The Lord works in mysterious ways...I know no other author as mysterious as our Mr. Bradbury...He has moved the mountains that have impeded my way...cleared the path through the impassable forest...and he has opened my eyes to our distant God and brought him closer to all of us...
I have seen Him (thanks to Mr. Bradbury)in the canola fields of England, Pont Neuf in Paris, Ege Street in Jersy City, and the white sands of Naples, Florida. I hear him in the wind. I smell him on a lonely dock in the middle of a cool night. I feel Him in my memories that let me know that He has always been there...and thanks to Mr. Bradbury I have the senses that allow me to feel and sense our God unseen.

Once again, I thank you Mr. Bradbury...

Thank you, that was beautiful.

booklover2727:
I know just what you mean. Went about the same roadways. Mine took far longer for I wasted so much time because of my sin nature. Of course, in the beginning I never went looking. So God threw Bradbury in my way years back as a means to find HIM! But when I bring that newfound knowledge to Bradbury, he doesn't see it. So, it's either my delivery of information, or Ray is looking for the perfect metaphors, which can only be imparted by the Holy Spirit.

Or he just plain disagrees with you.

This is profound and touches on a bunch of stuff with which I've been struggling since I was a teenager. Basically: WHY did Bradbury give me so much more inspiration, and often make so much more sense, than the Bible? Scary stuff here.

Hi Nard and Dandelion and philnic,

I guess there are differing points of view in interpreting Bradbury's work and life as seen on this blog. However, I think we can all agree that the true inspiration we have all received from this great and wonderful writer is the gift of sight (and I mean this metaphorically.) Reading Bradbury as a young child and through my teenage years opened my mind and heart in the grey urban world where few kids in my neighborhood could see beyond the daily misery and constant fear that accompanied us all. However, through Bradbury's stories I learned to face that thing in the fog, to thread through the "Dark Carnival" which invaded my life periodically or perhaps to even understand the spectral assasins that invaded my dreams late at night.
On the flip side...I learned to see the unseen. Long shadows under street lights became my friends. The rustling of reeds in a light wind became the voices of our ancestors. Tragedies became rebirths...the day we lost the space shuttle Challenger, like many others, I thought of the story Kaleidoscope and once again, in tragedy Mr. Bradbury reminds us of the positive: rebirth. His fatherly hand guides us and warns us. Most of all he inspires us to reach for the stars...and he tells us "never stop reaching".

I do not know his politcal affliliations nor do I know his religous inclinations. However, I do know this: If you've read Mr. Bradbury in earnest you have been enlightened...and that is truly the greatest gift that we can all receive.

Thank you,

Mr. Bradbury

P.S.
How is Mr. Ackerman doing? If anyone knows please keep us updated.

quote:

Originally posted by booklover2727:
How is Mr. Ackerman doing? If anyone knows please keep us updated.

I shall attempt to go round next Saturday and take him to lunch. I'll let you know!

quote:

Originally posted by Nard Kordell:
booklover2727:
I know just what you mean. Went about the same roadways. Mine took far longer for I wasted so much time because of my sin nature. Of course, in the beginning I never went looking. So God threw Bradbury in my way years back as a means to find HIM! But when I bring that newfound knowledge to Bradbury, he doesn't see it. So, it's either my delivery of information, or Ray is looking for the perfect metaphors, which can only be imparted by the Holy Spirit.

There is the Hound of Fahrenheit 451. And then there is the Hound of Heaven. Bradbury could use a lot of hounding down by the latter.

http://jloughnan.tripod.com/hound.htm

quote:

Originally posted by Phil Knox:
And then there is the Hound of Heaven.

Classic album! I love Daniel Amos.

Well, after these many years, I have, thanks to the internet, broken through to the other side. In particular, I have always had a soft spot in my brain for the tune: "Spirit In The Sky" by Noram Greenbaum circa. 1969. I have always wondered whether this tune was generated by a person who had found the spirit of Jesus and taken to the air with it, or if, instead it was a parody on the Born-again Christian phenomenon. At last, I have the answer and I can now go around singing this thing to myself without fear of being classified as one of them. See the link below for additional details:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_in_the_Sky

I love this song, tune, track or what ever it is now called, a one-hit wonder and a true classic I think. It is now for everybody, as we can all "...go up to the Spirit in the Sky" when we die.

At the risk of seeming anti-Christian, which I am not, here is another look at Norman Greenbaum:


http://www.jewhoo.com/editor/profiles/normangreenbaum2.html

BTY, a lot of very Christian songs were written by non-Christian, Jewish people, who knew how to put together a good set of lyrics with a catchy tune.

Spirit in the Sky is one of the songs on my iPhone - it's a great piece of music!

I had also wondered about the intentions of "Spirit in the Sky" and thank patrask for posting the Wikipedia article link. By the profile, the intention may have been for profit but not at all mean-spirited. Reminds me of a joke my mom tells about the young son of a Jewish shopkeeper saying, "Look, Ma, by the goyim it's Christmas, too!" A little reference to enterprising Jews making so much money off Christmas a young child might have mistaken it for a Jewish holiday.

quote:

Originally posted by dandelion:
This is profound and touches on a bunch of stuff with which I've been struggling since I was a teenager. Basically: WHY did Bradbury give me so much more inspiration, and often make so much more sense, than the Bible? Scary stuff here.

dandelion ~
Excellent question. But I have an answer!

Before I even knew what the Bible was about, likely before I ever picked up a Bible, actually somewhere's around 5th or 6th grade, I met Ray Bradbury as a name on a magazine cover, in a drugstore on the Southwest side of Chicago.

Just a name. Nothing else.

Never read a Bradbury story. Had no idea who he was. But I was on that very spot mesmerized by what the name represented. It represented a search. A search to what I had experienced a second before seeing that name.

What did I experience just a second before?

A sort of color a had never saw before. And a silence, a quietness, a sound I had never experienced before.

Fast forward one super second later, and the name 'Ray Bradbury', near the very top of a magazine on one of those old metal revolving magazine racks from long ago.

So I started my journey to discover those twin companions of sound and color. And I knew that if I met the man behind that name, Ray Bradbury, I would surely discover, at least, what it was that I had experienced.

Crazy!

Well, that was the turning point of my entire life. Nothing else mattered for decades. Why such a long journey? That's for another posting, perhaps a lengthy article someday. For now, just say there was a time when the inspiration from reading Bradbury's stories reached another turning point. The first two hundred words of the short story 'Death and The Maiden', for instance, would cause me to cry uncontrollably. 'The Tombling Day' would cause me to walk around on ethereal landscapes for afternoons at a time. I was compelled to pour sacred waters from The Ravine in the real Green Town, Illinois, into the radiator of my car to bring life to a vehicle in need of resuscitation and relief from overheating.

Crazy!

Yeah, somewhat. But the drive to find those elusive elements of color and sound called me on.

And then...one day, I don't recall the day of the week, perhaps it was a Saturday, but I stood in Ray's office, way back then when it was located on Wilshire Boulevard, near Westwood, and while I talked with him, I felt this great, unpassable gulf appear between the two of us. As if he stood uncountable numbered miles away, and the depth in between us was unmeasurable. I walked away that morning, silently lamenting that I was unable to connect on my venture to discover the meaning of that long time ago experience in the Southwest side of Chicago drug store, where color and sound captured my heart and my soul and my thoughts. Bradbury didn't seem to have any further answers on my journey.

One week later, I discovered Jesus Christ.
'
And HE brought me to that color, and that sound... I had finally made it across.

And so, dandelion...
... years later after that wide-gulf experience and meeting Christ a mere week later, the journey continues. Bradbury's stories still flash up with glowing embers and occasionally a fire flames of passion in his words, but they take me so far. They bring me along wonderful paths, but those paths end without Christ.

In scripture, the path continues, the world has opened up far more than I could ever imagine.

Let me quote something:

It's found in Ephesians:
Chapter 1, beginning in verse 11:
"God chose us from before the beginning of all things, and all things happen just as God decided long ago. (Verse 13): And now you have heard the truth, the Good News that God saves you. And when you believed in Christ, he identified you as his own by giving you the Holy Spirit, whom he promised long ago." (Chapter 2, verse10): For we are God's masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus. He did this so we can do the good things he planned for us before there was a beginning of things."

There it was!! Accepting Jesus Christ opened a doorway to the Holy Spirit, and the answers come tumbling into the heart. Make No Mistake!!: All along the way, it's a battle. A battle of the soul, the heart, the passions. It takes years to believe with the help of the Holy Spirit, to believe in the goodness of God, for instance. This is not an easy journey.

Now the words of Bradbury....end in paths that must be intersected by the Holy Spirit and Christ Himself, or they ultimately fall into space and time and nothingness, tho they excite, invigorate the heart and passions in time as they have for me, and kept me from the deathbed of my own stupidness.

Does God use Bradbury's written words to call to us sinners? Evidently. Those words called me. But do not, ultimately, lead to the feet of Bradbury. God who gifted Bradbury with the talent to create those words, is where the real path continues.

And that is where I enjoy and labor in the experience of knowing Christ, and journey today.

Well said, Nard!
We'll have to meet someday.
I know as I've matured (a little anyway) as a Christian, I've begun to put less and less value on emotional verification, as it were, of my beliefs. It's true or it isn't, no matter the accompanying feelings. The same is true for prayer. We are foolish to attempt to assess the efficacy of our prayers by our accompanying or subsequent emotional state.
The irony is, now I can read a Bradbury story that stirred my emotions when I first read it as an adolescent, and I'm much more deeply moved now. (And, like him, I can't watch the last scene of F 451 without weeping!)
Was it St. Irenaeus who said, "The glory of God is a man fully alive."?