I offered the following paragraph as a response to an e-mail, but after re-reading it after I'd clicked on the Send button, I realized that I'd left out a few words that may make my intent more lucid:
"The only part of this that irritates me is that my interest in languages was stymied by my father. Basically, he refused to let me take Latin in high school. He chose every course of study I took there. Except for the sixth grade, he taught at every school I attended through high school, and he took his work home with him, as did my mother, and so I was "in class" almost every waking hour.
I expressed a lot of bitterness and spite toward him and my mother, although she never taught in any of the schools I attended. After decades, I finally realized I refused to take the only course I needed to get a four year degree in college due to bitterness. I literally hated my parents, and hated myself for doing it... until I read this saying in the Gospel of Thomas:
55 Jesus said, "Whoever does not hate father and mother cannot be my disciple, and whoever does not hate brothers and sisters, and carry the cross as I do, will not be worthy of me."
http://users.misericordia.edu//davies/thomas/Trans.htm
Refusing to finish college by not passing this one, fairly easy sophomore-level course in stage design was a stupid thing to do. I didn't have a clue what my motivation was at the time. Later, I came to realize I refused to get a college degree to spite my father. Worse, to do it by deliberately refusing to obtain a passing grade on an easy course was mean-spirited.
It was fortunate I didn't realize why I did what I did until after my father died, but then it was too late to make amends. The odd thing was that my father forgave me for my bitterness and spite toward him before he died, and asked my forgiveness for the rather extreme physical abuse he imposed in my childhood. Well, he sort of forgave me through my sister-in-law. Never to my face. I like to pretend he forgave me, because I pretend I forgave him too.
I'm looking forward to the Winter Solstice again this year. A few Solstices ago I consciously experienced a feeling of peace and joy of fairly profound intensity during and just after the winter solstice. It was by accident I noticed. It wasn't an event I had anticipated by design.
The way I rationalized it was to consider the dynamics of the days getting shorter and shorter from the dawn of the Summer Solstice. The light of the Sun disappearing incrementally over the next six months naturally induced a fear into me, that this loss of sunlight might not stop happening, and the world would be left in darkness. Isn't that WHAT the world saviors and religions promise to save us from? Darkness?
Well, it's not their peace and goodwill to give away. The same tension is relieved even if you've never heard of any of these famous dead guys. The inhabitants of the Earth may need these careactors for some reasons, useful or not, but they don't need them to be saved from eternal darkness because the light of the Sun went away. The inhabitants of the Earth would go away first. Why would they not?
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
