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contamination. He feels wronged by the way | am. He once chided me about what
he saw as my futile spiritual search in what he called the “health food” Eastern and
brain religions. My youngest, only a little less ardent and critical, visits occasionally,
and, hands in the air and speaking in tongues, prays to the Lord for my salvation.
Of course, this sudden and long lasting personal transformation in the
direction of Fundamentalism is well known and almost commonplace in modern
American and European Jewish, Christian and Moslem college educated middle
class families. The Saudi Arabian World Trade Center bombers were, mostly, well
supported children of the educated middle class We recall the famously tragic
American radical Moslem, Richard Reid, the would be airplane shoe bomber. My
stomach clenched as | heard Richard’s sophisticated and obviously caring father
share his confusion and struggle to rationalize what had happened to his son. The
commonality of this kind of spiritual and life transformations in the educated young
makes each event no less painful. On the other hand, we know that healing
transformations in the name and spirit of the Christian God can lead to quite positive
realities. They are effective in even quasi-secular disguise as in Alcoholics and
Narcotics Anonymous, Synanon and in the rehabilitation of the Charismatic
Christian, ex-alcoholic, Southern Methodist politician, George W. Bush.
Paul Holmer, Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School gives thanks to
the evangelicals who “...keep alive the radical breach that the gospel is from the
nous of this world...they (Fundamentalists, Evangelicals) look marginal if you are
churchy...intolerant if you are ecumenical...anti-intellectual if you are trying to
systematize... in their roughness and ...abrasiveness.” | bring personal and painful
witness to these claims. To get to the personal meaning and mechanisms of these
transformations, | had to start from somewhere. | am wedded to the belief of the
Jewish ecstatic, Abraham Abulafia, and not those of Moses Maimonides, that the
human mind in an altered state of activated intellect, man’s Nevesh, can understand
such mystical happenings. | would continue to work at it.
One of the early personal church experiences with my sons’ religious path
came after accepting an invitation to go with them to a Sunday service at their
current charismatic church. By then, the eldest was married with children, the
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