Moyar to Borsch, December 9, 2005:

Dear Fred:

What I remember most from my undergraduate years is how the time at Princeton encouraged me in "searching everything". I did take courses from Paul Ramsey, George Thomas and Mal Diamond in the Religion Department and participated in the life of the Chapel to some degree, more with the Episcopal Church on campus and came to know Chaplain Bill Eddy. But my major became English literature, and I was at least as much intrigued by Shakespeare, Milton, Coleridge, Sterne, novelists (some of them quite 'secular' - I wrote my senior thesis on Virginia Woolf) and especially poets like George Herbert and T. S. Eliot - and the ways they probed for life's realities and significance.

 

There were also many conversations with friends, not only but often with David Sofield now Professor of English at Amherst. David was and is an 'agnostic'. He was majoring in Religion and I in English so we sort of switched subjects as life went on, but then as now shared a lot of the questions.

 

I'm beginning to understand how the universality of your academic and conversational interests at Princeton might have put you on the ‘religion' track. Our good fortune with outstanding teachers and good friends there was a blessing, wasn't it? The subliminal message from them was that their subject was important and our participation was expected and appreciated - however ignorant and ‘green' students like me were. I smile when I remember a small Freshman physics class in the spring of 1954 where I argued with John Wheeler that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle just didn't make any sense. I wish I'd had the confidence (and honesty) to make the same complaint to George Thomas when he asked my opinion of a book on prayer that was required reading. My excitement in studies in the Religion Department, nevertheless, grew, thanks to preceptorials with Malcolm Diamond and others in the years that followed.

 

Jerry

 

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Borsch to Moyar, February 13, 2006:
         
Dear Jerry - I'm jealous that you had a chance to study with John
Wheeler. As you know, I quote him several times in the book.
Hope for guys like you? How about me? How about all of us? In a
sense that is what "the spirit searches' and "keeping life's questions"
are meant to be about. What kind of hope? What is that hope? You say
that my final appeal is to mystical experience. I'll accept that, for
listen again to what I wrote in Chapter Three:
"The relationship may seem such that no certain boundaries or
demarcations exist between one's own spirit or awareness and the
Awareness of God and sense of God's presence. The Spirit is experienced
as essential to the self. It is the self at the profoundest level of
who I am, where I can no longer distinguish between myself and that
which is greater than I. In his /Confessions/ Augustine yielded to God
'more inward than my inmost part and higher than the highest element
within me.'"
While I would hold that much religious experience has this mystical
quality, I would also maintain that it can be experienced and expressed
differently - one reason "The Spirit Searches Everything" - in the
beauty of mathematics, in poetry and music, in work and accomplishment,
in relationship with others and, perhaps especially in helping others
and being helped and shared with. Evelyn Underhill tried to rescue the
word "mysticism" from those who regarded it as just mysterious or other
worldly. Her mysticism involved not only prayer and meditation and
worship but also the routines of daily life and regular ministry in a
poor section of London.  Fred

 

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Moyar to Borsch, February 22, 2006
Dear Fred: 
    You've helpfully restated the themes of your book that bear on my problem with what seemed to be a ‘retreat' from the "The Real World" (Chapter 2) to mysticism and the supernatural. Although "much religious experience" may be found in the mystical merging of awareness of self and God, I, for one,  have not experienced it. You also acknowledge a different expression of mysticism in the experience of meaningful accomplishment or beauty in our day-to-day lives. Some would say even in the mundane or secular.  I am reminded of a Kathleen Norris statement in her The Quotidian Mysteries that ". . . because we are human, it is in the realm of the daily and the mundane that we must find our way to God." I suppose that's closer to where I am, wrestling with "keeping life's questions," and why I rhetorically ask if there is any hope of my finding my way there.
    In the second chapter of your book, you provided a wide ranging overview of contemporary scientific and philosophical musings on the intricacy and wonder of cosmological origins and the development of conscious life and self awareness. Can scientific and religious intuitions be reconciled?  I've reread and long pondered that stimulating chapter on "The Real World," some writings you refer to in "Notes on Further Reading," and others.  At this moment I can only affirm your statement that "all of us are beyond our understanding."  Nevertheless, the quest is exciting, and there is no denying the motivation many of us have to find coherence in the two world views.
    The options are many.  Some like Ken Wilber conclude both domains are important but separate, and that such a view was taken by great 20th century physicists who had mystical sensibilities.  Others, like skeptics Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, forthrightly deny the supernatural realm altogether.  Then at least one, the physicist Frank Tipler (who claims John Wheeler as one of his mentors), believes he has proven with mathematical rigor that immortality is real and that "Religion is now part of science."!!
    In some of our past correspondence you expressed a desire to write a Natural Theology someday.  In addition, an earlier draft of your book (which you kindly shared with me) contained a passage which resonates: "More than a few contemporary discussions of the relationship between science and religion suggest that they should be regarded as wholly different ways of experiencing and thinking — with separate languages and standards.  While understanding many of the differences of ways of knowing, I have never been able to accept any full separation.  For me there is one real world of both Peyton Hall and the Chapel — of the microbiology department and the humanities — by means of which human awareness probes and shapes our reality."
    Does this statement still reflect your views, and can we look forward to a Natural Theology from you?

 

Regards,
 Jerry

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Borsch to Moyar, February 24, 2006
Dear Jerry -
    I do like your musing and insights. I don't know whether I
have the intellectual background to write a 'natural theology' as such,
though I was certainly leaning in that direction in chapter two of The
Spirit Searches Everything. The issues continue to interest me, and I
know I'll continue to explore them.

 

Warm regards,

 Fred