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enough narcotics to eliminate complexity of thought, real interpersonal feelings and
hope for meaningfully creative work. The remarkable thing to me was that people
began to talk about my “improved disposition,” an increase in out-of-my-
psychiatrist’s office personal empathy and kindness as well as a significant
decrement in my overweening, ego-stoking ambitious and competitive urges. Any
return to the earth body of tense readiness to competitively succeed, protect with
ego defensive anger, fantasies of assertive sexuality, stand tall grandiose notions of
intellectual superiority, even getting up for scientific combat, was accompanied by
the return to this world of pain. Only lovingly detached, unpretentious, other
directed, quietly calm inner dialogue with Him was a place that I could live. This was
an inner land of still another kind of God than I had previously known. I could even
read and struggle with theological ideas thoughtfully, without referencing personal
mystical, psychopharmacological, Holy Ghost-mimetic, experiences. I could enjoy
the rational, social responsibility valuing, spiritual peace of a white Protestant
Sunday morning service. I could attend Reformed Jewish Friday night services
about man’s responsibility to man without restless boredom. No longer seeking the
feeling of God’s thrill, I could think about it, even without being in the state of my
father’s and Abulafia’s activated mind.

If I had been benefited with a classical language education beyond the high
school and early college Latin of Julius Caeser and Cicero or matriculated in an
academic theological seminary, I would have already studied, maybe even worn
out, the deeper aspects of what seemed like a paradox of the consonance of faith
and reason. I would have been familiar with the rhetorical argumentation in the
patristic Latin commentary on sacred texts by Tertullian and other Fathers of the
early Christian Church, the Talmudic discussions (the Mishna in Hebrew and
Gemora in Aramaic) of the oral Torah by the Rabbinate, the Muslim explication of
Koranic Islam in the oral tradition of the Hadith. Robert Wilken in his recent The
Spirit of Early Christian Thought was in no doubt about the harmonic relationship
between rationality and faith: “...by putting itself in the service of truth, faith enables
reason to exercise its power in realms to which it would otherwise have no

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