This idea is not original to me. I heard it somewhere, sometime, but now it often pre-occupies me, though I cannot remember when and where I heard it or read it.
I will start with the weakest example.
My family are Baptists, I came in contact with the Catholic church in 5th grade, through Joan of Arc, but for a very long time I just believed she was a nice - but insane - girl. It took a lot of history books, and a lot of personal history, to come around. Anyway, the point is I came late to any specific knowledge of Catholicism, which is to say particularly to a knowledge of Saint Dymphna.
Three years ago I was flipping through prayer cards and came apon a picture of Saint Dymphna. I was shocked, I was deeply disturbed, my jaw hit the floor. I had to leave the room and go outside and smoke half a pack of cigarettes.
Why?
It was not like I had just seen her for the first time. It seemed enstead like I had seen her every day of my life.
In East Tennessee redheads are quite common, but in North carolina where I spent the first 36 years of my life , red heads are quite rare. Anyway, no, she does not remind me of anyone I am aware of.
No portrait has ever had such an effect on me. It also seemed to have an interactive effect. Photographs and portraits can give the illusion of looking back at you. This was much more. Actually it wasn’t even a look, it was perhaps akin to what people describe feeling when they encounter a “soul mate”.
Anyway, I don’t believe in reincarnation, to the best of my recollection that day was the first time I ever saw her, but it is as if I have always known her, as if she has always been my friend.
How could these apparent opposites be true?
The night time sky : these suns are X - number of miles away. Light travels at X -mph.
Some of these suns we are looking at ceased to exist long ago.
So, we are LITERALLY LOOKING at the past?
I can watch a movie. The people in the movie are breathing, moving, smiling, feeling, speaking, etc. the movie was made so long ago that everyone appearing in the movie, and working behind the camera, is dead.
I can liscen to dead people on audio recordings.
I can read a dead mans thoughts in a book. Consider the diary of Anne Frank, it is so personal, it is as if she is talking directly to me. She died 25 years before I was born.
Ok, so these are records, what of it?
I just get the feeling, the strong feeling, that there is more tangibility to the past than in film, audio recordings, and paper.
God cannot be beaten, God knows everything, in simple terms, God cannot suffer a Pearl Harbor -type surprise.
Here comes John Calvin ; if God knows everything, then God already knows what choices we are going to make.
But Jesus and the Pope say we have free will, so by golly it must be so .
So HOW can there be BOTH?
God is EVERYWHERE AND AT THE SAME TIME.
HOW could that be?
God is both with the living and the dead.
What about non-human entities?
Is God with dinosaurs long dead, and dead suns, and also with viral mutations that have not yet occured and suns not yet born?
If so, How could that be?
I commonly speak casually to Saint Dymphna, I talk to her about many random things. Perhaps this is unusual, but perhaps several people world-wide do the same thing.
Let’s say hypothetically that I start talking to Dymphna in Tennessee, at the same time a person in Texas starts talking to her, and another in Delaware, and one in Portugal, and one in Germany, and so on, and we are all bringing different joys, griefs, and topics to her.
How does she make coherent sense out of all of us at the same time?
I’m about to confuse the daylights outta you.
