BEER Group Read. spring and a burning bush

[Mark Kohut]

First day of spring. Equinox. A pagan celebration co-opted by The Church. Someone, Laura, wanted
an example of simple fine writing: how about here, first page, about the Callery Pears on the Upper West Side
and "sunlight finding its way past rooflines and water tanks to the end of the block and into one particular tree,
which all at once is filled with light." Such an image, why? 
 
I suggest we get the author's almost-religious love of nature and light, the pantheistic or panentheistic vision, as we wrote
about it in that Book of Light, Against the Day embodied in that illuminated Callery Pear tree that catches
secular Maxine like that Biblical bush caught Moses. 
"As a powerful religious symbol, the burning bush represents many things to Jews and Christians such as God's miraculous energy, sacred light, illumination, and the burning heart of purity, love and clarity."--wikipedia
 
If Oedipa wanted, tried, to hear the Word, but couldn;t Maxine sees god in a Callery Pear tree fifty years later. 
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l