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Thursday, June 12, 2014

Elemental Beginnings

To fully understand Jesus, what is needed in your life besides well-rehearsed knowledge? How do people hold on to religious rituals and heroes today, while missing the whole point of what those ceremonies and people represent? (Serendipity Bible 10th Anniversary Edition, page 1540). 


Like in most matters, a purely intellectual understanding without a substratum of experience including pain and complexity and compassion is simply a strawman caricature playing with pickup sticks.  Rituals and hero worship can be a blatant attempt to sugarcoat reality. I have limited knowledge regarding the details in which American independence was won and the Constitution established. But clearly an essential number of these early framers were creators--not strawmen, not caricatures. Reality was too much with them.

They of necessity had the stern stuff of which creativity is made--gutsy curiosity; a persistence that learns from mistakes; vivid perception; willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty; combining knowledge with imagination; cultivation of fitness and  elegance in deriving principal and structure; and an appreciation for systematic interconnectedness.**

In short, the most important freedom of the nation's founders was first and foremost the freedom to aptly frame reality and to imagine a hopeful future.

[**refer to "The Seven Da Vincian Principles" in How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci by Michael J. Gelb.]



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