Letter #1

3 Mar 10
I like your letter. Your religious views are to my mind impeccable. Good that you make the distinction between organised religion and God so clearly.
I like Olive Schreiner's definition of God as "an inscrutable mystery". In fact nothing is known about God that can be put into words. At most it can be a mystical experience, so that Meister Eckhart said : "Anything you say about God is false."

I was just worried that you might be under religious pressures, but it seems it is not too bad with you.

I have an extraordinary faith, that I don't understand at all. I don't see God as loving - that would just be to smear him with a human emotion. I simply see everything in the world as the expression of God's will, and it is up to me to tune into that will as best I can, to go with the flow and to retain my essentially sunny nature.

The hardest thing of all I find to swallow is pop music, such as Michael Jackson. For some reason, to hear the voices of pop singers drives me up the wall, I just can't stand it. Opera singing is a different kind of singing, I like it. Did you hear of the musical called "Pippin"? I liked that.

But mostly I find that music reached its greatest heights by the time of Schubert, and that everything thereafter represents a decline for me. I am glad that you are in an orchestra rather than a band, and are being exposed to what is for me real music.

As for the trauma of your life, naturally you are scarred, but it does create more love in me for you : "God" must compensate you, even if I have to be that "God" (I am a pantheist, I believe that everything is a part of God). So God DOES love you, even if I am the only part of God that does.

One thing I can promise you is a fact : YOU ARE TOTALLY INNOCENT.

Gurth xx