“I don’t fit in your box” -God No matter what flavor of religion or no religion you may have I think you can appreciate this quote from Martin Buber:
“The people in the Bible are sinners, like ourselves, but there is one sin they do not commit, our arch-sin: they do not dare confine God to a circumscribed space or division of life, to “religion,” they do not presume to draw boundaries around God’s commandments and say to him, “Up to this point,you are sovereign, but beyond these bounds begins the sovereignty of science or society or the state.”
Yes, we human like to limit everything, put a label on it, put it in a box and if it is troublesome, marginalize and ignore it. Yes we do this to everyone, even God.
When we call for nonviolent action here at home to end the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, often people say what can we do, there is nothing we can do that will make a difference. Fortunately many great, known and unknown, women and men in history did have this attitude and set no limits what could be done to change the society. Many did not live to see results and some things have not changed. The power of no limits is not working for ‘results’ but as Thomas Merton says because it is the right thing to do: “Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no worth at all, if not perhaps, results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you will start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself…”
If we look at the “struggle for truth” as valuable, not the results, we would not limit Truth or God
Comments
Dave Kruschke — 14 February 2011, 11:43
Sometimes research into new areas of Science and Technology requires deliberate acts of limitation just to get to the Frontier of a particular Area. This can mean looking very deeply Into the Box rather than Outside of it. Humans label and limit things to get a better understanding of it, not because they are “arch-sinners.” For creating the polio vaccine, for instance, this might involve setting aside the Question of whether “polio is God’s Will and therefore never can be changed.” Since it is possible that Martin Buber, Ghandi and Thomas Merton were not involved in this kind of deep, narrow research, in spite of all this talk about TRUTH, it might be unreasonable to expect them not to say what they’ve said.
Also, it seems that Thomas Merton’s quote, above, basically says that one should value the PROCESS but not the RESULTS. This is sort of like “Zen Archery” where hitting the Target isn’t that important. I vaguely remember a contest between Zen Archer’s and Goal/Target orientated American Archers. The American Archers won. Focusing on Results and even measuring Results are now widely used to improve Processes, including, say, reducing bacterial infections in hospitals and even the selling of advertizing (i.e. coupon useage/feedback)…
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