Posted by
Rob on Monday, March 30, 2009 7:39:47 PM
I am truly looking forward to Palm Sunday! That marks the 40 day point of my Lenten fast. Since I counted Sundays, it is 6 days sooner than the traditional accounting scheme which goes through Holy Saturday. Since it would seem irreverent to feast on Good Friday, I'll be restarting my fast on Maundy Thursday and continuing to Easter.
This weekend I augmented my soup intake with some carrots, celery, and a cooked onion (fished out of the Irish boiled dinner), and kimchi. Cabbages, onions and carrots all have some calories, so I can't say I've been quite as rigorous as I had hoped, but the vegetables do have potassium and fiber which help keep me sane.
Sanity is a touchy subject. A famous anecdote in physics tells about the fellow who asked Nobel prize-winner Eugene Wigner whether his brother-in-law, fellow Nobelist P. A. M. Dirac was crazy. Wigner replied that there was a fine line between genius and insanity. Alas, if only they were poles apart! For we all can recognize with nearly 100% confidence what mediocrity looks like, but we cannot tell the difference between genius and insanity. We construct our idea of "normal" by what we see most often, what we think is most probable. If most of our life is filled with mundane routine, and one day we wake up and find the birds singing better than Yitzhak Perlman, and the sky bluer than the cobalt, and the air sweeter than Chanel, does it mean that the world has changed, or that we have gone insane?
And when I'm fasting, one cup of coffee sends me into that world. The tears well up as I hear the firmament declaring His handiwork, day to day pouring forth praise, and night to night revealing knowledge. It is no accident that when coffee was introduced to Britain they viewed coffee-houses as near kin to opium dens. So when I spoke to a director of the Templeton Foundation after church on Sunday--that's the group that supports faith & science research to the tune of millions every year--it was fatefully after my first cup of coffee of the day. I was just waxing eloquent on the correspondence of Genesis 1 & 2 with anthropology and epigenesis, when he excused himself and said he had some urgent matters to attend to. But, as I said to my twins, it was great while it lasted.
Sometimes it is better, nay, necessary to be more than sane.