When Disciplines Come Together -- A New Beginning?

This is a follow-on (read: punchline) to a previous post titled "When Disciplines Come Together -- the Photos."  If you haven't read that post in some time, it might make sense to re-read that posting.  It references four (I think four) photographs that form the basis of a new understanding with which I am currently dealing/wrestling/contemplating/celebrating.  Take your choice.

Okay, I looked over the previous posting and feel ready to describe what I think I've learned from the choice of photos I made:

The photo with the young person holding the hand of the grown-up as the two of them walked towards the sunset (sunrise? I don't think so...) over the water was kind of an "add-on" selection to the set of three.  So let's start with them.  

What occurred to me early in my thinking about "Why these photos?" is that all three of them feature a hole as an important feature:

  -- The cross on one photograph was an empty space in the fabric (or paper).  But it was easily the focal point of the image.  
  -- The eye of the hurricane takes a little longer to focus on, but once again, it was the principal element in the image.  
  --  The bridge as structure was -- to me -- almost a fringe element at the sides and top of the arch.  And the river itself was visible, but not by a lot.  But the space under the bridge was occupied the center of the image and stretched out both to the sides and upward.  

What came quickly to mind was the chapter of the Tao Teh Ching normally presented as Chapter 11.  The opening line to that chapter is translated by John C. H. Wu as: "Thirty spokes converge upon a single hub."  And the other examples of important holes that Lao Tzu mentions reinforce this idea that emptiness is what makes things valuable and/or worthwhile.  

What came to me in contemplating this was that I had been wrestling with three different disciplines (that is, the Tao, Christianity, and Buddhism) trying to establish which represented my most valuable path to The Truth.  And that each of these disciplines offered insight and nourishment that did not necessarily interfere with that of the other two disciplines.  And that there was no reason why I shouldn't embrace all three -- as each had important "vision" that I find helpful in understanding myself and the world around me.

Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay for Natural History Magazine a number of years ago in which he used the term "magisterium" to describe the relationship between science and religion.  (The term is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as "teaching authority.")  His idea is that each of these two magisteria (i.e., science and religion) have authority over a different portion of the human experience.  They do not -- and should not -- compete with each other, as each is successful in its own realm.  Each answers questions that the other cannot.  Each provides tools for understanding the self and the world that the other doesn't have.  And I can now see my three different disciplines as being separate magisteria.  Not competitive and, when properly understood, not contradictory.  

(Gould was, for your information, attacked vigorously by readers of that essay.  I think the word "traitor" showed up in some of the letters written to the magazine in response.  Sometimes Truth has a hard time getting recognition by those who do not wish to hear it.  As I recall, Jesus had a somewhat similar issue with proclaiming the Truth...)