December 26
Health Strategy: Be OK with Mystery
Bible Reading: Revelations 7-9
Virtue: Humility-Imitate Jesus and Socrates
1,3,5 Plan
1-Fast one day this week. Which day?
3-Walk three miles today
5-Eat five fruits/vegetables
Verse of the Day:
Revelation 8:13
And I beheld, and heard an angel flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice…
Part of practicing humility is accepting a lack of understanding. One of the most difficult things to say is, “I don’t know.”
But if you do not count as “knowing” either naming or describing, then we know nothing.
If describing and naming count as knowing, then the formula for gravity is knowing. But if the formula does not count as knowing —but instead only as a description of the behavior and force between two objects, then we know nothing.
“Either everything is a miracle or nothing is a miracle,” Einstein reportedly said.
Reading Revelation without understanding is definitely a practice in seeing into the mist of unknowing. John saw and heard angels flying and speaking loudly. Those who see such things are either psychotic, or they give us hope in a part of the universe that is not understood yet explains everything. In these glimpses reported by those who seem to know lies our hope in immortality.
William Osler (considered a great man of science during his day and the founder of internal medicine at Johns Hopkins), in his lecture on “Science and Immortality,” recommended saturating the mind with the Bible, Shakespeare, and Homer. He said that he’d rather be wrong with Plato than right with the atheist.
With every age, there are some who see and hear something that seems other-worldly.
The vision may be brief and singular, a Saint Paul on the Damascus Road, perhaps it usually is. But the experience is real enough that it becomes a foundation for a life.
I have seen the circular rainbow, the complete circle described in Revelation, once.
Only once.
But the once was real. I did not see it because I am good or special. That seeing does not make me a Saint Paul. I just saw it.
Seeing that did not give me all-knowing and understanding.
Seeing that circular rainbow gave me a knowing that I do not know all things real. That knowing of unknowing can be a foundation for a life. Humility can be the start or the end of it all.
Further Reading:
Cosmic Consciousness, by Richard Maurice Buck
How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci (the chapter on “smoke”)
