LOOKING, TOUCHING, LOVING

I have been a student all my life. My formal studies were in mathematics and physics. I have since become an avid student of history and biography as well as theology and the Bible. I am fascinated by the complexity and vastness of the universe, that our human minds have been able to begin understanding its forces and relationships, as well as the amazing process of our evolution, and more recently the unraveling of DNA with all its implications. I am awed by the miracle of life itself, lost in the wonder of a new-born baby. I am increasingly aware of the mystery of it all, plus the realization that I neither can nor need explain God. Rather, I have come to experience God personally both within me and also in my relationships with nature and with all life and especially with my relationships with other people. This is where I see and feel God.

All this is summarized so succinctly in a poem by Mary Oliver that includes the following sentence*:

“Though I play at the edges of knowing,

truly I know

our part is not knowing,

but looking, and touching, and loving.”

I have all my life been fascinated by everything around me – learning and exploring and asking how and why – the “edges of knowing” – and that’s been play to me. But how much more to life is the experiencing of life – the “looking, the touching, the loving.”

Loren Bullock
July 7, 2005

*Why I Wake Early, new poems by Mary Oliver, 2004 Beacon Press, Boston, page 5