This is a truism if ever there was one. People have a tendency to camp out in their little corners of opinion and bravely say their mind when it is met with rounds of approval and applause. Because, generally, people like applause.
Except for some of us. Whether it is by chance or by habit, some of us play the fool and are always bringing up the questions and the other view or the pessimistic scenario. And for those of us that do that, we sometimes lose our credibility through our consistant playing to the role. Which isn’t so good, either, seen on the smaller scale. Maybe on the larger scale it creates balance…. but in the daily life, it makes for the raincloud on the parade. Move that picnic inside…..
I think it is an art to get people to reveal their true thoughts and feelings, and to be able to reveal your own, in an environment of exchange. Sometimes I get it, and oftentimes I don’t. But trying to have that is better than settling for the secret societies of homogenous views.
Not that I am against real unity. That is the goal, after all. To have a unity of harmonious living within truth, The Truth and each others truth. We do need some transperancy to get there; as well as willingness to change our own ‘truth’ when it becomes disjointed from our own selfishness and full of self-ness. Truth cannot abide that we make ourselves God/god.
Why this little sidetrip into my mind? Discussions brought up something that I have found…. along with the fact that people will believe what they want to believe. Change requires something that works on the desires of the heart. And the desires of the heart are inflected with many different things.
I would give up on the whole complex business except for two things. One, I have this unexplainable wellspring of hope. Two, God gives different directions than I would give myself. My pessimism does not matter one whit in the working of God. It resists or stands with it, but it does not change realities of the forces at work.
Pessimism, optimism, are simply our subjective point of view. That is why we need to be open. Open to reality…… but judging what that is. Again, I would give it up, were it not for the hope in God. It gets to the point where if you see enough, you see that you cannot see.
“I see”, said the blind man. The joke my grandfather always used to say.
Sight, that very complex thing…. requires light it requires ability to interpret that light and it requires experience. Our eyes and brains have to get used to knowing what is being relayed to us. It really is more than we can consider…and yet we are bold to think we can consider all things…. that we have a handle on the ‘what is’.
Yet there is ‘seeing’, there is the potential of the knowable. There is understanding to be had. Where to go with this? This is where we always choose to go individually on our own way …. I will go on to desire to know more about God, someone else will go on in their doubt, some will immerse themselves in the sensory, but we have thought a little, we have met in this place. Will we do this again?
Or do we find more of that person than was pleasant… and recoil once more? Teaching each other to be more careful next time.