Reverent Agnostics

I just finished A.J. Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically. I picked it up expecting to be entertained, and I was.

What’s not to like about a modern-day germ-phobic secular Jew from New York with obsessive-compulsive disorder trying to follow the Bible as literally as possible for a year? He even stones an adulterer (but since the Bible doesn’t specify, he uses a very small stone).

What I didn’t expect was to relate to his spiritual experience.

At the end, A.J. says:

I’m no a reverent agnostic. Which isn’t an oxymoron, I swear. I now believe that whether or not there’s a God, there is such a thing as sacredness. Life is sacred. The Sabbath can be a sacred day. Prayer can be a sacred ritual. There is something transcendent, beyond the everyday. It’s possible that humans created this sacredness ourselves, but that doesn’t take away from its power or importance.

I fully agree with Jacobs’ experience here. I do not know for sure if there is a God or not, but I do know I have experienced the sacred.

What’s more, I have also found the Quakerism, Christianity, and the Bible to be tools to help me understand Truth and to experience the Sacred.

And that is enough for me