“Moments of Wisdom” is included in “First Essays”, available on this site at “Buy the Books!”

The assumption that an unenlightened person can on occasion — in deep reflection or the throes of creation, contemplating a divinely inspired text or moment, or just caught off guard — catch a bit of divine insight explains away a lot of great spiritual mysteries.

Examples: How is it that singer-songwriters who’ve not reached the apotheosis of wisdom and goodness sometimes capture true wisdom and goodness? Or why do certain holy scriptures, maintained by researchers to be the work of the same author, seem in places wondrous holy, but in others rather too bedraggled by the happenstances of time and place to soar into the Basically-True? Or why is it that the wisdom of certain great religious figures seems so uneven?

In that final case, I’ll think of Martin Luther. You’ll see a movie where he prayed so desperately for God’s guidance and had the insight and courage to fight against the ecclesiastical folly of 15th Century Rome and help bring about many undeniably salutary reforms; and then, years later, you’ll come across some docuconcern about how his views on Jews started out time-/place-relative relatively tolerant but, after disappointment at their disinclination to conversion, he at some point began proclaiming them full of “devil’s feces … which they wallow in like swine” and suggesting their synagogues burned, homes razed, and other Nazi-esque interventions. [Editor’s Note: “Von den Juden und iren Luegen” (“On the Jews and their Lies”) by Martin Luther, 1543.] Or I’ll even graze a quibble past that slawart of buddhadarma known by posterity as “the Buddha”, who generally comes off as remarkably enlightened — pace-settingly so — , but who still had to be begged and begged into accepting what is now obvious: there shouldn’t be just buddhist monks, but buddhist nuns as well. [Editor’s Note: The Buddha didn’t write anything. There are, however, some texts suggesting he was initially reluctant to permit monastic ordination for women.]

Let us, we woefully amateur and tragically part-time watchers for the Light, put together a few lyrics by mere musicians, singersongwriters unaided by perfect wisdom or miraculous revelation, but in whose song&dance we nonetheless felt some real — aka: eternal/infinite — Truth:

{And then the author quotes Jewel; Sinead O’Connor (now officially Shuhada’ Sadaqat, although it was still officially SOC when this essay was written like 2015/16); John Stewart Singer-Songwriter from California; and Bob Marley. And then weaves them into a coherent metaphysics. Or so we suppose.}

The Author of this Essay is Sandra Sandstone.
Editors are B. Willard & A. Whistletown
Copyright is AM Watson