Finding a Reason and a Faith

 

We were all connected.  Related.  And it was why I always read the paper.  It was about my town.  The mystery about what happened here.  People I knew.  Yesterday.  Or in Mumbai.  And I wanted to understand all of it. 

 

The mystery:  It is a bad day to ask the insensitive question, but to see India is to marvel.  In a city of 19 million, where do they put the raw sewage?  It was a marvel in my city of 350,000.  Or in a world with more than 6 billion, for that matter.  It is a miracle that it is disposed so well.  Each day.

 

In Mumbai, how many deaths?  What just happened?  Why?  People who were the same yet different.  People with shared ideas and other ideas beyond any kind of theology.  De ja vu all over again. 

 

With belief, a person thinks that something is true but may be mistaken.  Faith is not the same thing as knowledge.  We learned that in Minnesota on August 1, 2007.  For example, a woman thought a particular bridge was safe enough to drive across.  The bridge was older than her.  She attempted to drive across it one Wednesday evening.  Unfortunately, the bridge collapsed.  She believed the bridge was safe but her belief was mistaken. It is not accurate to say that she knew that the bridge was safe, since plainly it was not. If she had gotten home from work that day, she might be justified in subsequently holding that she knew the bridge had been safe enough for passage at that particular point in history.  For something to count as knowledge, it must actually be true. Since that day, a lot of people worry.  About bridges over rivers.  About falling markets in equities and bonds.  About the world. 

 

In search of something mysterious.  Of life.  Looking below the surface layers for the mystery.  In the fruit.  The lingonberry jam. The plum jam.  The orange marmalade.  In the grapes.  Bitter. Sweet.  The harvest.  When picked.  The heat of August and its affect.  The terroir.  The soil.  The longitude and latttitude that determined sunshine, temperature.  Adopted.  Transplanted grapes.  To Australia, New Zealand, Chile.  A wine with a dry taste. Drinking something and thirsting for more.  God. 

 

Wine, as different as people.  White.  Red.  The land.  The 1929 crash caused the wine business to plunge. And in November 2008, the 2005 Chateau Mouton-Rothschild from Bordeaux, a wine which was sold just a few months ago for double the price, languishs on the shelves at $549 these days.  The variables affecting taste.  And the cost.  Blind to our reasons for justifying our methods of inference of taste, of truth, we use rational insight to justify the cost. That was the mystery.  What did I know about this wine, except for the cost?  What was behind all this?  Why did people pay such a cost?  It is said that there are more than 10, 000 denominations of Christianity alone.  With the news out of Iraq, it sounded like Islam had the same kind of divisions.  Islamist feminists, in search of the Truth, had the same struggles for Truth as everyone everywhere.  Denominations a lot like the 10,000 bottles of wine in the Bottle Shoppe. 

                

To read about people.  People who are the same, people who are different.  People with shared ideas.  People with a common past to begin with, in family.  People next door who were different. To understand them.  Because my son was attracted to the girl next door.  Things vying for my attention.  And his.  People to share a glass of wine with.  Monotheism or polytheism?   Here or there?  Three in one.  Or One?  

 

Each person was a lot like those grapes before they were crushed and blended.  Trying to learn about each year.  The stress which determine “being.”  Prior to the blending and the change.  How this taste came to be.  The new tastes.  In the pursuit of knowledge, I was changed.  It was why we read.  You and me.  And together we reached new highs. 

  

Judaism, Christianity.  One starting place to find God.  Behind the mystery.  Things vying for my attention.  To look for God in the mystery.  The kabbalistic text.  Things.  People.  Ideas.  Things that make my day, my life….holy.  By my spending time.  By my actions.  Time and money.  God revealing, and time spent praying were two different activities.  Kabbalistists believe that God Himself in the end is unknowable, but there is a revealed aspect of God who created the universe, preserves the universe, and interacts with mankind.  In the day, I interact with His creation through my actions, somehow making the world more sacred, working for others.  It was part of the Great Commandment, to know, to love, and to serve.      

 

Searching for God and just a part of His mystery.  Robert Parker Jr. on the 2005 Bordeax: “It is an extraordinary vintage and one that is different from anything I have tasted in the last twenty-eight years. As a general rule, the wines are very concentrated, extremely high in tannin, and backward, but the fresh acids combined with the massive concentration and higher than normal alcohols make for a distinctive vintage that will probably be one of the longest-lived I have ever tasted…In short, this vintage has no shortage of legendary wine…” 

  

It was like trying to learn about the nuances, of wine.  In the land of milk and honey, right here.  With a variety of 10,000 bottles in the wine shop.  in the Land of 10,000 Lakes.  Each with a different year, a different taste, a different history.  There was so much to learn and read.  The process of education.  The mystery of the past.  The layers we stood on.  The terroir in which the grapes were planted.  We drank with our biases.  

  

“So what did you do today, honey?  Do we have any wine?”