Mystery and Mankind

The mysteries of personhood provide what may be the most challenging causes for research in secular and spiritual issues (questions) related to nature studies – especially those impinging on faith matters.  Both we as individuals and society fumble along with only limited understanding of who we are as individuals and in societies of individuals in relationships.  Often in conversations, sometimes in serious counseling with persons, I note the significant differences between the way they think and the way I think.  Some of the differences are easy to account for related to the ranges of experiences, of formal education, of family perceptions, and other factors.  In education the differences may be accounted for in the different college majors represented in the conversationalists or sessions.  We can tell the difference when talking to an engineer and a psychologist from those who have taken seriously the formalized majors related to what has been traditionally identified as the liberal arts.  Often the differences are so extensive that it becomes difficult to gain a straight answer to a limited question.  The problem is managed by cross-examining attorneys with witnesses – in asking for Yes or No answers to questions.  A witness is likely to presume the questioner is leading to a line of thought that is either attractive or unattractive to either the witness or the defendant, perhaps supportive of a private belief in a movement, or for some other interest.  The person asking the question may be entirely objective seeking only a truth on which to make an evaluation, or may be trying to support the witness, or thinking in some context unknown and not in the consideration of anyone in the exchange.  Truth is often hard to come by, and when we find it, we may not agree on what may be done with it.  Wise persons tend to find truth that seems to serve society well, and find ways of testing the matter, making amendments along the way, forming solutions the way a potter takes a glob of clay and takes the time to form it into the finished piece begun in a vision of it.  The artisan is often surprised to discover that the piece should be taken in a different direction and the vision amended.

The vision may change before the initiated vision is proved one way of the other.  For example idealists in their marriages may seek divorce before they have played out the factors of moving from individualism to social idealism that begins with two persons growing together in various ways.  The vision is lost in the difficulty of forming the vessel from two separate clays.  The tragedy is confounded in blaming the natural system rather than proving that system.  So – marriage didn’t work; marriage is out-of-date; or some other.  One person proposed that official marriages or intimate partnerships should be contracted for seven years with either party to the agreement setting off for a new experience.  Almost always the rights and benefits of one person are enhanced in such arrangements and the other diminished.  Society may have so wandered from understanding the human being and social balance that the problems are multiplying, perhaps beyond the human ability to solve them.  We are now faced with the flow of humanity into more complex relationships without at least minimal preview about how we can make the complexity work. 

Some persons are becoming as mechanical as the gadgets to which they give so much attention.  The warning from the beginning has been: Garbage in: garbage out.  We are making an untested society with the oddities of technology.  Society is emerging in a context that is beyond the evidence of earth.  There is something in each person that is mysterious, not only to others, but to the person. That mystery is something valuable incorporated by persons of genuine humility, desire to be the best he or she can be, and the variables stack up to make valuable persons in families, business, society, and faith.  When that mystery is not guided by a creative humility as the opposite of arrogance, the battle is lost or a stand-off – the person is reduced.  The point is illustrated simply.  Beginning in the 1970s one day was set for casual dress, usually Friday.  It became the camel’s nose in the tent.  The camel takes over the tent.  About the same time casual, even crude, language increased.  It now has become common crude using sex privacy to express meaning unrelated to spirituality.  We now commonly encounter a casual, crude, secular society.  At best it is inappropriate: at worst it is damning.  It offers a slippery slope downward for future generations.