Why it's life-enhancing to creatively and respectfully disagree

I like this!

Division of opinion, too often the fault line of human relationships, is, when we embrace it openly, what invigorates thinking and stirs new thought. It is the ground of new beginnings, the beginning of new insight, the foundation of new respect for the other. If anything sharpens the dull edge of a relationship it is often when it ceases to be boringly predictable. It is when everybody on two continents knows what we are going to say next that we know we have stopped thinking. Then we need to have a few old ideas honed. We need to think through life all over again. "Of two possibilities", my mother used to tell me, "choose always the third".

Uncommon Gratitude, Rowan Wuilliams and Joan Chittister, (Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2010), 41

Yes, I do like that. I seldom read Joan Chittister without nodding or shaking my head. She is a wise, shrewd, compassionate but unsentimental analyst of spiritual psychology and human relationships. Reading her is for me a form of therapy, if therapy is that process by which we are helped to think of ourselves and our world, and our relations to self and the other, with more compassion, insight and patience.

Her writings on the Rule of St Benedict are that rare thing in spiritual writing - well considered common sense, moderation without compromising on the essential, and enough humour to remind us that laughter is one of our most humanising and loveable traits. And she faithfully, persistently and persuasively urges Christians to see the world with eyes open - with creative thought and critical consciousness. As to creativity - "We fail to realize that it is precisely the ability to think beyond the context of the times in which we live that makes us fit to live in times to come." But also "Critical consciousness is the testing ground of new ideas, the gatekeeper of tomorrow".

  This resonates in my own spirit on a number of levels. Whatever else it means to grow older, it cannot mean growing narrower, or being content with familiar and limited horizons. However else spiritual maturity might be evidenced, it isn't in static thought, contented convictions, complacent certainties, fixed ideas, or life still drawing on the capital of past experience. Wherever the future of the church lies - and I mean the Church Catholic, the Body of Jesus Christ in all its rich diversity, historic rootedeness and future possibilities - that future cannot be a perpetuation of the present, let alone a repristination of the past.

In all our lives there come times when we have to think beyond the context of our times, think creatively, and be critically conscious of who we are, how the world is, and what it might mean for us to live faithfully for Christ in that context. That can be a soul stripping experience, a re-orientation that can only take place out of experiences of disorientation. And at such times prayer becomes a crie de couer, a re-aligning of what matters as we discover what matters most. And at such times I find T S Eliot's words from Little Gidding express better than any words I could compose, the risks and consequences of any one life that dares to be open to the love of God and to the mystery and miracle of human life, the range and beauty of human thought, and to human relationships in all their complexity and capacity for wounding and healing.

You are not here to verify,
instruct yourself,
or inform curiosity or carry report.
You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid.
And prayer is more than an order of words,
the concious occupation of the praying mind,
or the sound of the voice praying.

Comments

[Perpetua]

"However else spiritual maturity might be evidenced, it isn't in static thought, contented convictions, complacent certainties, fixed ideas, or life still drawing on the capital of past experience."

That was a really helpful thing to read just after my 65th birthday, reminding me that I must still keep on growing and changing. Thank you.