Believer Beware: First-Person Dispatches From the Margins of Faith

.
"Please Don't Feed the Prophet" by Daniel S. Brenner

"I don't know what kind of person you are, but maybe you don't believe that God loves you any more than Barney the Purple Dinosaur loves you..."

Daniel's dispatch is a stream of consciousness rant on the seeming impossibility of making a connection with a loving God. He ends with this story;

"There was a child born whose mother did not give her milk. Nor did she give her love, nor think of her as a miracle as she lay in the cradle. A bitter woman, she was, a tormented woman, her mind had been warped by the selfishness of those around her and she saw her child only as a burden, a chain, an affliction.

Yet in spite of the mother's neglect, the child grew. For in her dreams each night an angel would come and feed her. First the angel fed her letters, all the letters of the languages of the earth. And these letters nourished the child.

And as she grew the angel began to feed her words. And this was good. She grew more and soon the words grew into poems, and the poems begat songs, and the songs begat stories upon stories.

Soon the child was grown up, and she walked the earth filled with the letters, words, poems, songs, and stories from the angel. And in small groups, people would gather to hear her. Some men wanted to hunt her down and kill her for her stories frightened them. Some women wanted to slit her throat from jealousy. Her stories spoke of the deep shame of her life, the silent pain, the loneliness. And when she spoke, those who heard her felt a nourishment they had never felt, a mending of all that had been shattered. She roamed from place to place and spoke in her quiet way, a cross between whispers and lullabies. Where is she now, this child fed from the letters of angels? ... She had disappeared. Wandered off deep inside your soul, calling out to your right now to join her. She's getting ready to tell you a story.



Peter