The Helper
November 17, 2007
A lone spectral figure races against the dark backdrop of the heavens, relentlessly scanning the planet. Suddenly up ahead a beam of light shoots up from the depths of Middle America, piercing the clouds and fading into the ionosphere. Instantly accelerating to blinding speed, the ghostly entity dives towards the light’s source, a long, glowing, meteoric tail stretching brightly behind him.
(Meanwhile, somewhere in the American Midwest)
“Call on him! Call on him! That’s all you need to do. He will help us.” The young girl was breathless with excitement.
The boy knelt on the floor, his head bowed, hands clasped together with fingers pointing skyward. His eyes were closed and his lips moved in a fast and urgent whisper.
There suddenly came the sound of a roaring wind, rising louder and louder, like a fast approaching freight train. The window curtains began to wave about crazily and a pile of papers on a nearby desk fluttered around the room like moths in a whirlwind. A blinding white light filled the space and both teenagers threw themselves down on the carpet, hands over their eyes. Instantly in the middle of the room there appeared a man of light, hands on hip, cape swirling about his shoulders. On his chest were written the bright glowing letters; H.G.
The girl peeked up through her fingers. “He’s here! He’s here! He has come to help us!”
(Later, at the dining room table)
“So now you see why we called for you. We need your help” said the girl. “If we don’t pass this exam then we won’t be accepted to Canon College next fall.”
“The temptation to cheat is so strong. Can you please help us!” His eyes wide in panic, desperation filled the boy’s voice.
The figure seated across from the boy and girl was so bright with light that it was impossible to look directly at him, yet no visible features were discernible and he seemed to lack material substance. There was a soft filminess about him, a somewhat translucent quality to his presence, like maybe he was there yet also somehow not there. A low voice emanated from deep within.
“You were right to call on me, kids. With my help you will be able to accomplish your task. Here, take this and keep it someplace safe.” He reached across and placed something in the girl’s hand. “Now that my work here is finished, I must be going.”
“But why can’t you stay with us? When will you be back?” the girl cried.
“I can’t stay; others need my help. But remember; I am always there for people of righteousness. Just call on me and I will come!“ At that moment he rocketed out of his chair and in a rush of blinding light and energy shot through up through the ceiling, leaving behind a swirling mist of shimmering particles.
The room began to settle back to normal. “Holy smokes! He’s gone!” said the boy breathlessly. “What was that he gave you?”
Slowly opening her hand they saw a square of folded paper. Carefully she opened it up and, reading what was on it, she began to smile, tears of joy running down her cheeks. “The answers! He gave us the answers to the exam! Oh, thank you! Thank you!”
They both ran to the window and looking up they saw a blazing comet streaking towards space, and a voice crying “Up, Up and Awaaay!”
Ghost Story
October 24, 2007
My wife and daughter share a casual interest in accounts of the supernatural. They love to watch those ghost shows on the cable channels, the ones where the paranormal investigators check out allegedly haunted houses. Although they are not in the least way obsessed with the idea of supernatural contact, they both find it entertaining and have adopted a “who knows?” attitude. As for myself, I am a born skeptic and have little time for these ‘reality’ TV programs.
Last Sunday Bev and I took Dot, our 19 year old daughter, and her best friend Bekah , out to enjoy an afternoon’s drive through the countryside at autumn’s peak. It was a classic fall day, a brisk wind pushing gunmetal clouds across a blue sky. The sunlight had that watery feel to it, softening the bright colors of the leaves. Later in the afternoon we ended up in an old town that is famous for being at the center of a Civil War battle. Dot mentioned that the town was considered a favorite haunt for many ghosts, apparently due to the thousands of violent deaths inflicted in that battle.
Since the weather was so nice and the trees so beautiful we were surprised that only a smattering of restaurants in town were open. Of those few, we chose a busy place on the square. Most of the buildings in town looked quite old yet well maintained, and this one was no exception. There was a 20 minute wait for a table so I took my pager outside and sat on a bench. My wife darted into an antique store to check out their advertised “dental artifacts” while the girls ran to the lady’s room, upstairs in the restaurant.
Ten minutes later the girls burst out through the establishment’s doors, laughing and giggling. When I asked about all their joviality, Dot held out her phone to me. “Listen” she said.
The traffic noise was loud on the square but I could just make out Dot’s voice saying; “Is there anyone with us today? If you’re here we would like to talk to you.” There was a long pause full of static, then Dot saying; “You can talk to me (garbled)?” Pause. “ You don’t have to be afraid of us. You can talk to me. My name is Dot. Pause. Allright, bye- bye.” This was followed by the sounds of both girls giggling. .
(I knew just what they had been up to. Recently we watched the movie “White Noise” on DVD. In it, Michael Keaton is contacted by souls who have gone over to the ‘other side’. They reached him by laying their voices down on magnetic recording tape. Upon playback these spectral voices could be heard for the first time. Called EVP – Electronic Voice Phenomena- it is taken very seriously by some people, the foremost experts being Lisa and Tom Butler of AAEVP, consultants on the film. [ http://www.aaevp.com/ ] I thought it was a fair movie, but like most ‘scary’ movies you need to suspend your disbelief for a couple of hours. My disbelief in the paranormal returned before the credits were running, My wife and daughter maintained their “who knows?” perspective. and after the movie they excitedly exchanged stories of other EVPs.)
Back on the town square, I smiled and handed the phone back. One should never underestimate what Dot might do. Just then, as Bev was walking up, the restaurant pager went off. We went inside, had an enjoyable meal and within a couple of hours we were back home. That night, in the quiet of our living room, Dot listened to the recording again. Excited, she had us listen to it as well.
In the middle of the second pause of scratchy white noise a woman’s low voice could be heard whispering what sounded like “Kitty, kitty, kitty”, followed by a very soft chuckle (or sobbing, perhaps?). I immediately suspected the girls of playing a prank but Dot was able to quickly convince me of their innocence. I know my daughter, and that’s not her style. She insisted that they were completely alone in the ladies room (she would never had attempted this stunt otherwise). I asked her to send the voice message to my phone and the next day I had some co –workers listen to it. Eyes were wide when they put the phone down. You can hear the recording by going to the following link:
Going to Google I initiated a search for more information and found what I was looking for:
In 2001 this restaurant burned down to the ground and it had since been rebuilt to the original specifications. During the reconstruction the body of a recently murdered woman had been discovered at the building site, where she reportedly had been left to die. (I have yet to find any other information). The restaurant staff says that the spirit of this woman haunts the building, open and closing doors and windows , with most of the activity taking place in the kitchen and in the ladies room.
OK. I can’t explain this. Is this the result of some elaborate hoax being perpetrated by the operators of this restaurant? It’s not as if they promoted any haunting – it was not easy finding the story of the dead woman’s body. Could it be the tortured soul of someone named Kitty, somehow trapped in this house? Or, as my daughter suspects, was the spirit mocking Dot, comparing her to someone who casually calls for a pet, not knowing what they are really dealing with? Is Kitty someone we should be praying for?
At one time I would never seriously consider such a thing as supernatural phenomena, but for over the past 5 years I have been immersed things spiritual. As some will say, who knows?
What do you think? Do you have a similar story to share?
Quantum Miracles: Physical Spirituality
July 23, 2007
OK, please bear with me here. Other than the fact that I am as curious as a cat (and live with three of them) I haven’t the foggiest notion what I am talking about. Still, there just might be something to this.
In 1935 the Austrian physicist Erwin Schroedinger envisioned a scenario that illustrated some of the mysteries of quantum mechanics. This famous thought experiment became known as the dilemma of “Schroedinger’s Cat.
Here is a description of Shroedinger’s Cat that I found a bit easier to digest.
Schrodinger’s Cat
A cat is in a box with a lid that is shut. Within the box is a radioactive nucleus that has a 50-50 chance of decaying in an hour. If the nucleus decays this triggers a mechanism that breaks a vial of poison gas that kills the cat. The cat has two states: alive or dead. Schrodinger argued that if quantum mechanics is regarded as a fundamental universal theory then it must be applicable to all systems be they small or large. If so, then we must write, for the cat’s state,
|cat> = a|alive> + b|dead>,
that is, the cat apparently is in a superposed state of life and death! Then we open the box.
According to the measurement hypothesis (discussed next) when we open the box, we are performing a measurement of the cat’s state; this is said to cause the cat’s superposed state to collapse into one base state or the other |dead> or |alive>. The cat is found either pushing up the daisies, or purring for its milk. Schroedinger considered this to be so absurd that (like Einstein) he concluded that quantum mechanics could not be the final word; something was missing.
This is such a strange notion, a cat that is somehow both alive and dead, and, more to the point, contrary to what appears to happen in the macroscopic world that there seems to be only two possibilities: either quantum mechanics works only on a microscopic scale, in which case it is not a universal theory, or it is a universal theory in which case it cries out for a better understanding of the notion of superposition.
Since the advent of quantum theory, many physicists have tried to devise different interpretations of the superposition of states.
From “The Quantum World” , Florida State University Physics Department.
http://www.physics.fsu.edu/users/ProsperH/AST3033/quantumworld.htm
So, in a layman’s nutshell: Just the act of observing an experiment will affect the outcome. The tree falling in the forest makes no noise.(The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle makes a similar statement, but let’s not go there right now.)
The reason I wanted to talk about Schroedinger’s cat is because I think it might just have some bearing on the validity and relevance of miracles. A group of us have been engaged in a discussion over some of the works of CS Lewis and recently the topic was his essay “Miracles”. Lewis, for those of you who do not know, is considered by many to be one of the greatest of Christian apologists, practicing the art of intellectually and rationally explaining the Christian faith to those who do not believe.
In this essay it is his premise that the miracles that have been witnessed by many people over the centuries present clear evidence, to anyone who is interested, that there exists a God, particularly the God of Christianity. One of the people in our group took issue with his suggestion, a suggestion that is not unique to Lewis and is considered a part of Christian doctrine as told in the various creeds.
She contended that so many of these miraculous events are easily explained away by non-religious people and the more that science reveals of our natural world, the less people are likely to accept supernatural explanations. There also tends to be a lack of consensus among spiritual believers over what constitutes a miracle, from dramatic healings to the finding of lost keys.
I would have to agree with her. I have witnessed events that I can only describe as being supernatural evidence of God but rarely have I presented them to others as being miraculous. When I have witnessed those attempts at convincing a skeptic that God does work miracles in this world, they have never been successful. That doesn’t mean that miracles have never drawn someone closer to accepting spiritual possibilities, but I have never seen it happen.
The evidence of miracles had very little to do with my turning away from atheism, and the same can be said for my family and friends. I can not recall ever witnessing a miracle (before I found my faith in God) that I would have identified as such. But since I now enjoy a relationship with God, through Jesus, rarely does a day go by that I do not encounter a miracle or two. Some of them may be considered mundane but more than a few cannot be easily explained away naturally.
So could it be, that because I have changed my perspective on life, miracles do exist for me as I observe them? And when a skeptic observes the same event, there is no miracle, because of his particular vantage point? I am not suggesting here that our perception causes us just to see things differently (though that is certainly true) but that in many (perhaps all) instances it is our actual physical observation that helps shape the outcome.
In other words; the skeptic opens the box to find the cat dead because his rational mind, weighing the evidence in hand, tells him it must be so. When the person of faith opens the box, she witnesses the miracle of a live cat even though the same evidence was clearly visible to her. Her faith has effectively changed the outcome of the event.
And he did not do many miracles there because of their lack of faith.
Matthew 13:58
What do you think? Other than perhaps I should consider putting a little less catnip in my pipe.
*If God Is In The Details Why Does Genesis Offer So Few?
September 4, 2006
All things are possible with God. So it could very well be that the universe was created precisely as it has been laid out in the book of Genesis. Science certainly has not been able to prove otherwise, but for many of us the culmination of the evidence does paint a slightly different picture.
It is often said that God is in the details. The closer we scrutinize nature and observe its intricate workings the more God reveals himself to us. We often come upon paradoxes that would only seem to be explicable as long as there is some benevolent intellect at work behind the scenes. (For example: proteins are manufactured in cells yet cells need proteins to exist).
But if God is in the details, Genesis surely does not present us with too many of them. Perhaps the creation account is correct but the picture it paints has been made with broad, flowing strokes of the author’s brush. Perhaps there was no felt need at the time to be very detailed and precise in describing the process of God’s creativity. We should remember that the Bible was originally an oral history. How much detail could be retained and then passed on from generation to generation? How much detail was even necessary to convey God’s message of love and beauty? We need only to look around and it is all there for us to behold.
As creation surrounds us, it bedazzles us, inspires us and nurtures us. It also intrigues us. Being creatures in his image we are obsessed with the rest of God’s creation. The longing for God’s nature drives us to uncover more of his mysteries. How and why do things happen? To what purpose is there to the observable world, if any at all? The more we study our universe the more we learn about ourselves as well as the artist who first imagined us.
There are some very concise (yet hypothetical) explanations by various highly accredited scientists, theologians and philosophers that bring Genesis and science together with little trouble. The problem seems to be that many good people on both sides of this debate feel that the wall of separation is too high to be able to see over.
Maybe both arguments are correct. Before I am accused of relativism here let me try to explain by analogy:
Statement #1) In 1863 Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.
Statement #2) In 1865 the Union finally defeated rebel forces thereby ensuring the emancipation of the slaves held by the Confederate states.
Although both the above statements are true, neither one is complete. Some people may even think that these statements are virtually at odds with each other.
Is it possible that Genesis says all that is necessary but is deliberately lacking the detail to fully explain God’s artistic process, that it describes the picture without identifying the medium or the technique? Isn’t it also possible that secularized science does a good job of identifying the palettes, pixels and mediums involved in the painting yet fails to see the hand of the artist, the passion that the artist has for his work? Every work of art denotes an artist and every artwork is the culmination of an intricate combination of materials and processes used by the artist. It is often hoped by the artist that his work be studied, pondered and examined and that truth may be revealed to the observer in the process. With all good art there are usually more questions raised than answers given but the truth will shine through.
How else could it be in the hands of the Maestro?
