No, not those three words. To be sure, I love you goes a long way toward building solid relationships and healing broken ones. But three other words might help the healing process as well.
Something in our DNA compels us toward knowledge. Perhaps it’s the thirst for understanding: where would science be today without it? Maybe, less beneficially, it’s the desire for control. Or the drive to hold on to something concrete amid constant change: such a drive, I suspect, has contributed mightily to the rise of fundamentalism.
One tiny problem: certainty eludes us. The cosmos isn’t built for it. Look at the mind-boggling uncertainty at the subatomic level; you can’t even tell where a particle is with any certainty. On the human level, we have studied the psyche for thousands of years—and yet there is still so much about our inner life that is mysterious.
This is all the more true of God. Even the Bible speaks of a God who changes course and sometimes seems to act in a contradictory manner. In our everyday lives, God stuns us just when we think we’ve got him—wait, her?—figured out.
If we could embrace such uncertainty—if we could hold our ideas about God and the world lightly—we would be more at peace with the nature of things. But in so many ways, we insist on certainty. That, in turn, means that we clash with others who cling to their certainty. We cannot afford to listen and dialogue because our certainty might be threatened.
Conversely, the more we embrace I don’t know as our fundamental orientation, the more we open to the thoughts and insights of others—even others with whom we disagree. That enables us to move into dialogue, into respect for other people and their own experiences of God, into appreciation for those experiences and what they can teach us.
In a world where so many people and cultures clash with one another over their conflicting “certainties,” the simple admission of I don’t know could be the dialogical equivalent of laying down one’s arms—the first step to peace and to healing.
2 comments:
How radical of you, John, so radically simple: the way to reconciliation is right out there in plain view.
"I don't understand" is also good.
The only certainty seems to be that you can't be certain of certainty -- presumably even this "only certainty"?
Anyway, if I say that at least I'm certain about how I feel and about what I think at this moment, even then I'm unaware of all the things that trigger my sense of certainty. My own history and deep-seated psychological dynamics are never fully clear; the 'environmental' influences of the passing scene may also be tugging at me in unsuspected ways. It may all produce a somewhat different certainty tomorrow. Sometimes we call that "growth" or 'learning". Sometimes it seems more like inconsistency or eccentricity.
Unfortunately, letting go of certainty in an uncertain and dangerous world goes against the grain. Certainty is a comfort. But the comforter becomes a straitjacket...
So here's to dialogue and to the principle of I-Don't-Know. Maybe we can turn it into a Movement and elevate the Uncertainty Principle into unassailable doctrine.
(Hey, isn't that what we always eventually do?)
The real question, though, is how to bring the certainty folks around. Is there any reason to think that their response to our disarming openness will not be scornful?
I guess that it can only come about in the context of real relationships where there's a chance for listening. It can't be accomplished through forums, debates, or mass mobilizations. And public leaders are not apt to present themselves as models for uncertainty.
That's why the simple is so damnably complex.
Bill,
Fine thinking all the way round. I too wonder how to talk with the certainty folks--because I suspect deep dialogue can only happen as they let go of certainty. You make a very good point that it may only happen as we build relationships with them. This is why I keep going to the annual Convention of our literalist Episcopal Diocese: to show them, at least, that we "uncertainists" are real human beings. Whether it will do any good remains to be seen.
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