Joseph C. Masterleo

Ninety-five percent of the human population is left-brain dominant. A 2013 study sampling 160,000 Americans showed that 37% of Americans are left-brained, while only 29% are right-brained. In only 34% of participants did the two hemispheres exert equal influence on decision-making.

Several accounts envision Jesus himself as divine light: so, in the Gospel of John, he declares that “I am the light of the world,” and, in Thomas, “I am the light of the world, the light that is before all things; I am all things; all things come forth from me; all things return to me. Split a piece of wood and I am there; lift up a rock and you will find me.” 

There is a unified field in the cosmos that holds everything together, and every discipline is a portal to it. Science calls it a field of fundamental forces and elementary particles. Religion calls it God and accepts it by faith as an impenetrable mystery.

When the intellectual history of the 20th century is written, a few achievements will tower overall. Einstein’s theory of general relativity will be one; the laws of quantum mechanics will be another. The Big Bang Theory of the origin of the universe will be a third.

Spirituality is all about seeing, inclusivity, and reconciling apparent opposites via the "narrow way." The strait gate/kingdom that the spiritual Janus (Jesus) holds the keys to.

Scripture teaches that nature is our first Bible, suggesting that the eye is to look to her for the vestiges, images, and patterns of God to recommend to the heart, thereby confirming our faith (Rm. 1:20). As such, we are to be on the look-out for seasonal sights and sounds that arrest our attention.

Institutional religion has become vestigial enroute to extinction, having largely become a “non-prophet” organization.

While it may look like there are individual trees in the above picture, quaking aspens grow in colonies of tens of thousands of trees, or stems, which are all connected by a single root system.

With childlike wonder and anticipation, I too will be dreaming this holiday, less of a White Christmas than a multi-colored, trans-religious, trans-disciplinary, trans-"everything" world, one complete with an iconic (conic?) tree, party hat, and in a literary sense, megaphone.

Sugar Maples remind us to tap into our core in transitional seasons when life itself sometimes hangs in the balance, tossed to-and-fro between the fluctuating extremes of faith and doubt, sickness and health, or fear and courage. Crises tend to dim and blind our exterior self as we awaken to and free fall toward our inner self, and with it the few things that matter.

The timeless and universal aspects of life are known as beauty, truth, and goodness. They are endowed properties of all beings, some more than others. In mortals, they are sprinkled in just enough quantity to preserve and leaven the whole, but not nearly enough to straighten the irregular timbers of humanity wholesale.