Human history is in a time of
great flux, of great cultural and spiritual change. The psyche doesn’t know
what to do with so much information. I am told that if you take all of the
information that human beings had up until 1900 and call that one unit, that
unit now doubles every ten years. No wonder there’s so much anxiety, confusion,
and mistaking fact for fiction and fiction for fact!
In light of today’s
information overload, people are looking for a few clear certitudes by which to
define themselves. We see various forms of fundamentalism in many religious
leaders when it serves their cultural or political worldview. We surely see it
at the lowest levels of religion—Christianity as well as Judaism, Islam, and
secular fundamentalism, too—where God is used to justify violence, hatred,
prejudice, and whatever is “my” way of doing things.
The fundamentalist mind likes
answers and explanations so much that it remains willfully ignorant about how
history arrived at those explanations or how self-serving they usually are. Satisfying
untruth is more pleasing to us than unsatisfying truth, and Big Truth
is invariably unsatisfying—at least to the small self.
Great spirituality, on the
other hand, seeks a creative balance between opposites. As Jesuit William
Johnston writes, “Faith is that breakthrough into that deep realm of the soul
which accepts paradox with humility.” [1] When you go to one side or the other
too much, you find yourself either overly righteous or overly skeptical and
cynical. There must be a healthy middle, as we try to hold both the necessary
light and darkness.
We cannot settle today’s confusion
by pretending to have absolute and certain answers. But we must not give up
seeking truth, observing reality from all its angles. We settle human confusion
not by falsely pretending to settle all the dust, but by teaching people
an honest and humble process for learning and listening, which
we call contemplation. Then people come to wisdom in a calm and compassionate
way. There will not be the knee jerk overreactions that we have in so many on
both Left and Right today.
The Judeo-Christian tradition
was not supposed to be a top-down affair, but an organic meeting between an
Inner Knower (the Indwelling Holy Spirit) accessed by prayer and experience;
and the Outer Knower, which we would call Scripture (Holy Writings) and
Tradition (all the ancestors). This is a calm and wonderfully healing way to
know full Reality.
No comments:
Post a Comment