THERE would be two conventional replies to Fr Rolheiser's lament "Haemorrhaging of the Heart" (Catholic Herald. January 15).
Firstly, that is what Christian hearts are there for. Secondly, it is not true that we are losing heart: those who obey the oldfashioned counsels are as strong as saints always have been.
But there is a third, unconventional answer in the pipelines: stop the bleeding with a bit of cotton wool.
A logician and "thinker" by inclination, a physicist and mathematician by training, and a legal analyst by past profession, I have turned in my dotage to unsolved puzzles.
For almost three years, evidence of the complete invalidity of Einstein's mathematics has been accumulating; it has taken time for the fuse to alight.
What has it got to do with bleeding hearts? All physics this century has been false; rejection of Einstein reveals the reality of a living force which creates the universe as we know it, which (by the mathematics of "chaos") causes "things" at a boundary to move and which, in "autonomous neural systems", becomes freely creative in the transcendent range.
Humans being liberated from sexual instinct, we can use our energy to grow into "spiritual" things. Ancient religions have guessed it; we are beginning to see what the counsels (especially chastity) are about.
But our brain is plastic; babies are helplessly born with a skull full of unconnected neurons and depend on the cajoling of mothers to grow those dendrites which are responsible for (he practice of divine charity.
Those who have grown up to locate divine charity in the stomach, are simply lacking in spiritual capacity; we must also be mindful of the weakness of our "flesh" and of the danger of corruption.
If we face these issues much that has seemed doomed can be rescued.
That physical reality actually looks like that which mystics and saints have always seen will need getting used to, but it is a better bet than fundamentalism or even revolution.
Gertrud Walton Winchester