the thing that makes you stick your head out in the rain

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter comes from the title of the book that the movie is fairly well based on.  It is by one of my favorite authors, Carson McCullough, one of those southern women writers who are all so good.  She also wrote A Member of the Wedding which they made an award winning movie out of. 

Did you know Genghis Kahn was a Christian?  He was a Nestorian Christian one of those early offshoots that shot off east and then were kind of lost to the central church.  I don't think whatever brand of Christianity he belonged to had much in common with the one that occupied Europe when he sent his short legged horses running west.  And I don't really know for sure that he was any kind of Christian, it was just something I read in a book about him.

Which I guess is the same thing you could say about Jesus, that you read a book about him, which I maintain is just a pretty good book, not the good book, and of course we don't really know for sure if he said what those guys, who we are not even sure who they were, said he said. 

So what does it even mean to believe in Christ since so many people who claim to believe in him believe in entirely different things?  Don't you really have to say that you believe in the Christ defined by such and such doctrines in order for your declaration to have any meaning?  And then if you aren't sure about Christ than you can't be sure of the Christian god.  You could become Jewish or Moslem or one of those odd little sects like the Druze or the Yazidi.  You could have your own church of the Holy Church of Christ without Christ, like Hazel Motes in Wise Blood written by Flannery O'Connor, another one of those great southern women writers, and a pretty damn good movie too.

Or I suppose you could just choose any god at all, the world is full of them.  Or you could do like Rene Descartes, Beagles thinks therefore he is, and start with the things you know for sure and work outwards towards them.  Of course Rene's quest led him right back to the bosom of the Catholic Church so I don't know.

See and there you go again, a couple paragraphs down, after saying you are not so sure about Jesus because he didn't come back in a few days like he said he did, and you really can't be sure if he actually said that, or said anything those unknown guys said he did, and then you are referencing something he said.  I think we have a misunderstanding when you quote the bible.  What most people mean when they say that the bible says this or that, is that this is important and credible because the bible says it.  What I think you mean is just like this is something I read somewhere, or heard somewhere or something, it's to be judged on its own merit and not because of its source.

And I think I agree with what you are saying.  We are always told to do the good thing, always choose good over evil.  Well duh.  But the problem is telling the difference between good and evil, and really the best thing to do is to think it out to its consequences and choose the act that leads to the best consequences.  This puts you into the ends justifies the means crowd that so many get up on their high horse and decry, but in fact that is the way to go.  I don't know why people even argue about it.

I think that most of the trouble in the world comes from people doing stupid things rather than evil things, and I think the evilest things done are by people who think they are doing good.


No the meaning, that elusive thing, that, I don't know, thing that you are thinking about when you lean out of your window into the rain and sigh, that you sense sometimes in a book or a movie or a song, and it almost seems like you can reach out and grab it, but it always slips out of your grasp, is not of the things of this world, as nice as they are no sammich or painting or garden can ever hold it.

See it's nice to think that there is something out there, not exactly of this world, something bigger, maybe better, and it's nice to think you have glimpsed it or rubbed shoulders with it, but if you ever did get it, it would be a thing of this world, like the sammich the painting and the garden, nice enough in their own way, but ordinary, not bigger, not beyond.  Part of its charm, maybe all of it, is that it can never be grasped, and therein a sadness, but a sweet sadness, the sort of thing that makes you sigh before you pull your head out of the rain.

Whatever that means.