Been a minute since I’ve had "a moment". Life is full. Writing gets pushed to the background amidst all that fills my days. Thank you to those of you who bug me to keep writing. You know who you are and I appreciate you!
I just completed the reading of a hefty theological treatise that gave me the profound gift of reminding me that I have paradigms and filters that I view life through. I read the Bible through those filters. I read the news and world events through those filters. I read the history of my own life, my purpose and meaning, through those filters. I read you and your life through those filters.
Filters aren’t inherently bad. They are how we organize and try to bring coherent meaning to the world we live in. Without them we might have a hard time staying sane with the amount of information that gets thrown at us all day long every day.
The problem arises when something comes along that flies in the face of our assumed understanding of the way the world works. Something that blatantly contradicts what we know to be true. Every single one of us has had that experience in life. Most of us more than once.
That person we thought we knew who did something so “out of character” that it threw us for a loop and caused us to question what else we didn’t know. That event that “only happens to other people” that stopped us short and made us question who we are or who God is. Suddenly our way of seeing the world has to be adjusted. In these situations, there’s no going back to how it was. Things have fundamentally shifted, suddenly and irreversibly.
Other times the press against our paradigms is more subtle. A gradual introduction of alternative points of view that, over time, cause us to think differently and move away from long held understandings of how things are. A new friend who was raised differently and sees the world through a different lens. Our perspectives change gradually, and only in hindsight do we recognize the shift.
The shift represented by book I just finished likely lands somewhere in the middle of those extremes. Not truly a core shift in my belief system, but more like a stretching and opening up to things I hadn't seen or had avoided. It has pushed my thinking to a new place and will truly shift how I think, how I filter things. But this will only happen over time as I allow the implications to inform how I read my Bible and view life and circumstances. I’m not ready to talk about the book or even give you a title, because my head is too busy spinning to settle down and share. Nor would I recommend such an academic read to my friends. I like you too much for that.
All I wanted to say for now, as I put pen to paper, is that it is a good thing to be reminded that how I see the world is not necessarily the sum total of truth and reality. The way I have been taught to think, especially through my particular branch of faith and Christianity, cannot encompass the totality of truth that exists. Fear not, I’m still all in on the Trinity and Jesus as the way, truth and life. I’m just realizing how many parts of the overall Scriptures, Old and New Testaments, that I’ve read past and not taken in, or chosen to backburner because they don’t make sense.
I guess that’s the point of this ramble. If we are going to be critical thinkers, good thinkers, we have to be willing to engage the viewpoints of people who don’t share our paradigms and filters. This is true whether we’re talking about faith or race or politics or socio-economic standing. We have to be willing to try to see the world from where they are standing so we can interpret alongside them, seeing what they see if we can.
It’s a big world, and the view from my tiny corner of the universe is a pretty limited view. Not an unimportant or irrelevant view, just a limited one. Humility recognizes the value of being stretched by the work and thinking of another person who, like me, doesn’t have the entire picture sorted out.
So, what or who is stretching your paradigms these days?
