The Wall That Creates All Others

The one wall, so evident in our time, which creates all other walls in our world is the separation of thought from opinion or belief (in religion, politics, and every other area of our social life).  No where is this more evident than in religion—though the same phenomena is happening today in the realm of our American politics.  That “wall” is our failure to think. We cannot “care” or “love” without thought.  We cannot separate thought from either the will or the emotions, for as human beings we are a unity.  We can never merely be beings who understand, or will, or feel, or opine—we are people with minds made for pondering as well. 

I’m reminded of St. Teresa of Avila, who wrote, “Let no one be taken into this religious house of ours, unless she is a woman of a sound understanding.  For if she is without mind, she will neither know herself nor will she understand her best teachers.  Ignorance and self-conceit is a disease that is simply incurable, and, besides, it usually carries a great malice and great malignity along with it.  Commend me to people with good heads.  From all silly devotees may God deliver us!” 

Vision becomes reality, love happens, care begins, and walls come crashing down, only when we have first “inquired and searched diligently” for truth.  "Our hearts,” writes E. Herman, have gone cold because we have lost the art of pondering.”   Without thinking things through, without inquiry, without searching diligently for truth, we fall for anything and everything—and must therefore build a wall to protect our ignorance, our stance, our opinion, or our belief.

The wall built by the failure to think and ponder is one we are very familiar with:  them/us, young/old, conservative/liberal, etc.  If “your truth” and “my truth” (subjectivism) are both true, there is no room for dialogue. The point is, however, that there are facts—objective facts.  There is evidence—objective evidence—and by careful thought and pondering we can discover truth together, but only if we are open to a truth outside our own.  

“Think, learn to think!” Even the scripture has God complaining:  “My people doth not consider!”  We are wondrously made and a part of the equipment given us to live is the gift of the mind.  Let us use it to its full capacity, in spite of our belief, our stance, our opinion, or our particular bent.  As Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed often:  “There is something in this universe that justifies Carlyle in saying, ‘No lie can live forever.’ There is something in this universe which justifies Willian Cullen Bryant in saying, ‘Truth crushed to earth will rise again.’ There is something in this universe that justifies James Russell Lowell in saying:

Truth forever on the scaffold

Wrong forever on the throne

Yet that scaffold sways the future

And behind the dim unknown stands God

Within the shadows keeping watch above his own.”

My Great Granddaughter--just a'pondering!