Brian’s Reflection: Tuesday, August 23, 2011

The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of
Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.

Mark Russell, American comedian; he
was born on this date, 1932, at Buffalo NY.


The theological theory I like the best is that God sat down and wrote the Bible and had it transcribed by human scribes ….. into Hebrew and Greek! Everyone can use a good laugh now and then ….. and this theory provides me many a good belly laugh! It is about as plausible as Mark’s theory of the rings of Saturn – and just as frustrating as the aggravation of lost luggage!

One of the things I love about reading the Bible is the insight It offers into human nature. The Bible is relentless at poking fun at us – and this is even funnier when we recognize that we mainly composed it ourselves! Every one of our human foibles: our egomaniacal self-importance, our deviousness, our charming naïveté, our wickedness, our self-delusion, our lovely hopes and dreams, our beauty - they all surface in the text of the Bible. Without realizing it, we gave ourselves the great gift in the Bible of a mirror in which to see our true selves with all our warts and our wondrousness.

Awareness of the truth about ourselves is one of the primary tools to freedom, health, and wholeness ….. and towards peace and enjoyment of each other. God is very clever. She knows, understanding how we are made, that it is in walking the clear-eyed path of self-knowledge that we shall grasp the truth, and that doing this ourselves holds out the greatest possibility of our breaking free into a Life as wild and wonderful as whirling around like a bit of lost luggage in the rings of Saturn!

Brian+