I quote from Mona’s most recent letter:

Aunt Nina used to talk about not fighting what God has in store for us.  I think there was alot of wisdom in this stance.

This is one of the major, oft-recurring themes on this blog.  This wisdom is Dad’s, Aunt Nina’s, and Laure’s.  There’s no wheeling and dealing with what God has in store for us.  I think it’s high time we gave this a little thought.  I’d like to do it with several members of my family, though.  What do you say?

There are many problems with this view.  I know I go along with this, but I don’t know how to talk about it.  I complain that my parents and sisters remain silent on religious subjects, as if talking about them would be a breach of privacy, like Chinese hackers getting into precious data-banks on Google.  And yet, for such a blabber-mouth as myself, I have precious little to say about this.  Except that it seems complicated, and dangerous, and fascinating.  I wonder what God thinks about this stance of not fighting his will.  My boys were baptized under a huge painting of Jacob fighting God’s angel.  And it left a mark on Jacob.  And seems to have stood him in good stead.

I’ll stop here.  I wish we could all come together and be serious about a few of the themes and questions set out on this blog.  This one seems so close to the history of our family that I would imagine it wouldn’t take much to get the ball rolling.  Let’s wait and see.

In the meantime, I have a book to recommend.  “36 Arguments for the Existence of God” by Rebecca Goldstein.  It’s a novel.  A novel about a person who thinks and knows himself to be an atheist, but an athiest with a soul.  Is that possible?  Isn’t that what we are eventually going to confront?  The soul as something shared by everyone, in different ways, regardless of their religious “positions.”  I wouldn’t recommend this book if it were not such an impressive achievement.  It’s the kind of book you can surely put down (as against all those books that are so good you can’t put them down until you’ve come to the plot’s resolution.)  It’s all about the psychology of belief.  That’s a family matter if there ever was one!  I dream one day of something like a trans-atlantic book club with a sign outside reading: “for family only.”  Dream on, Tom.  Rebecca Goldstein divorced her first husband to marry Steven Pinker, author of “The Language Instinct.”  These two people have to be the most glamorous pair of teachers in the history of the profession.  Go and check em out.  Both of them are knock-down gorgeous.  It doesn’t seem to have impacted negatively on their work.  It’s as if they were unconscious of the faces and bodies and voices and general allure.  The students, reportedly, go bananas over both of them.