So,
is it just me, or have the last couple of weeks been particularly horrible for humankind? I know that the world
has always been full of violence, and I can remember other awful, violent times. I have, after all, lived through the
two Kennedy Assassinations (Jack and Bobby), the Martin Luther King, Jr.
assassination, the Civil Rights Movement, the Cold War, the Viet Nam war, two
Iraq wars, the war in Afghanistan, 9/11, and much more. All of this notwithstanding, I feel
overwhelmed by recent headlines: The
heartbreak of the downed airplane, the intractability of the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the determination of ISIS to drag Iraq and its
neighbors into the Dark Ages. Maybe,
I am just getting too old for all of this hatred. Or maybe it is that I have lost patience with certainty, both
political certainty and religious certainty (which, for me includes not only
religious fundamentalism but also what I call fundamentalist atheism).
We
are finite beings living in, and trying to understand, an apparently infinite
universe. We are hurtling through
space on a planet that circles a star that is only one among countless stars. We are doing our best to make sense
of this, but, really, what do we
know? So how is it that anyone is
so certain that his/her narrative or worldview is the only possible acceptable narrative
or worldview that he/she is willing to kill for it? (And before we get too self-satisfied about the fact that we
are not among the killers, we might consider whether we have ever been
judgmental, nasty or intolerant of the views of others without spending much or
any time trying to understand those views.)
What if we were to admit that we are all like the blind men and the
elephant, each groping for an explanation from our limited vantage point? What if there is more than one
truth? What if we, for all our
scientific breakthroughs, are still very far from understanding much of
anything?
Of
course, I have deeply held beliefs, the most basic of which is that we should
be guided by compassion. But, the older I get, the less interest I have in
religious or political dogma, and the more willing I become to entertain the
idea that I could be on the wrong track.
I have, in short, come to appreciate curiosity over certainty.
What
if we were to kick at the lines that we have drawn in the sand and blur them a
bit? What if, instead of drawing
lines in the sand, we were to build sand castles that would depict our dreams? What if instead of feeling scorn for
those who do not see things our way we were to explore our common dreams?
What
would the world look like then?
