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John, Andrew, Philip, Thomas, Bartholomew, Matthew, James, Simon and Judas.
“_..they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as
the Spirit gave them utterance...” The secular psychoanalyst in me tried to make an
analogy with the joyful jazz lyrics of Ella Fitzgerald’s scat singing, I’d done a little of
that during my small jazz group pianistics as an a adolescent. | thought about how
verbally paralyzed stutterers could be articulate when singing what they mean when
they could not talk it. | wondered about the relevance of the spontaneous poetry of
slams and Hip Hop rapping. We attended what my sons called charismatic black
Baptist churches in South Los Angeles and Long Beach. These often four hour
services usually featured two wonderfully harmonic echoing choirs with organ and
drum punctuation of the speech-singing, sermonizing Reverend. Large and
beautifully dressed black women sang operatically and danced gracefully down the
aisles. | joined my sons in this joyful noise for these long services and, exhausted, |
was forced to go home for a Sunday afternoon nap.
In spite of what could be regarded as validating experiences with the real life
Holy Spirit, | continued to be generally confused and even more deeply estranged.
An inner voice kept recalling my spiritual failure as a parent and being traitorous to
my Jewish ethnic identity by Christian church attendance. | tried to understand how
my sons had traveled from where | thought we were living together to this entirely
new world. How did it happen? Could the path going there and back be
meaningfully reconstructed and then reversed? This idea is consistent with the
medical dictum that knowing the cause, the treatment logical follows. My education
had shown me such assumptions of reversibility need not be true.
Contrary to the beliefs of early physical mechanics, medical psychiatric
history takers and psychoanalysts reconstructing childhood events, the modern
physics and mathematics of complex systems says phase transitions in complex
systems are probably not reversible, at least not simply so. One of the features of
global changes in complex systems, often called bifurcations or phase transitions
(think heated water going suddenly to a boil), is their dramatic discontinuities in
behavior. Knowing only the initial and end state, phase transitions in complex
systems do not allow for point-to-point backtracking or specific linear-causal
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