post was growing too long, so it has spilled over to Tuesday. * * * * * * * The talk yesterday about seers and mystics reminded me a book I read about ten years ago: The Miracle Detective by Randall Sullivan. I really enjoyed it and was quite bummed out that I couldn't find it as I composed this post (one of the disadvantages of a loosely-organized 2,500+ book library). Sullivan was a Rolling Stone magazine irreligious contributing editor who started investigating visionaries. The investigation took him to Medjugorje where he had remarkable experiences and ended up converting. Oprah interviewed him about it. * * * * * * * He now has his own show on Oprah's network. It's getting pretty bad reviews (4.0 by users at IMDB), but I thought highly enough of Sullivan's book that I tried to find the show on my Roku, but without success. I will check out some of the scenes on Youtube later, even though the one I watched left me cold. * * * * * * * I've enjoyed George Woodcock's writings about anarchism. Imagine my surprise when I opened up a short anthology of Thomas Merton's writings on eastern religions and saw an introduction by Woodcock. I guess it shouldn't surprise me that a person's interests range from political philosophy to Taoism, but it did. I'll have to delve more into this man some more. * * * * * * * I've heard it said that Taoism was the original anarchic creed. If I weren't Christian, I'd be a Taoist. In fact, the more I read, the more I see an ocean of parallels between Christianity and Taoism. * * * * * * * A great essay on the topic would start with the final words of GKC's Orthodoxy: "Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth."
