BLURRING OUR LINES IN THE SAND

         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?