Joshua 4:19 - 5:12

Desert suggests an inhospitable place, a place where survival is not a sure thing. Certainly the Israelites felt that way about the desert through which they wandered. They remembered Egyptian food with longing: fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic (Numbers 11:5) And yet they were provided food - quail and manna - for all the years between Egypt and the Promised Land. But there came a time when the manna ended...

In his memoir of the concentration camp at Auschwitz, Primo Levi recalls how the prisoners were periodically pared down. Those too ill to work were sent to their deaths. It was a capricious culling. The prisoners were forced to run out one barrack door and into another. Here, in front of the two doors stand the arbiter of our fate, an SS officer. On his right is the Blockältester, on his left, the quartermaster of the barrack. Each of us, as he comes naked out of the Tagesraum into the cold October air, has to run the few steps between the two doors, in front of the three men, give the card to the SS officer, and go back through the dormitory door.

There’s a substance in Tolkien’s "The Lord of the Rings" that functions very much like manna in the Bible. Tolkien, of course — a professor of ancient literature at Oxford — was a deeply Christian man, a committed Roman Catholic. When faced with the problem of explaining what food Frodo and Sam would find to eat, as they crossed the scorched, volcanic hellscape of the land of Mordor, Tolkien invented a kind of manna that they carried with them — a gift of the elves. It’s called lembas, a magical bread. It’s durable as hardtack, but tastes far better. Lembas cakes would keep for many months, as long as they stayed wrapped in a certain magical leaf. Even a bite or two was enough to sustain you for a whole day.

In 1996, while working at Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center, Dr. Taylor awoke with a sharp pain behind her left eye. Her speech and motor functions failed. “She melted into what she called a euphoric stupor and lost all sense of where ‘Dr. Jill’ ended and the rest of the universe began.” It was the rupturing of a congenitally deformed vein-artery connection deep in her brain – the first stage of a potentially killer stroke. As befits her situation (all of our life situations??) Koehler says nothing unfolds in her book as we might expect. The surest sign of the Spirit is to lead us where we never (or only!) dreamed of going! The bottom line, says Koehler, is “amazement” – “Ph.D.-level clarity and awareness of detail combined with childlike exuberance!” – “the shattering of the self-created box we live in that we call ‘life’!” Here is what Taylor finds in the “right-brain/little brother” part of herself – Wow, what a strange and amazing thing I am. What a bizarre being I am. Life! I am life! I am a sea of water bound inside this membranous pouch. Here, in this form, I am a conscious mind and this body is the vehicle through which I am ALIVE! I am trillions of cells sharing a common mind. I am here, now, thriving as life. Wow! What an unfathomable concept! I am cellular life, no – I am molecular life with manual dexterity and a cognitive mind!”...