God, Aliens, and Other Stuff

Medium editor Brian Rosta proposed a writer’s challenge for the publication The Second Half (of our lives) ― “What I Wish I Had Known at Forty.” My answer to that is a montage of three occasions when I got great advice or insight in the first half of my life that carried me through the second half. I describe three different phases of my development, where I received illumination that has persisted through the years. All Bible quotations are NIV, copied from biblegateway.com. Number one. A dad’s important lesson Image by author using ChatGPT I was four or five years old around 1949 or 1950. My father was an airline pilot, so he was away a lot, and I guess he wanted a little father-daughter time, so he took me with him to downtown Los Altos, California. We were just outside a store, waiting to go in, but had to step back to allow an elderly man being pushed in a wheelchair to pass out first. I blurted out, “Oh, no, a wheelchair,” and scowled appropriately. The man and his aide loo...

  Image by author using ChatGPT Marian apparition stories need to be taken seriously. They have profound global influences. They always present an exquisite challenge to the Catholic Church, which it can hardly refuse. On a scale of 1 to 10 measuring unexplainable paranormal phenomena, they are usually a 10, almost equal to a ship full of little green men landing on the White House lawn. Since this is an article and not a book, I will focus on one apparition in this post, the appearance of “Mary” to a poor, unlettered, obscure Nahua Indian who was baptized by Spanish priests with the name Juan Diego. Most of the descriptive narrative below is taken from Ethel Cook Eliot’s contribution to the book listed in the sources below. The Story of Our Lady of Guadalupe On Saturday, December 9, 1531, Juan Diego left his village at daybreak to attend the celebration of Mass in another village. As he passed the hill called Tepeyac, he was startled by the unaccustomed sound of birds sing...