Frank Nieman

They Just Came to Me: Occasional Inspirations Frank Nieman

This volume is a collection of some very different things the author wrote down simply because they "just came up" in his mind. He claims that, like some other things he has written, they are not going to be sought out by most publishers because they are a bit controversial.

The story, The Invasion, was a reaction to the folly of war. About the time of the First Gulf War, a casual comment appeared in a newspaper wherein an observer of that war said, "We would be better off sending television sets than troops to that part of the world." If the story reads a little more like a screen play that a tale, that is because a play was in the author's mind at the time.

The essay on "Created Equal" was rejected by a couple of Catholic publishers, basically because I was not "Catholic enough." The author is used to that. With a college degree in Classics, an M. A. in philosophy, and a Ph. D. in Theology, he is too philosophical for most religions and not assertive enough for his own Roman Catholic persuasion. To complicate matters, he wrote a dissertation on Martin Luther at a Jesuit University under the guidance of Lutheran professor with a doctorate from Harvard. He has sought only to present a reasonable approach to life for one who might not be gifted with faith. Faith is, after all, a gift from God.

The short essay on the relation of Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Soul is from an insight that came with the much-published announcement of the "proof" of Dark Matter in August, 2006. The author had waded through the four hundred pages of the English translation of the theologian Karl Rahner's dissertation, Geist in Welt (1935) %u2013 a brilliant attempt to found a reason for assertions beyond the physical world - and truly wondered what he would have made of that claim.

The poem, "A Visit from Belznickel," was written (with apologies to Clement Clarke Moore for the parody) because the author grew up with the sinister German elf, "Belznickel." As a child, and when the time was near to Christmas, when he visited relatives in Cincinnati, Ohio, he would be asked whether he had really been good enough this year to deserve presents. "It gifs Belznickel, you know!" they would tell him. Belznickel went about the night after Christmas taking back toys from all those children who had tried to fake being good during the days immediately before Christmas. Having been read Moore's, "A Visit from St. Nicolas", I naturally used it to inform my own children about Belznickel. The poem was first published in an issue of the school paper of Pleasant Hill High School, California, in 1974 when my son, Francis Paul, then a senior, was on the editorial staff.

The author has always written to stimulate thought, both for himself and others. The truth about the great gift and mystery of life is, or ought to be, one of the strongest motives of living once a human being is managing to survive. The author hopes only to stimulate the reader to continue to confront the mystery.