OK, so, is Oddness a theme?

Or is there some other name for the quality of a person, place, thing or piece of art (including literature) that has that very special stamp of the divine recognizable universally to believers.  I say "person" because there are people who have this imprint--the saints, for example.  Many of the saints were encountered as "different" during their earthly lives--sometimes bearing a stamp of "be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect," and at other times bearing a mark or seal of genuine strangeness or eccentricity.  One would need to pursue testimonies along this line.

The Parting of the Sea

I ran across a link to this story about the possible scientific plausibility of the incident of the parting of the sea in the Exodus narrative and passed it on to some colleagues.  One wrote back asking how I felt about the "literal level" of the Scriptures.

Here's what I answered:

I think the wonder of these writings is that they contain lots of truth that does not depend on the literal meaning—so, “holistic truth.” That part is basically what Tradition teaches, going back to the Fathers. However, the older I get and the more I read, I am more convinced that there is in many stories that don’t pass the historical-critical standard, something like a vestigial and sometimes collective memory at work. There is a “fact-level” that may be open to us if we truly are open to the Scriptures, but it’s buried very, very deeply in the most ancient connections we have to our human past. The stories are “true” in that they are rooted in the theological truth of our nature as God’s children, but they are also likely to be true in having connections to unique experiences at some really old level.

I think, for example, not only of the Moses cycle of stories, but also of the flood narrative—some ancestral part of the faith community underwent a rescue, not just metaphorically, which is nice, but from a vast inundation, and they just knew it was Yahweh who did it. I think parts of the Abraham cycle have this character, also. I see it in the sacrifice of Isaac story. There’s an oddness here that it would be difficult to “make up.” So, while I don’t NEED to tie scriptural stories to science, I think it’s nice when these pregnant connections cause us to wonder.

A question.

I had occasion to revisit the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of his son Isaac the other day, and I didn't mind because the story is so haunting and so provocative.

Why did Abraham agree to this act?

Why was he so uncommunicative about it to his son and servant?

Did Isaac resist the final binding on the place of sacrifice?

Did Abraham ever have a doubt?

Why does God stay his hand only at the last second?

Did God have a doubt?

What is the lesson?  Does the lesson belong to the realm of faith as the absoluteness of abandonment to the will of the Other?  Or does the lesson belong to the realm of morals and the awakening of conscience to the true voice of God, who ultimately forbids barbarism and demands a prudent, orderly, civil and humane faith?

On the Doctrine of the Soul

A friend related a story about when she and her sister were much younger. As their mother was taking a rare nap, her sister, a toddler at the time, went up to mom, carefully pulled up the lid of one of mom's eyes, and asked, "Mommy, are you in there?"

Who could explain it better?