The last few days have been just about perfect.  I have been able to be outside a lot.  I like to just sit and watch Creation.  I have seen so many birds of prey flying around this week.  I had an Osprey fly over and sit on the pine tree out back.  I saw swarms of fish fleeing some unseen predator on a pier nearby.  I see palms and pines and majestic old oaks.  I feel more at peace than when sitting in a church being talked at on a Sunday morning.  Back then I would have rather been communing with the most visual part of the life that binds us all together but guilt and habit kept me inside.

I was watching a PBS show about the Amish this past weekend.  I was struck with the sense of connection that they had.  Their identity is built around their shared beliefs and it shames most expressions of faith that I have seen in mainline churches.  Another thing that I also found very interesting was that they all subscribed to a strict adherence to their shared beliefs.  No thinking allowed.   One of the interviewees even said that, in as many words.  Those who wanted more than “because I said so” eventually had to leave.  I kinda know how they feel.

When I was in college I had a professor who sort of reviled the kind of practical faith that some of us in his class practiced.  I was even called out for showing inappropriate behavior once for looking out the window (that is just an aside with no real relevance other than I would have rather been outside than listening to him).  My cronies and I were part of the 70’s “Charismatic” movement.  We served a God who was still alive and was involved in our lives.  The professor was a proponent of the German literary criticism movement of the pre-WWII years.  Needless to say, we clashed.  He told me I did not give his favorite theologian the necessary reverence.  I thought that he didn’t give God enough reverence.  We were probably both wrong.  I was young and sure of myself.  He was older and not so sure of anything.

Now I’m the one who is older and not so sure of anything.  All I seem to be sure of is that I don’t know very much.  The older I get and the more I read and experience, the less I seem to know about anything.  My old professor wanted us to have a faith that could be reasoned and was “real” and not beholden to “myth”.  I didn’t think he knew what a myth was, we did–his beliefs.  What he called myths, I now call faith stories.  It is much easier to understand a hard concept when someone explains it to us with a story?

I think too much.  I don’t “do” enough.  This afternoon, I have been doing.  I have been watching the sky and listening to the sound of the wind in the palms and hearing the call of the birds and the buzz of the cicadas and the whining of our dog wanting me to throw the ball to him.  So I give in and throw it and wish the guy pressure washing on the other side of the canal would be done already. Time for me to be done already.

An unused mind will atrophy just as much as an unused muscle.