2024 Berry Street Essay: The Reverend Kim K. Crawford Harvie

Mystery Loves Company
204th Berry Street Essay
Delivered by The Reverend Kim K. Crawford Harvie
Virtual Ministry Days
June 19, 2024

“I have a group of friends who have held each other’s mysteries for many years.” Rev. Jan Richardson is speaking. “We have held the joyful mysteries, the unimaginably sorrowful mysteries, the complicated mysteries. We have held the mysteries that have shattered us. We have waited together, wept, and rejoiced together, offered and received blessing. We have helped carry each other across thresholds into lives we could hardly have envisioned.”

This engagement with mystery is good ministry. Sometimes, the work is joyful. Sometimes, we celebrate. Sometimes, the work is lonely: Will no one stay awake with me? By times, we are fearful; we abide; we mourn. And sometimes, the not-knowing really gets to us.

Do you know this E.E. Cummings poem?

no time ago
or else a life
walking in the dark
i met christ
jesus)my heart
flopped over
and lay still
while he passed(as
close as i’m to you
yes closer
made of nothing
except loneliness.

I’m not talking about faith or faithlessness. I’m not talking about believing or not believing in a god or gods. I want to talk about our refusal of cheap certainty — I love that about us. I want to talk about making ourselves at home with the unknowable; about facing mystery head-on; about the willingness to live in the presence of mystery and to know it as a worthy companion — even, to try to love it. This is not for the faint of heart.

Rumi said, “Sell your cleverness, and buy bewilderment.”

We are called to the good work of building, holding and upholding beloved spiritual community; to raise the questions but not to answer them — “to love the questions,” Rilke said, “And the point is to live everything. Live the questions” whether or not we “live into the answers.” 1

I’m thinking of that Sidney Harris cartoon of two scientists at a blackboard, which is covered with numbers and symbols on both the left and the right. In the middle, in between the two sets of equations, it says, “Then a miracle occurs.” And pointing to that, one scientist is saying to the other, “I think you should be more explicit here.” 2

Here goes!

I’m standing with musician Pete Donnelly as we prepare to process for the installation of our own Rev. Kate in the Provincetown pulpit. Pete is in the spin cycle of difficult days; I share my faith with him that when one door closes, another door opens. Without missing a beat, Pete intones, “Yeah, but it’s hell in the hallway!”

O, that hell of in-between, of fear, grief, anger — all those unwelcome guests that come knocking in the night. Most of us would prefer not to answer the door, pretending we’re not home. But sometimes they just barge in, don’t they? They tromp in, stomping their muddy boots; toss their stuff everywhere; stand in the open refrigerator door, eating us out of house and home; they eviscerate us.

And then they’re gone.

And maybe, just maybe, they leave a gift.

Many years ago, my friend, Victoria and I were visiting El Santuario de Chimayo — the Lourdes of New Mexico — when a tiny, ancient woman, dressed entirely in black, walked into the church. Victoria, who knows these things, said “She’s a holy person.”

We followed her into the tiny room where tourists fill Tupperware with holy dirt from a hole in the floor. The woman did not stoop down for dirt; she merely stood, motionless, with her eyes closed, presumably in prayer. We, too, closed our eyes and prayed.

When I opened my eyes, I found her gazing intently at me with clear, dark eyes set in a wrinkled face.

“May you be well,” she said in Spanish. “Peace be with you.”

Victoria was ecstatic. “She gave you a blessing!” she said.

The next afternoon, the bottom of Frijoles Canyon was shimmering under the August desert sun. Horsing around with two teenage boys, I stood on a huge boulder and swung out over a waterfall on a deceptively thick, green branch. There had been a drought.

At the top of the arc, as I hung suspended over the falls, the branch snapped, and I fell.

This is what I saw, as I somersaulted over and over and over:

white water, black rocks, red canyon walls, green trees, blue sky, water, rocks, walls, trees, sky. . . .

I was absolutely certain that I was about to die. This is what I thought: My last glimpse of the earth: so beautiful!

I landed hard, somehow seated upright in the icy water of the shallow pool at the bottom, somehow … alive.

My left arm was shattered … and I was gobsmacked, streaming with gratitude and drunk with awe at the vivid, pulsing beauty of the Eden of the canyon. Walking up and out, I was delirious with joy for another chance to wake up on this beautiful earth.

The feeling has never left me.

Carlos Casteneda’s Yaqui shaman, Don Juan, recommended taking death as an advisor. He said, “Death is our eternal companion. It is always to our left, at an arm’s length. It has always been watching you. It always will….

“The thing to do when you’re impatient is … to turn to your left and ask advice from your death. An immense amount of pettiness is dropped if your death makes a gesture to you, or if you catch a glimpse of it, or if you just catch the feeling that your companion is there watching you.”

Mystery loves company.

This is an invitation to the willingness to let the unknown be unknowable. I don’t want to poke at it as if it were a sleeping beast or worry it like a bad tooth. It is not malevolent, nor is it benevolent: It just is. I want to honor the presence and power of mystery — our constant and worthy companion.

I was maybe eight or nine years old when I first heard the Beatles sing Eleanor Rigby. Her loneliness haunted me. In Paul McCartney’s two-volume collection of essays about his songs, I was greatly relieved to read that Eleanor Rigby was a composite old lady and Paul made up the rest, including Father McKenzie. Saint Peter’s church and its graveyard are real, though, and the site of the fateful meeting of Paul McCartney and John Lennon.

Paul was fifteen and John was sixteen; a mutual friend, who knew they were both “obsessed with rock and roll,” introduced them at a festival. In two weeks’ time, they were playing music together and sharing songs.

Paul writes, “I do often stop and wonder about the chances of the Beatles getting together. We were four guys who lived in this city in the North of England, but we didn’t know one another. Then, by chance, we did get to know one another. And then, … when we played together … we sounded pretty good….

“To this very day,” he says, “it is still a complete mystery to me that it happened at all….

“I’d seen John around — in the chip shop, on the bus … — and thought he looked quite cool. But would we [ever have] talked?…. Would John and I have met some other way, if [our] friend hadn’t gone to that [festival]? I’d actually gone along to try and pick up a girl….

“All these small coincidences had to happen to make the Beatles happen, and it does feel like some kind of magic. It’s one of the wonderful lessons about saying yes when life presents these opportunities to you. You never know where they might lead.”

I have a friend of some considerable means who has made several significant, anonymous contributions to Arlington Street’s work in the city. I invited him to attend the service sometime, just wanting him to experience it.

And sure enough, one Sunday morning, he walked in, accompanied by a young friend, and slid into a pew toward the front. I was so happy to see him and really excited to show us off.

Just then, a bedraggled and obviously inebriated guest careened into the sanctuary and came pitching down the center aisle. Arlington Street’s sanctuary seats more than 900. But somehow, he stumbled into — yes — the pew where our benefactor and his guest were seated.

As the service got underway, he fell asleep and slept loudly. But then something woke him up and, apparently surprised to find himself in church, he staggered back out the way he had come.

Later in the afternoon, I called my friend to apologize — not the call I had wanted to make. He stopped me.

“Kim,” he said, “you know I’m sober. That kid with me this morning — when we got to church, he’d been clean for less than 24 hours. Yesterday, he didn’t look so different from that poor guy sitting next to him this morning.

“So afterwards, he told me that, at some point, he turned and looked to his right, and saw his past. Then he looked at me, and saw his future. He got it; he got that he has a choice. Pretty graphic right? — nothing subtle about that! Church was a total win.”

*

Why do I ever, ever think I’m in control of anything? And really, are there any coincidences? When I told this story to a rabbi, he said it was Elijah who came and left before anyone knew. Mother Teresa spoke of “Christ in all his distressing disguises.”

In early December, one of my oldest and closest friends went in for a routine mammogram and was diagnosed with breast cancer. Less than a week later, she went in for a regularly scheduled colonoscopy and was diagnosed with colon cancer. One day, she appeared completely healthy. Three weeks and two surgeries later, she awoke in the swirling chaos of pain and pills and prayer.

I sat with her, as we do, and sitting with the mystery of these uninvited guests did not sit well with me. I could feel my resistance rising, feel the fight coming on.

She was far more spacious than I. To begin, she asked the question of questions; we would do well to tape it up on the bathroom mirror, or maybe have it tattooed on our forearm:

Not, Why is the happening to me, but, Why is this happening for me?

Why is this happening for me?

And then she got curious. Not, “I’m going to Google the living daylights out of this,” but, “What is the gift?”

Answers began to surface. “I’m not very good at asking for help,” she said: an award-winning understatement. Suddenly, she had no choice. And as family and friends, church and neighbors rallied to her care, she experienced herself surrounded by affection and tenderness. Full of wonder, she told me, “There is an ocean of love.”

Answers began to surface, and many questions remained. And somewhere along the way, mystery became Mystery — capital M Mystery — a companion on the journey of her illness to healing and wellness, both terrifying and awe-inspiring.

One thing became crystal clear: Once you’re all in for mystery, you’re all in for living wide awake.

Lao Tzu wrote,
From wonder into wonder,
existence opens.

Those of you who were raised Catholic are undoubtedly far more familiar than I with the twenty mysteries of the rosary, moments or events in the lives of Jesus and Mary, divided into four categories of capital-M mysteries, plural: the Joyful Mysteries, the Luminous Mysteries, the Sorrowful Mysteries, and the Glorious Mysteries. Anna Mary Ward, a devout Catholic and mother of my friend Mike and his six siblings, had the same answer for every theological question her children asked:

It’s a mystery.

Anna Mary believed in a lot of things I don’t, but our explanation for why she did and I don’t all meet in that theological intersection: It’s a mystery.

Rumi again:

Out beyond ideas
of right doing and wrongdoing, there is a field.
I’ll meet you there. 3

Unitarian Universalism is my greatest religious influence — onward and upward forever! — but like most if not all of us, there are others. I learned to swim in Thoreau’s Walden Pond, diving in, immersing myself in the fresh, deep waters of Transcendentalism. I love its seat — its throne — in nature, the embodied way it exalts the senses and emotion, its embrace of the “transparent eyeball” and the “different drummer.”

Transcendentalism’s main apologist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, lived a life marked by tragedy. He was just shy of eight years old when his father died; his brother went insane; his first wife died not even two years into their marriage; his firstborn son died at the age of five. Emerson spoke of the “thin porridge or cold tea” of genteel Bostonians; Unitarian theology and ritual, he wrote, were “corpse cold.”4 He knew firsthand that reason and logic are poor tools in the face of suffering. This made total sense to me from the time I was very young.

When I was twenty, living in Japan, I landed — seated again — in a Zen Buddhist monastery. The giant container of silence and ritual both held me and freed me; I layered them onto the Unitarianism and Transcendentalism of my childhood, cobbling together my faith and my ministry.

Zen’s relationship to mystery has a name: Don’t Know Mind. The spiritual practice is to counter the strong pull to know with Don’t Know.

Japanese culture is infused with Don’t Know Mind; one of its cardinal aesthetics is yūgen, which translates as “ineffable” — something beyond language, though not an allusion to anything beyond the beauty of this earth and its stars. The sky is a portal to yūgen: sunrise, sunset, and a solar eclipse, they say, proffer the experience of encountering mystery. With all its rich wisdom traditions, there is, in Japan, great respect for “don’t know.”

My friend and yoga teacher, Rolf Gates, writes of the gifts of not knowing: “My first authentically spiritual practice was saying that I did not know. I became sober as a military officer, having spent the preceding years pretending to know everything. Despite the fact that I was the only person who believed me, I persisted in my know-it-all-ness right up until I landed in rehab.

“Rehab takes the know-it-all right out of you. While I was [there], the world changed, and when I got back to my unit, [we were at war]. I was a military officer in a combat arms unit preparing for war, and I no longer knew everything. In fact, I didn’t know anything. I was appalled. Just when my country needed me to have my act together, I was coming to the conclusion that I did not know a thing about life.”

Rolf Gates continues, “What I found was that instead of being a liability, my new awareness was an asset. The truth was, I had never known anything…. My newfound cluelessness was actually the beginning of wisdom…. [Before, when I knew everything,] I could not learn anything. I could not listen to anyone. And I could not be of any real service to anybody.

“In the frantic weeks [that] my unit prepared for the Persian Gulf War, I was able to really listen to the men who depended on me. And when I answered their questions, it was with truth. I realized that I had been carrying an immense load on my shoulders, having to know it all, and that without [that] weight, life was a great deal easier. The enormous amount of energy I had channeled into knowing it all could now be channeled into more productive behavior.

“I began to form relationships. I began to learn from others. I began to stand calmly amidst the chaos of life…. As I emptied my cup, the world flowed in.”5

Mystery loves company.
*

I was in college when I first encountered William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience.6 It has accompanied me on every move. Across the decades, my 17- or maybe 18-year-old self speaks to me from its pages through my pencilled marginalia and underlining. In “Lecture III: The Reality of the Unseen,” James writes, “I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hill-top, where my soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite, and there was a rushing together of the two worlds, the inner and the outer.”

Echoing Psalm 42, he continues, “It was deep calling unto deep, — the deep that my own struggle had opened up within being answered by the unfathomable deep without, reaching beyond the stars.”7

Much more recently, browsing in the heaven of a used book store, next to his international bestseller, Einstein’s Dreams, was physicist Alan Lightman’s Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine. I opened it … and the James passage jumped off the page.

Across a century, here is Alan Lightman calling to William James … and to us:

“It’s a clear summer night and we’ve been sitting on our dock at Lute Island, looking up at the stars. Overhead, the … white sash of the galaxy sweeps over the sky.8 And I feel myself falling into its depths. I am falling and falling and I am surrounded on all sides by the stars…. I am beyond the Milky Way.

“In the distance I see other galaxies, glowing spirals and pinwheels and elliptical blobs, each containing billions of stars. And I myself have grown larger…. I am a giant … striding through the dark halls of the cosmos.… But the universe is always … larger. Space goes on and on and on…. I am dizzy with infinity.

“Then … I grow smaller. I am … shrinking. Eventually, I find myself back in my home galaxy, [hurtling] toward a particular star, … then toward a particular planet, then toward the dappled brown coast of a landmass on that planet. Finally, I am sitting again on a wooden dock by the sea.”

In the company of stars,
all of us are mystics.

Mystery loves company.
*

This is American singer-songwriter Iris Dement’s Let the Mystery Be:9

Everybody is wondering what and where they all came from
Everybody is worrying about
Where they’re going to go when the whole thing’s done
But no one knows for certain
and so it’s all the same to me
I think I’ll just let the mystery be

Some say once you’re gone you’re gone forever
And some say you’re going to come back
Some say you rest in the arms of the Savior if in sinful ways you lack
Some say that they’re coming back in a garden
Bunch of carrots and little sweet peas
I think I’ll just let the mystery be

Some say they’re going to a place called glory
— I’m not saying it’s not a fact
But I’ve heard that I’m on the road to purgatory
And I don’t like the sound of that
I believe in love
and I live my life accordingly

But I choose to let the mystery be
I think I’ll just let the mystery be….
*

I said I wan’t talking about believing or not believing in a god or gods, but talking about mystery does beg the question, doesn’t it? Speaking of Einstein, I’m doing to give this one to him. When asked about G*d,1 0 the German-American physicist replied, “The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. [They do1 1] not know how. [They do] not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangements of the books, but [they don’t12] know what it is.

“That, it seems to me,” he said, “is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward G*d. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws.”

With his signature curiosity, originality, genius, and fearlessness, Albert Einstein exhorted us to embrace the unknown and cherish a childlike sense of wonder and awe.

“The most beautiful thing
we can experience,” he said,
“is the mysterious.
It is the source
of all true art and science.”1 3

Let’s talk about “awe.”

Up until 15 years ago, scientists were studying emotions essential to human survival, like fear and disgust, but they were basically uninterested in awe. They knew that, throughout the span of evolution, we’ve met our most basic needs not individually, but socially; we’ve survived according to our capacity to cooperate, form communities, and create culture that strengthens our sense of shared identities.

Then came the realization that the “the provenance of so much that is human,”1 4 — music, art, religion, science, politics — binds us together with awe: a scientific a-ha!

Awe is still very much an elusive emotion, but we do know, now, that it transforms our bodies and our brains. It is awe that cools our immune system’s inflammation response, sharpens our reasoning, and orients us toward big ideas and new insights. Awe — “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends [our] understanding”1 5 — is a transformational, vital force in our lives.1 6

American film director Steven Spielberg was asked,17 “What was awe like for you as a child?”

Echoing James and Lightman, Spielberg recalled that “one night his [father] gathered him up and hustled him into the car. They went to a field and lay on their backs on blankets. A meteor shower washed over the sky.

“[He remembers] the light, the profusion of stars, [the vastness of the night sky],18 and his experiments with seeing … fleeting patterns of stellar awe.

“It was this wonder of life,” he says, “that [I hoped] to give to others in ET.” And then he says this:

“We are all equal in awe.”1 9

In 2022, Dacher2 0 Keltner, a professor of psychology at UC Berkley and the director of their Greater Good Science Center, published the book Awe. In the course of their research, he and Professor Yang Bai gathered stories of awe from people in twenty-six counties.

He says, “We cast our net broadly because of the scientific concern about ‘WEIRD’ samples.” What are weird samples? This is hilarious: That’s WEIRD, spelled out all in caps, which are those comprised disproportionately of people who are (here comes the acronym!) Western, Educated, Individualist, Rich, and Democratic…. WEIRD.”

Adjusting for WEIRD, they received 2,600 narratives by speakers of twenty languages. And what was the largest common denominator that “led people around the world to feel awe?” Do you want to guess? Birth? Death? Love? Nature? Music? No.

What leads us most often to feel awe is “other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming.”2 1

One day in the mid-1980s, I was doing what I did for most of a decade: sitting with a parishioner as he lay dying. This was the worst of the AIDS years. And since no one knew how it was spreading and I was burying as many as three people a week, we all assumed we would all be dead. On that particular day, it was Rodgers Baker. I adored him. I was devastated.

Rodgers was … curious. “If I possibly can,” he said, “when I die, I’m going to give you a sign that everything’s okay.”

I wasn’t thinking of that as his breathing slowed and slowed and finally stopped. I was thinking that his suffering was over, remembering that there had been exactly one day over the past few months when he had felt well enough to be up and out.

He had spent it buying gifts for everyone he loved.

Just then, the room was filled with a kind of warm presence. I’m not sure how to describe this; it was peaceful. Maybe, if you could feel light, it felt like that.

I didn’t say anything; I knew it might be one more strange byproduct of exhaustion and unremitting grief. But from the other side of Rodgers’ bed, his partner, Preston Babbitt, looked at me, wide-eyed, and said, “Do you feel that?”

I did.

Preston said, “He’s still here. He’s comforting us.”

He would. And my heart opened to an almost physical experience of grace … opened to the mystery.

The feeling lingered for perhaps twenty minutes or more — we had no sense of time. But as it dissipated, at the very moment the room became the room again, for the second time that afternoon, Preston said, “He’s gone.”

The last sense of Rodgers’ physical presence was gone, leaving behind nothing but his spent body and two people who had loved him deeply, deeply reassured that somehow, he was okay.

Who knows what we felt that day? Of course we wanted it to be our sign from Rodgers, and maybe it was just the angle of the sun coming through the window, or the cranky old radiator, or our longing playing a trick on us. It doesn’t matter.

And that’s the point.

That day, at the hour of death, we were companioned by Mystery. And I will tell you, for what it’s worth, that I have been companioned by Mystery countless times, since.

Mystery loves company.

Mostly, I don’t tell these stories — they’re not a good way to make Unitarian Universalist friends. I found that out the hard way, when I attended the first day of a chapter retreat, craving the steadying presence of colleagues, though I didn’t dare stay overnight — too many young men were too close to death.

We began with a check-in. When it was my turn to speak, I reported that AIDS was both destroying and creating our community; that the congregation was experiencing an extraordinary sense of spiritual awake-and-alive-ness; that I was both exhausted and exalted. I added that there were days when the veil between the living and the dead felt translucent — almost diaphanous — to me.

Afterwards, I was approached by a older minister whom I liked very much. I want to preface his comments by saying that he was nothing but welcoming and kind to me before and after. But that day, my comments about death had upset him and concerned him, he said. These are his exact words: “I would have expected more from you.” He believed that the plague had infected my theology.

I wasn’t hurt by his reprimand. Instead, I felt an overwhelming sense of compassion for him; as he tried to talk sense into me, his fear of death was palpable. And that fear was helpful — instructive — because, in that moment, it was crystal clear to me that making room for what cannot be rationally explained is both necessary and courageous. I was lucky to learn this early in my ministry:

Setting a place at the table for mystery
is good for our souls
and good for our faith tradition.
*

Recently, I was speaking to a doula — a woman trained in childbirth, who accompanies those who are giving birth, toward the ends of an empowering and, she said, spiritual birthing experience. Her eyes lit up as she described her work — engaging with the arrival of new life, live from the very front row.

And then she trained as a death doula, helping to companion people through dying until the final release. She said, “It’s the same thing.”

“I welcome them from the mystery;
I send them back into the mystery.
It’s the same mystery.
And that mystery is our home.”
*

What would it mean to make our home in mystery — mystery above; mystery below; mystery all around?

Rev. Jan Richardson again: “I know what it means to give ourselves to the company of … mystery and those who can help us navigate it: those who bear witness when our lives travel far beyond anything we can understand; … those who help us live into the mysteries that unfold over time; … those who help us recognize and celebrate clarity when it comes; those who know that our hearts are made whole, not so much by certainties, but by the love that carries us and connects us through it all.”

Why would be ever be afraid?
*

In Jane Wagner’s one-woman show, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, Lily Tomlin starred as Trudy, an elderly woman who walks the avenues of Manhattan, carrying all her worldly goods in a couple of plastic grocery bags while carrying on a loud dialogue with an invisible group of visitors from outer space, whom she calls her “space chums.”

As their guide and interpreter of the strange ways of the human species and the vagaries of human culture, Trudy is constantly holding up a can of Campbell’s soup in one hand and the famous Andy Warhol painting of a can of Campbell’s soup in the other hand, trying to convey to the extraterrestrials the difference between soup and art.

“This is soup,” she keeps repeating. “This is art.” Soup, art….
They fail to grasp the difference.

The other thing Trudy wants them to understand is the enigma of human emotional response. How would you explain goosebumps? More importantly, how would you bring someone to experience the curious combination of awe and dreadful wonder that causes our hair to stand on end? Trudy decides to take her space chums to the theater for their final evening on earth, hoping for goosebumps.

In the very last scene, Trudy stands alone on the stage. Her chums have left behind a note, which she reads aloud.

“Dear Trudy,

“Thanks for making our stay here so jam-packed and fun-filled…. What we take with us into space that we cherish the most is the ‘goosebump’ experience.”

“Did I tell you what happened at the play?” asks Trudy. “We’re in the back of the theater, standing there in the dark. All of a sudden, I feel one of ’em tug at my sleeve, whispers, ‘Trudy, look!’

“I said, ‘Yeah, goosebumps. You definitely got goosebumps. You really like the play that much?’

“They said it wasn’t the play gave ’em goosebumps; it was the audience.

“I forgot to tell ’em to watch the play; they’d been watching the audience!

“Yeah, to see a group of strangers, sitting together in the dark, laughing and crying about the same things…. That just knocked ’em out.

“They said, ‘Trudy, the play was soup; the audience … art.’”

In the early 1990s, my friend John McDargh went to see the show when it was on Broadway. He was seated next to a stranger. Not surprisingly, in typical northeast fashion, they had not greeted each other.

The play was almost over. “I like to think of them out there in the dark, watching us,” says Trudy. “Sometimes we’ll do something and they’ll laugh. Sometimes we’ll do something and they’ll cry. And maybe one day, we’ll do something so magnificent, everyone in the universe will get goose bumps.”

At just that moment, Trudy turns around to face the back of the bare, grey stage wall, and throws her arms wide open. Suddenly, the wall became an inky black sky, sparkling with thousands of stars.

The audience surged to its feet. John McDargh found himself both laughing and crying.

“And then,” he says, “for the first time that evening, I became aware of the stranger to my left, who was also on his feet, engulfed in the same emotion. Spontaneously, we threw our arms around one another and hugged.”2 2

Beloved spiritual companions,

Thank you for keeping me
such good company
in the mystery.

I love you.

Amen

NOTES:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, 1 like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letter Four,” Letters to a Young Poet “
I think you should be more explicit here in step two.” Please see sciencecartoonsplus.com/gallery.htm
adapted from Coleman Barks and John Moyne, The Essential Rumi
for an introduction, please go to digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3551
Rolf Gates, Meditations from the Mat, pp. 135-136
1902
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, “Lecture III: The Reality of the Unseen”
The word “diaphanous” is omitted, because who can use that word twice in one essay?
adapted
whether he believed in G*d (Einstein was not an atheist)
This response was translated as, “It does,” with “it” referring to the child.
“doesn’t”
He added, “It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we can dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature.” Einstein was a pacifist and a vegetarian. Campaigning for civil rights, he said racism is America’s “worst disease…. I do not intend to be quiet about it.” ~ Matthew Francis, “How Albert Einstein Used His Fame to Denounce American Racism,” Smithsonian Magazine, 3/3/17
Dacher Keltner, Awe, p. 12
Dacher Keltner, Awe, p. 7
from the promotional materials for Dacher Keltner, Awe
by Dacher Keltner
Dacher Keltner wrote, “how vast the night sky was”
Dacher Keltner, Awe, pp. 191-192
pronounced DACK-er
Dacher Keltner, Awe, pp. 10-11
Also told by John McDargh, Sermon for Good Friday, 1991, Church of St. John the Evangelist, Boston

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