"Moorage......................"

”"I think it is impossible to explain faith. It is like trying to explain air, which one cannot do by dividing it into its component parts and labelling them scientifically. It must be breathed to be understood" - Patrick White, Nobel Prize in Literature 1973

”For the first time in my life I understood the meaning of the word ‘never’. And it’s really awful. You say the word a hundred times a day, but you don’t really know what you’re saying until you are faced with a real ‘never again’.” – Muriel Barbery

While exploring a few previous internet encounters this morning, I found myself caught for more than just a few moments by this picture and the above quotes. The two were connected only in as much as my own mind explored potential relationship between them. The page, itself, was designed to inspire writers and, out of the variety there before me, this trio sparked something in my depths. In one sense, the memory of losing my father when I was but eighteen is yet as real as the day it happened. While a feeling of there being “a knife in my belly”, severing from me all possibility of ever again knowing his existence otherwise, may no longer seem more than my ability to bear, the words “never again” became quite clear to me long ago. How does that relate to this image of some book or manuscript destroyed by flames? For whatever reason, it spoke to me of Bible, of whether a man’s trust is anchored in a book or in the One who lives within its pages. There is, for me, a difference. With more than four decades in this now, I’ve known far too many who, out of disappointment with a doctrine taught and accepted, but didn’t hold up somewhere down the road, out of discouragement with a church whose humanity proved stronger than any manifestation of His resurrected reality, abandoned ranks and walked away. There may well have been no literal match applied to Scripture. Nonetheless, a belief once strongly confessed is reduced to ashes unless that which gave it life sprung from more than just chapter and verse. Either we know a “hook in our belly” or all we really possess is merely an illusion, a false sense of security anchored in our own stinkin’ thinkin’. Either His “paternal umbilical cord” has been reconnected to an inner point in the depths of all that we are, or our Christianity is not much more than religious ritual. If any would seek to know the difference, inhale; and if all you experience is more oxygen in your lungs, that, of itself, only serves notice of you yet being in this world…….