July 09, 2025

Episode 405 - Into the Mystic

24 minutes

One has been thinking all week about those precious little girls from Camp Mystic. There's also a pastoral situation or two in which sharp suffering seems to have been "imposed" on people I love. Why and How and ... What?

I had a kind of visitation late one night this week. It came initially from ... Van Morrison.

His song "Into the Mystic", from 1970, started to play inside my mind. Then a phrase came down: And Yet! I was looking at all the tragedy, regression and loss -- really seeing it and feeling it... And Yet.

Then something else happened:

A 'Republic Picture' from 1949 came across my screen.

It was a Western I had never seen before but it stars Marie Windsor, so it had to be... at least...

watchable. But then something began to come clear: the movie came to me from, well, Heaven Above (Peter Sellers, even). Seriously, the ending of Republic Pictures' Hellfire (1949) was intended to help us. It was made (back then) to help us (now). It embodied And Yet.

The Christian response to darkest tragedy is probably not explanation or interpretation, but rather superimposition. It's impossible to explain away a certain reality, let's say. And yet what happened is not the whole reality. There is another reality. You might almost say, there are two realities. But isn't this true of our life histories, even of our personalities? The Old Creation is alive and potent. The New Creation is eternal and more potent.

See what you think. Hope you'll maybe try it on.

...more