Though we cannot think alike, may we not love alike? May we not be of one heart, though we are not of one opinion?
—JOHN WESLEY, 1749
IRONICALLY, WE SPEND so much time avoiding change, when we’re changing all the time. Even our cells are rearranging, mine as I’m writing this, yours as you’re reading this. It’s like trying not to blink when we’ve already blinked twice during the thought.
This all came up recently when I was speaking to a survey-of-religions class at a community college in the Midwest. A likable young woman raised her hand. She described a group she belonged to that held Thursday dinners with people of different faiths. As she spoke about meeting people different from herself, her eyes lit up. Then she hit a wall, saying, “I love listening to others until it rubs up against my beliefs, the way I was raised.” Her eyes went cold, “I’m open, but I’m not going to change who I am.” Suddenly, she was digging in. Yet she was already changed by what she’d heard, only struggling to admit it.
This led to a conversation about how we harden our mind. This often comes from the quietly desperate effort to assure ourselves that who we are—or who we think we are—won’t vanish or melt for being exposed to life. We fear that in our encounters with difference we’ll lose our identities. We fear we’ll succumb and become what we encounter. On the contrary, the essence of who we are will only grow for listening to others. Healthy change is called growth, and it reflects how we become who we are by encountering the various energies of life as met in others. As Thomas Merton said, If we truly beheld one another, “we would fall down and worship each other.”
I remember that, for a long time, I found myself acclimating to not hearing, before admitting that I needed hearing aids, and slowly the dullness of a quiet world began to appear normal. Likewise, when we acclimate to the comfort of our own views and resist any form of difference, we become mind-deaf, which means that we impose our dullness of thinking on the world and consider it normal. Being mind-deaf, we think that understandings of life are only valid if they are close to our own. When we acclimate to the history of our own feelings and resist the truth of other people’s feelings, we become heart-deaf and feel that experiences of life are only valid if they mirror our own. Some degree of this resistance happens to everyone. The question is, How long can we refuse the lessons that come from understandings and experiences other than our own?
When we resist every thought we meet unless it upholds our own thinking, we’re turning everything we see into us. And when we minimize or invalidate every feeling we meet, unless it confirms our own experience, we’re turning everything we touch into us. These extensions of self-centeredness starve the mind and heart into isolation, and such acts of self-centeredness drain us and the life of those around us.
There’s a thin line between adapting to what life brings our way and colluding in our own diminishment by acclimating to the comfort of habits that box us in. Often, this collusion stems from our resistance to change. Our insistence on the stories we prefer can encase us, until we’re wrapped and tangled in a hardened web of self that no longer lets us drink from the well of life.
As it is, we seldom see what’s up close clearly and often take the things we love for granted. Until we’re stunned or pained into looking at things freshly. Not because we don’t care, but because this is the foreground and background of consciousness, the approach and retreat of wakefulness. I’ve come to understand this seeing and not-seeing as a natural, if dangerous, ebb and flow of being here.
So how do we begin to expand our view? By revitalizing our ability to take in the Whole of Life and to act from there. Some of you may remember that before GPS devices, there were AAA TripTiks. You’d call up the American Automobile Association, tell them where you were going, and they would plot a route on a physical map, highlighted in yellow, so you could find your way. If you made a wrong turn, however, you’d have to retrace your steps to the highlighted route to resume your journey.
With GPS, you can redirect yourself from wherever your journey takes you. You don’t have to backtrack and start over. This is because the reference point for GPS is global, as seen from satellites. The AAA TripTiks, helpful as they were, assumed there was only one way to get where you were going. The GPS encourages whole-mind thinking and assumes there are many ways to get where you’re going. It allows for exploration and course correction. In an age where everyone’s lives are more connected than ever, we need to move through the world with an awareness that there are many ways to get where we’re going.
So much depends on letting in more views than our own. The profound feminist thinker Carol Lee Flinders quotes Huston Smith about our need to have more than one perspective, no matter how strongly we believe in any one idea:
[He] used to talk about the value of being able to see through two eyes—that if one of our eyes is covered, we don’t see depth. Look out from two eyes, and you see the point of convergence way out ahead where things cohere, and then everything becomes multidimensional.
We need more than one perspective to glimpse the point of convergence where all perspectives meet. When we become zealous or stubborn, when we stay resistant to change, we’re seeing with one eye and lose the common center from where all views emerge and return.
We vacillate between resisting change and accepting change, between acclimating to our own views and adjusting to the unknown. We teeter back and forth between being mind-deaf and heart-deaf and being forced to let in other views. And yet we must try to go deep without drowning, always working toward the point of convergence.
I have to confess that, after a lifetime of experience, I still wake some days feeling small. When smaller than I really am, it’s hard to stay connected to everything larger than me. It’s hard to lean forward. When smaller than I really am, I start to see with only one eye. And then I start to hide. I start to distrust. I settle into being disheartened, though I know better. Having endured these shifts several times in my life, I know that the storm of being small will pass. When feeling small, when feeling less than, when unable to reach out the way I know I can, it’s important to remember the point of convergence where we all meet.
What a world we live in, where small things of color fly about us and sing, a world so much bigger than the frames my mind can put around it. Diversity and change underline the day, whether I acknowledge it or not. But only when I can stay open to the changes and look at things freshly, can I in time say yes again to life.
So much depends on letting in more views than our own.