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Comments on Fred Borsch's New Book
Our classmate, Fred Borsch, has written a powerful little book about big questions. With intelligence and sensitivity, The Spirit Searches Everything – Keeping Life's Questions, Cowley Publications, 2005, (149 pages) engages the universal questions of the origin and meaning of life. While dogmatic or definitive answers will not be found within its covers, Fred provides comprehensive background and fresh insights learned from a unique life of scholarly study, teaching, pastoral care, wide social experience and spiritual intuition. He develops a high level of appreciation of our humanity and elicits intimations of the divine. The appended "Notes for Further Reading" (a kind of annotated bibliography) is a particularly valuable addition.
In these pages Fred offers ruminations on the evolution of our self awareness, natural theology, science, the problems of theodicy, morality, and hope. These reflections are usually drawn from stories about particular moments in his life, whether as common place as a walk with his dog, or as traumatic as a plane's crash landing. Profound intellectual discussions dwell here, especially when modern science and cosmology are engaged. So, too, do moving literary metaphors and poetic intuitions of "the Spirit of being and life." Although he doesn't emphasize his visionary experiences, Fred does refer to an "out of body" experience, and to an Elijah-like mystical moment of "sheer silence." As an incentive for your own reading of this book, I have copied below (with permission of the author) his short Preface. Might be good required reading for a seminar, don't you think? An interview with Fred about his book may be found on the ExploreFaith website at www.explorefaith.org/books/borsch.html.
Jerry Moyar ‘57 Preface to by Frederick Borsch How is it that we not only think but think about ourselves thinking and are aware of ourselves and the world about us? Is this awareness alone in the universe? Or is it in some way related to a quality fundamental to creation? Why is there not nothing? What is the universe made of? How does it run itself? Could there be a Spirit of life that cares for us? How might we experience this? Why is there so much evil, wrong, and suffering in the world? Are we for anything? Can our lives be said to have meaning? What is a good life? How can we best live together? Why am I so often restless and unsatisfied? What is it that I long for? What happens to us at death? These are questions I have found myself asking ever since I remember myself. And I have recognized them to be questions not just about me but about all of us. I once taught a seminar in which a group of university students met with me over a period of years to talk about these issues. Coming from different religious backgrounds they were bright and vibrant and full of their own ideas and wondering. They decided to call our time together "Big Questions." We laughed at our audacity and asked what could be the biggest question of all: whether there was any point in asking our questions. We decided that we had to go on asking and exploring. More that homo sapiens — humans knowing, we are humans questioning — homo quaerens. That exploration does not happen apart from the stories of our lives. "At its heart," Frederick Buechner once observed, "most theology, like most fiction, is essentially autobiography. Aquinas, Calvin, Barth, Tillich, working out their systems in their own ways and in their own language, are all telling us the stories of their lives, and if you press them far enough, even at their most cerebral and forbidding, you find an experience of flesh and blood, a human face smiling or frowning or weeping or covering its eyes before something that happened once." Here are some of my questions and reflections, some of my hints and hopes, smiles and frowns, tears and stories that I hope might bring on yours as well. |
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