Check out Albert Einstein musing on the faith of his birth and how he expands out from it:
Judaism appears to me to be almost exclusively concerned with the moral attitude in and toward life. […] The essence of the Jewish concept of life seems to me to be the affirmation of life for all creatures. […} There remains, however, something more in the Jewish tradition, so gloriously revealed in certain of the psalms; namely a kind of drunken joy and surprise at the beauty and incomprehensible sublimity of this world, of which man can attain but a faint intimation. It is the feeling from which genuine research draws its intellectual strength, but which also seems to manifest itself in the song of birds…
That one clause made me smile: "a kind of drunken joy and surprise at the beauty and incomprehensible sublimity of this world, of which man can attain but a faint intimation."
Here's what's both humbling and exciting to ponder: We can sometimes have a huge, intense, soul enlarging experience of that beauty and incomprehensible sublimity, a mystical realization coming to us unheralded, and stopping us in our tracks. I recently wrote on one such experience I had during a daily walk, some weeks ago (click here). And sometimes, like Saul, on the road to Damascus, it's a life changing experience that reorients everything for us, opening us up anew and turning us onto a path we hadn't really seen before.
Just like the Psalmist, we can feel that "drunken joy and surprise at the beauty and incomprehensible sublimity of the world." And yet, however great and overwhelming the experience might be, Albert E considers it merely "a faint intimation" of the true reality that encompasses us. Just think about that, and its implications.
Wouldn't it be great to carry with us every day that sense that we're living and working amid immensities whose grandeur and scope are so great that our highest mystical experiences capture only a glancing glimpse of the hem of its garment? Then, perhaps, we'd really have a new moral attitude, and an affirmation of all life that would make us lights in the darkness that so sadly seems to engulf many in our time.
Truth is a wildly blazing sun. Carry with you at least a small candle in its honor. Cast light in the darkness wherever you go.
