Faith...

I’ve been reading - consuming - books by religious apologists. The literature is broad… but not very deep (writing more and more about less and less). At some point in every book there comes a moment where the author throws up his hands and says “You just have to believe!” Mark Twain was blessed with the ability to get to the heart of the matter, and express it with insight, brevity and wit. “Faith”, he wrote, “is believing what you know ain’t so”.

So I’ve picked up a book (Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo, by Michael McCarthy) about the birds that arrive in spring and leave at the end of summer. I’m enjoying his writing style… “It is not simply the fact of their arrival… that so affects us; it is the recurring nature of it. In coming back year after year after year, against all the odds that they face, the spring migrants are testaments to the earth’s great cycle. They remind us that, although death is certain, renewal is eternal, that although all life ends, new life comes as well”…

17th century almshouses in the village of East Coker...