“The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.”
You might as well try and guess who said this…Paul Young? Eckhart Tolle? How about Rowan Williams or maybe Pope John Paul II? Actually, it was Albert Einstein, self proclaimed agnostic, humanist, and a man who, during the course of his lifetime, often denounced the existence of a personal God. When I first read this as quoted in Harvey Cox’s recently released book, The Future of Faith, I was sitting in the cockpit at anchor just off Fleming Island, Key West. The sun was well on its downward trek to meet a watery horizon, and I was in one of those thoughtful moods you sink into, like a beanbag chair, the result of having experienced a Christmas full of family, natural beauty, and eggnog (with less egg and more nog). The New Year was upon me, like a mulligan, and I was grateful and pensively considering it. A stiff wind blew erratically that late afternoon, roughly 20 or so knots, causing my world to swing alternately back and forth across Man of War Harbor. Relishing the revolving view, I closed the book, and thought how much I liked this quote on mystery by a scientist who used such evocative words, poetic words even, like “cradle,” “snuffed,” “candle,” and strangely even the lately maligned “religious.” The word, I thought, was practically vindicated by this quote.
My eye snagged on the word “mysterious” and prompted in me a feeling of ill at ease. Like when, except for the dog, you are alone in the house at midnight and hear a thump in the basement. All at once you are very conscious of your aloneness, your vulnerability. You are glad, now, for the dog except that he has lifted his head, alert, and begun to growl. You can pretend you didn’t hear anything. Go back to reading your book, turn on the television, convince yourself that all is well. I have done this and it works fine until you hear the thump again and the dog starts barking. Even still you have options. You can load the dog up in the car and leave. Head to a motel or the neighbors and wait for morning. Bring back reinforcements. Or, you can face it then and there. You can take your bat or your rolling pin and descend the stairs to see what’s up, mindful of the fact that the dog, the big chicken, has decided to remain where he is. I have done this as well. I have pushed open the door and whispered, “Who’s there?” The latter is the least appealing but instantly gratifying and great for getting the ole heart a pumping—a fine response to mystery anyhow.
Mystery to me is like being at anchor in the middle of the night. When we first moved aboard, I hated being at anchor during the night. For one thing, it is very dark at anchor, more so if there are clouds and no moon. In the wee hours, with the wind howling, I would make my way to the bow to check on the 1 1/4 inch rode (rope) that stretched across our deck, plunged over the edge, and disappeared into the murky blackness of the water. Somewhere out in front of Chrysalis, maybe 150 feet or so, that rode connected to our anchor that was buried in the mud and sand and which, hopefully, would keep my world tethered and secure. With the gusts the rode would strain, making an eerie sound. What really got me, I mean really got me, was that sixty five feet of power catamaran along with my whole world embarked upon her, would careen, sometimes fast, through the darkness, around the circumference of her anchor, and I had no way of telling what was out there: above, below, or around me.
These days I love being at anchor, even during the night. I have enough experience to trust our anchor and our abilities to set it. I even feel confident that we would know what do should we begin dragging in the middle of the night. So I sit at the bow and soak in the darkness. Turn off all the lights and let it close in around me. Breathe it in. And the wind howls and the anchor rode groans. They are familiar sounds to me now. And it hardly seems to matter that I don’t know what’s out there: above, below, or around me. I look up into the stars and say, more as a statement than a question: “Who is there.”
And it is beautiful, sublime even, as Einstein intimates with more than just a smattering of awe thrown in for good measure. Especially if I happen to consider this thump in the night: that stretched out above me exists objects that are 10 billion light years away. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a bedouin in the Sahara desert. While we sat by a fire looking up at the universe, he said to me, “When I see all the stars, it reminds me that God is big and I…I am very small.” Well put. And in this sense I am a devoutly religious woman.
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