"Spelunking.........................."

“A thing is not high if one can reach it; it is not great if one can reason about it; it is not deep if one can see its bottom.” ….Peter Keating in Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead”

Having just finished the above novel, my second perusal of the author’s personal opinions put forth in a fictional outreach, I find myself once again mentally chewing on the bits and pieces of her recipe for what she calls “Objectivism”. She breaks it down into four mandates, the first three of which are as follows: (a) reality, in so far as facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, hopes or fears; (b) reason, as being a man’s only means of perceiving reality; and (c) self-interest, since every man is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. Some, I suppose, might wonder why a fellow with a forty year experience in Christianity would be reading anything an atheist has to say; but, in truth, some of her viewpoints give me more food for thought than did a lot of the sermons preached to me in this journey. That, in no way, is meant to suggest a lack of faith in Biblical authority, only that it was long ago proven to me humanity remains humanity on either side of the pulpit, God teaching us as we go, speaking to us out of more than just the Book. At one place in the above story, for example, the author writes of a young man trying to decide if life was worth living, looking to find meaning to life, a joy not yet gained, and feeling a sense of discovering it in a secluded wilderness, but realizing, at the same time, it would be lost to him upon his return to society. Her answer for his longing does not match what I would say to him. The predicament, itself, though, is one my group addresses each time we visit the Detention Center. The character quote above was probably intended, by the writer, to frame success. To me, however, it’s a pretty good description of God being beyond our ability to access other than through that connection He gives us in Christ. Such genre is not my normal pursuit and I wouldn’t recommend it as anywhere to consistently swim without the “anchor-line”; but every now and then, as He permits, a venture into other waters hasn’t hurt me yet……