An Effort, Years in the Making, to Capture the Mystery

[rug]

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: November 18, 2011

The story of a faithful man, and of the unique offering he will be making on Sunday to his church, begins in a Southern California backyard in March 1974. That man, today a prominent Manhattan doctor named James Marion, is then a 10-year-old boy, and he is startled by the sound of screams from inside his family’s home.

When the boy enters, he sees his father vomiting blood, and hears his mother telling his older brother to drive to the hospital. As the car pulls away, Jim stands on the sidewalk, catching sight of his father in the back seat. It is the last glimpse he will have of his father alive, for Robert Marion will die a week later at age 40, having slowly bled to death from an ulcer.

Sitting in his Upper East Side office on a recent afternoon, Dr. Marion, 48, says with a physician’s mordant humor that “you don’t have to be Sigmund Freud” to figure out why he ultimately became a gastroenterologist. He became an expert in the kind of disease that killed his father.

The death of Robert Marion plunges his family into poverty. Without his salesman’s salary to support them, his widow and their four sons resort to selling T-shirts at weekend flea markets. There is no more money for parochial school tuition.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/19/us/an-effort-years-in-the-making-to-capture-the-mystery.html

[Jim__]

1. Beautiful story.

To capture the mystery reminds me of listening to Joseph Campbell - from wikipedia:

According to Campbell, the absolute mysteries of life cannot be captured directly in words or images. Myths are "being statements"<25> and the experience of this mystery can be had only through a participation in mythic rituals or the contemplation of mythic symbols that point beyond themselves. "Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of reason and coercion.... The first function of mythology is to reconcile waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of this universe as it is."