yearnings

when you’ve got an answer, it’s time to find better questions

Truth on earth cannot be what it is in heaven. In heaven there it Truth; on earth there are truths. Absolute truth cannot exist for any human being. And so Truth is cast out of heaven and down to the earth. There Truth is shattered into pieces, fragments of it everywhere, so many that they are impossible to count…

And human beings will search forever for truths within themselves and throughout the entire world. Life will be an ongoing act of creating, revealing, and discovering. Each person, each culture, each religion has part of the truth; none has it all.

every truth has the potential to lead to a wider reality

If you listen, really listen, to your spouse or your child, your boss or your perceived enemy; if you allow their point of view to sit alongside your own, it’s incredible how you and the situation can be transformed.

You may even see that the ideas you are willing to fight to the death for are the very ones you’re most unsure about; the fierceness of your answer a mask for uncertainty.

You realize that we never have any independent opinions that are wholly ours, points of view that we came to on our own. We’ve inherited them from our parents or rebelled against their views; we had a childhood trauma or a fear that has influenced us greatly. Never mind the television we watch or the books we read.

Context is everything.

At the same time, we must be careful not to simply say that since everything is partially true, nothing really matters, as if there aren’t standards of right or wrong.

Martin Buber: Faith is so much more richer, so much more meaningful and authentic, if we can also doubt.

Life is a dialectic between being lost and found, found and lost. When we’ve lost God, it’s time to look deeper. When we’ve found God, it’s time to get lost.