Personal reflections on spiritual transformation and academic background

enough narcotics to eliminate complexity of thought, real interpersonal feelings and hope for meaningfully creative work. The remarkable thing to me was that people began to talk about my “improved disposition,” an increase in out-of-my- psychiatrist's office personal empathy and kindness as well as a_ significant decrement in my overweening, ego-stoking ambitious and competitive urges. Any return to the earth body of tense readiness to competitively succeed, protect with ego defensive anger, fantasies of assertive sexuality, stand tall grandiose notions of intellectual superiority, even getting up for scientific combat, was accompanied by the return to this world of pain. Only lovingly detached, unpretentious, other directed, quietly calm inner dialogue with Him was a place that | could live. This was an inner land of still another kind of God than | had previously known. | could even read and struggle with theological ideas thoughtfully, without referencing personal mystical, psychopharmacological, Holy Ghost-mimetic, experiences. | could enjoy the rational, social responsibility valuing, spiritual peace of a white Protestant Sunday morning service. | could attend Reformed Jewish Friday night services about man’s responsibility to man without restless boredom. No longer seeking the feeling of God’s thrill, | could think about it, even without being in the state of my father’s and Abulafia’s activated mind. If | had been benefited with a classical language education beyond the high school and early college Latin of Julius Caeser and Cicero or matriculated in an academic theological seminary, | would have already studied, maybe even worn out, the deeper aspects of what seemed like a paradox of the consonance of faith and reason. | would have been familiar with the rhetorical argumentation in the patristic Latin commentary on sacred texts by Tertullian and other Fathers of the early Christian Church, the Talmudic discussions (the Mishna in Hebrew and Gemora in Aramaic) of the oral Torah by the Rabbinate, the Muslim explication of Koranic Islam in the oral tradition of the Hadith. Robert Wilken in his recent The Spirit of Early Christian Thought was in no doubt about the harmonic relationship between rationality and faith: “...by putting itself in the service of truth, faith enables reason to exercise its power in realms to which it would otherwise have no 176 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013676