Catching up -- a hodgepodge

Night after night, I have talked myself out of typing on this screen. It's not that I've had nothing to write about -- quite the contrary. So much has gone on in my life -- sometimes I am so busy living it that I find myself too tired to write about it.

Sarah Palin came to our state recently and I took a day off from work to go to the event. It was labeled as a rally, so that should have prepared me, but still, I felt slightly uncomfortable at the attempt to rouse my emotions that way. I never went to pep rallies in high school for that same reason -- even hated singing campfire songs as a kid because I don't like being told how I should feel, or having others work on my emotions.

Contrary to popular rumors, nobody screamed,"Kill Obama" or anything like that, at least at this rally.

This month, Sweetie and I also took our Niece to Her ballet practice. I killed time by scribbling down thoughts as they came to me there as well as details of what I saw and heard around me. I used to do that a lot. More on that later.

We took our neighbor out for dinner and made some new friends, a sweet, older couple. More, later.

I've also been reading intensively from about four different books. One is Thirteen Moons, a historical fiction novel set at the time of the Cherokee Trail of Tears. Since I have so recently defended Columbus, perhaps I am hypocritical to feel utter contempt for Andrew Jackson and his role in that disgusting travesty of the American ideal. Still, contempt I feel.

The second book is Boorstin's The Discoverers, the most recently read chapter being about the invention of clocks. More on that later.

The third book is Encyclopedia of the Prehistoric World, all about the bumper-car antics of our planet's continents, and the weird creatures that have lived upon it. More later.

Lastly, I have read through the writings of the Early Christian Church Fathers, so now, before moving on into the age of Constantine, I've taken a little detour into the extinct (?) world of the Gnostics, supposedly heretical Christians at whom some of those ECFS took great offense.

For a movement that only lasted about a century before being obliterated by orthodoxy, and whose works also were consigned to oblivion until a jar of them was found in the Egyptian desert in the 1940s, it is astounding to read that no less than 4,000 books have been written on the subject.

There is so much that I could write, so many questions that pop up! What compelled an early Christian monk from a nearby monastery to collect and hide away these proscribed texts? What was he thinking about when he made that lonely trip into the desert with his jar of heresy?

What was in the minds and hearts of the people who wrote these texts -- certainly they were not all the slavering charlatans that Iranaeus and others made them out to be.

And Elaine Pagels, who in 1979 wrote the award-winning account of Gnosticism for the understanding of laymen -- what a fascinating life this Woman has had, as well! She started out a dancer with Martha Graham and then became a scholar in the field of ancient religion. More, much more, later.