Pilgrim Notes

Reflections along the way.

What Do I Know?

trees

I’m not sure how people keep up. The amount of information humans produce and consume rains down like a flood across the globe. Last spring, Science Daily suggested that 90% of the world’s data had been produced in 2011 and 2012: 90%. Companies face the never-ending challenge of storing, sorting and analyzing the endless stream of data.

I love and hate technology at the same time. Some days, I feel like I’m struggling to breathe beneath the endless rain of information.

How do people read, let alone write as much as they do? Sometimes I want to simply breathe. Pause. Stare at the dead leaves on my tree in the backyard that refuse to let go and fly away in the late winter breeze. Every year, these leaves will not fall until mid-spring.

The breeze has stopped. Continuos movement through the leaves is almost imperceptible: a vital stillness Through the leaves and spidery limbs, I see layers of trees: five, six maybe seven trees sprawl in every direction. Behind those spindling limbs, I see patches of green, a pine tree that survived the blight from a few years ago. Then patches of blue: deep blue sky.

On this late winter afternoon, a variegated world greets my glance. In this simple glance, there is more to behold than I can fully grasp. There is always more. In one momentary glimpse of creation, I behold a vast, textured landscape that can unfold and unfold and unfold: mystery upon mystery.

Over 20 years ago, I stepped into the library of my graduate school and felt both elated and saddened. I would never be able to read all those books. Now I step into my library, infinitesimal compared to that library and I realize, I’ll never be able to read many of my books.

What do I know? I know less and less and less.

What I do know? I know more and more how little I truly love.

What I do know? I know more and more and more how dependent I am dependent upon family, friends, and strangers whom I never met and never will meet. A multitude of persons have enriched and continue to enrich my life.

What do I know? I know that the world around me, the people around me, the flood of information around me constantly unfolds wonder.

I don’t have to master it all or know it all, I simply need to pause and behold; to inhale and exhale; to respond as this moment requires; to learn again and again the possibility of thankful love in the midst of such glorious abundance.

2 Comments

  1. Sounds to me like you’re in the spirit of what St. Paul called the weakness that was his special boast, or what St. Cyril (?) called the “ignorance of Jesus Christ,” who did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but took upon himself even our unsinful human ignorance, and remaining faithful to it unto death.

  2. Doug Floyd

    March 8, 2014 at 5:57 pm

    Yes. That’s good Ben. I like the phrase the “ignorance of Christ.”

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