For my entire life, I’ve approached God a little like this painting. This is Raphael’s The School of Athens, painted during the Italian Renaissance on a wall inside the Vatican. At its center stand Plato and Aristotle. Plato points toward the heavens. Aristotle reaches his hand outward toward the physical world. Two different ways of trying to understand reality. I grew up Catholic and attended Catholic schools. I had to take a religion class every single semester of my young life. Scripture was something we studied. We were tested on it. We learned theology, doctrine, biblical history, and different methods of interpreting Scripture. I learned early about the difference between reading the Bible literally and reading it contextually. I have always been a contextualist. Maybe that’s because the Bible became an intellectual exercise for me before it ever became much of a spiritual one. None of the stories I’m reading during this 365-day Bible project are particularly new to me. I know these people. I know these stories. I have been studying them in one form or another since I was a little girl sitting in Catholic school. What’s new is the reader. I have always been a seeker of knowledge. My instinct throughout life has been to search for the physical evidence. Show me the documents. Show me the history. Show me the science. Show me something I can observe, test, touch, argue about, or prove. I still approach Scripture that way. But now I’m trying something else at the same time. I’m trying to see what my eyes cannot see and understand what my hands cannot physically touch. Strangely enough, Madonna helped push me toward this experiment. I recently watched her long interview with Jay Shetty about spirituality. Madonna is another cradle Catholic, and I was fascinated listening to someone who obtained extraordinary levels of fame, wealth, success, and material accomplishment describe still finding herself spiritually empty and searching for answers. Her search eventually led her to Kabbalah. Mine led me back to a book I already knew. It made me think about how thoroughly I had neglected the spiritual dimension of myself. I never completely stopped wrestling with the Bible over the years. But for a long time I approached Christianity from a place of hostility. Being gay complicated my relationship with the religion I grew up in, and Scripture became something I was more interested in arguing with than listening to. At 44, after everything I have experienced in this life, I’m willing to listen again. And today, on Day 17, I landed on Proverbs 3:13-18. “Happy is the one who finds wisdom.” And then: “She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her.” That stopped me. Because after all these years, I’m still doing exactly what I have always done. Searching. The difference is that I spent most of my life searching almost exclusively for knowledge that could be demonstrated to me in the physical world. Now I’m asking whether wisdom might require me to look somewhere else, too. I don’t intend to abandon reason, evidence, history, science, or skepticism. Those things are part of me. Maybe the mistake was believing that intellectual curiosity and spiritual curiosity had to compete with one another. Look again at Raphael’s painting. Plato points upward. Aristotle reaches outward toward the world. Maybe I don’t have to choose between them. Maybe I can look in both directions. The Bible hasn’t changed. The reader has.