Praise God!

In my kitchen this evening I found myself praising God. And doing it so spontaneously I was rather surprised and had to wonder at myself. The immediate occasion was listening to some exalted string music performed by Julian Lloyd Webber and broadcast by our local classical music station, WCPE 89.7 FM, in Wake Forest, North Carolina. Praise God, indeed! Why don't I listen to more such music? Friday I had been affected similarly by a performance of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto ("The Emperor") by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, under the direction of Herbert von Karajan, broadcast by the University of Southern California's KUSC over the World Wide Web.

Today was special. In the morning, out in the yard raking leaves, I felt I was in church, exciting thoughts "about God" flowing through my mind, words flowing from my muse, but nothing manic feeling about it, so stately and calm and strong.

If Jesus had ever been going to come again,
I wish He had already done it in
    A year before the one
    My parents my life begun,
So I'd not now be in the slump I'm in,
To choose Christian or other cognomen—

For God exists, and Jesus His Son,
And Prophet Muhammad's not to shun.

But how thrilling, envigorating, and inspiring the whole week! Special on several fronts. Because of the blessed approach of spring, I walked four times up and down the hill from my office to the Carolina campus (a little over a mile one way). My body has been renewed and charged, especially sexually. (In springtime a young man's fancy—and an old man's too—turns not to baseball, but to sex! Throughout my life, whenever sexual energy has been flowing, so have my mental and spiritual energy, which is the secret, if anything is, why Youie was/is for me feminine.)

And I mustn't overlook another front: the provocative comments I've received from (and made back to) Brandon and Tom and Maliha, especially when I've put into the mix with them, quite by accident (or serendipity), my beginning to read a little book by Garry Wills: What Jesus Meant. [Wills is the author also of Papal Sin, Why I Am a Catholic, Saint Augustine, Saint Augustine's Childhood, Saint Augustine's Memory, Saint Augustine's Sin, Saint Augustine's Conversion, The Rosary, and What Paul Meant.]

Reading just Wills's foreword, "Christ Not a Christian," has shaken my world.

While you may know that I need to confess that I can be overly affected by the reading of a new book (as I suppose I was by my reading of Sam Harris's The End of Faith), I do have the sense already that I (and how many millions more of humans?) have been on the wrong track in trying to whittle Jesus Christ (or, as Wills says, "Jesus-Messiah") down as just a man like us. How many times have I written on this blog lately that I didn't believe that Jesus was the son of God in some way that you and I are not?

And I've been hopping about like St. Vitus seeming to agonize over the question of God's existence. Hey, God exists. I affirm it. Jesus was His son. (I'm even going along with God's being the Father rather than the Mother.) And I affirm that Muhammad was God's authentic Messenger, maybe even (as he claimed) the Final One.

So, now, the more interesting inquiry begins:

What, if anything, are we to do in the face of the existence of God, the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and God's message through Muhammad?