Law and Transcendence
Law and Possibility
by Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch
Exodus 20:1-4; 7-9; 12-20
October 5,2014
“We are not alone.” You may recall that was the tag line for the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” in the late ‘70s. Richard Dreyfus plays a man who has had a “close encounter” with a flying saucer and he begins to act crazy, building mountains out of mashed potatoes and so forth. It turns out that the mountain he is imagining is the meeting place—the point where aliens at last reveal their presence to the Human Race. It is ultimately a benign encounter, but what the movie gets at so well is the confusion—the sense of being mad, of cracking up—that one would experience when first confronted with that terrifying reality—and the sense, most of all, that you will be forever changed, that the individual, and humanity itself, will transcend its limitations when we discover that “we are not alone.”