Courage Walks Alone

Courage Walks Alone

Copyright 2016 Don Ray

At the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure to combat breast cancer

Ten minutes after sunrise, crowds in pink stream in, then shuffle blank faced around the grounds before getting in one of the various long lines to dutifully collect bags of stuff and trinkets and baubles covered with marketing logos of the sponsors.  

From the surrounding neighborhoods people stream in after finding a place to park, most of the pink clad people walking in groups of teams or families, some wearing “survivor” tags, some wearing “in memory of…” tags.  

But an older gentleman walks alone, dignified in his crisp, new, pink-and-white t-shirt.  He arrives alone. He will leave alone, his solitary participation eloquent testimony to the cost of the disease this event seeks to combat.

The droning speaker whom no one hears, the volunteers filling the bags of baubles provided by sponsors, they are all beautiful in their worldly attempt to address a cause of suffering….but it all must ring a bit hollow to the dignified older gentleman in pink and white, who more than festival and frivolous costumes could surely use a hug and that missing familiar hand in his.

Copyright 2016 Don Ray

Science vs religion

Science vs. Religion

Copyright 2016 Don Ray

The beauty of science: it offers a mutually shared faith.

You can see my data and replicate my experiments.

The weakness of religion: you cannot see my god(s), cannot share my ecstatic experience, cannot measure my holy truths.

With science I can give you improved crop yields, transportation, communication, and medical care. 

With my religion I can give you confusing words and obscure names and esoteric creeds, and of course, retribution.

Science will always win the intellectual debate with religion because science’s shared, common, mutually experienced data base is inarguable.  But religion would eliminate even the need for debate if it more effectively shared what it offers as common, verifiable, replicable, mutual experience: love,  hope, healing, forgiveness, and compassion. 

Copyright 2016 Don Ray

Cranial Caucus: confusing conundrums of consciousness

Cranial Caucus

Don Ray

Copyright 2016

Self-awareness, thoughts arising from within the self, objective-external sensory inputs, the self’s filtering and perception of those external inputs, dictated-genetically programmed thoughts and behaviors, randomly firing neurons and synapses, reactions and automatic responses, and somewhere in that cacophony, the whispering of the Holy Spirit?!

Good grief, can consciousness really be so complicated?!  And I’ve not even yet invoked the mysterious subconscious!

Maybe we should introduce a few possessing spirits while we’re at it!….and let’s not leave out addictions, lusts, and hungers, with their concomitant ability to deftly weave our rationalizations of our irrational behaviors. 

Jesus' Despair

Copyright 2016 Don Ray

What was it like for Yeshu? ( or “Jesus” as pronounced in the United States for the last century or so)

My God, to have such a clear vision of the human condition, to so perspicaciously perceive the madness of human behavior and priorities, to discern our abject lack of awareness of evident consequences of our actions, surely there had to come a time when such realization brought Him to despair and hopelessness.

His teaching would not become popular.  The crowds disappeared.  No one understood.

Do we hear some of that hopeless resignation in His oft repeated query, “what do you want from me?”  To the blind and lepers and cripples He said this, a seemingly rhetorical question about the obvious, but after a lifetime of seeing humanity seek that which is patently destructive, unhealthy,

Hugged by trees

In perfection of harmony these old trees judge not.  Still and quiet and peaceful they stand, teaching one more lesson.

Their randomly tangled limbs, reaching this way and that, reveal life reaching, life reaching in every direction.

These limbs could be our lives, our lives every bit as crooked and tangled in their blind reaching for the Light.....but unlike our fading past and hidden future, in the trees’ branches that groping life-path is documented, each twist and change of direction and simultaneous growth in multiple directions all there to be seen, an entire life history sculpted through, and suspended in, thin air.

Might our lives not look similar could we see them in their entirety, from beginning to end, our growing roots reaching into the earth, our roots extending around the boulders and bedrock of constraints and barriers and setbacks, our roots extending into the world seeking sustenance in careers and crops and

Perceiving Purpose

On yesterday’s hike I was entranced by the wall of trees blanketing the opposite canyon wall.  I marveled at the intricate network of branches on trees on this side of the canyon.

Today I recognize that there before me was displayed a model representing all existence.  Each tree symbolizes a universe.  The chaos of branches and roots represents exploration in every possible direction, seemingly random and chaotic exploration, exploring every life-form, every geologic form, every stellar form, every planetary form.

In the tree, formed out of the roiling, random chaos of branches reaching this way and that, appears an unambiguous direction of growth, always up, always toward the sun......but this general direction of growth, the reaching down for water and up for sun, is indiscernible if looking too closely at only one or two or three knotted roots and twisted branches. 

Underlying the random chaos of the branches is the structure of DNA, for a living entity analogous to the laws of physics for a universe.  From tree to tree, and

Choose your ticket: Auschwitz or Roman Colosseum

Choose Your Ticket: Auschwitz or Roman Colosseum

Copyright 2016 Don Ray

Society’s attitude toward Auschwitz and the Roman Colosseum  may tell us something about ourselves.

Nobody likes Auschwitz.  Everyone perceives it as a place of tragedy, except for perhaps a handful of unrepentant psychopaths.

Now go to the Colosseum.  Within its walls countless thousands upon thousands were murdered, executed, tortured, and generally torn asunder, no small number of them because of their non-conforming religious beliefs.  The Colosseum was a place of unbridled horror, blood, gore, terror, and suffering.

Auschwitz had to be kept hidden from the general populace.  Its perpetrators operated in secrecy behind walls.  The Colosseum operated for entertainment of the general public.  Admission was free.

The operators of Auschwitz were hunted down, imprisoned, executed, and universally condemned in public opinion.  The operators of the Colosseum are for the most part praised as one of the great civilizations in history.