Between the Dark and the Daylight: Encountering and Embracing the Contradictions of Life (15 page)

As Voltaire remarked, “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”

The problem is that certitude seduces us. It enables us to believe that what is said to be true is true because someone else said so. It simply cuts off thought. It arrests discussion in midflight. And yet we yearn for it with a passion. We spend endless, sleepless nights grappling with intellectual options in order to wiggle them into a satisfying kind of certainty without so much as a scintilla of evidence.

It is a very effective tool for kings and potentates and any powers that be. Of all the tools authority has to wield,
certitude trumps them all. They call it tradition or law or infallibility, the irrefutables of any institution, the staples of fear. The timid, the insecure and the sycophants accept them without contest because they enable a people to look more pious than inept.

So rulers of all stripe and type dispense certainties—theirs—with great abandon. They do whatever it takes—define cultural dogmas, assert organizational doctrines, impose decrees, and use power, force and penal systems—to suppress the ideas of anyone who dares to question them. Ideas, after all, are dangerous things. Ideas have brought down as many myths and mysteries as they have toppled kingdoms.

Certitude carries within itself a kind of social convenience, as well. No greater conversation stopper exists than the notion that an idea is unassailable, closed to discussion, simply not open to review. “We have always done it this way; this has always been true” is authority of the most effective type. Declarations like these either end peace or spawn passivity. They make foes out of friends. Certainties turn a thinking people into a restless people, waiting for the light they know will come while watching creativity die in their midst.

But there is another way to live that runs hot and bright through darkness. There are always some in every population who know that life is not meant to be about certainty. Life, they realize, is about possibility. They see certitude as a direction but not an end.

These are the ones who understand that what we know now that is belief without proof is worthy for its own time
only. At the same time, it is exactly this awareness that cows a world that prefers certitude to doubt. “How,” they ask, “can anyone believe in anything when everything changes all the time?” They have no tolerance for unfinished ideas.

And yet, it is precisely the unfinished idea, however well-intentioned, that deserves the unending pursuit of the open-minded who are bent on bringing what is incomplete to the fullness of the true and the real. The real truth is that their discoveries will make life more authentic for us all.

Doubt is what shakes our arrogance and makes us look again at what we have never really looked at before. Without doubt there is little room for faith in anything. What we accept without question we will live without morality. It is in populations like this that monarchs become dictators and spiritual leaders become charlatans and knowledge becomes myth.

An ancient people tell the story of sending out two shamans to study their holy mountain so that they could know what their gods expected of them. The first shaman came back from the north side of the mountain to tell them that it was covered with fruit trees, a sign that their god would always bless them abundantly. The second shaman came back from the south side of the mountain to tell the people that it was barren and covered with rock, a sign that their god would always be with them but intended them to take care of themselves. So, which shaman was right? If both, then it is dangerous to dogmatize either position.

It is doubt, not certitude, that enables us to believe because it requires us to think deeply about an entire subject,
and not simply depend on the side of reality that is on our side of the mountain. Only when we can look beyond absolutes to understand every level of life can we possibly live life to the fullest, with the deepest kind of insight, with the greatest degree of compassion for others.

Voltaire was right, of course. Certainty is comfortable but always unlikely and forever disruptive. As life changes so must our explanations and responses to it.

The absurdity of certitude is life’s most seriously damaging narcotic. It accuses us of our shallowness and hollows out the soul.

Doubt is uncomfortable, yes, but doubt always leads us beyond the present moment to the kind of moments that call us to greater truth, deeper wisdom and a more adult measure of the self.

Fear is the toxin of this generation. Overcrowded cities, seeping borders, professional transience, the movement of great numbers of people from one place to another on the globe like schools of fish in an aquarium, have re-created the face and nature of society. From the crowds of displaced people seeking new jobs in new places, to those being transferred from one office to another, to refugees driven from their homelands around the globe, the roads of the world are filled with strangers looking for a new home.

But the very meaning of home has changed in our time.

In the small village in which I am writing today, home is 250 families scattered across this mountainous territory where sheep are far more commonly on the roads than people. The houses are small and tucked into copses of trees or blended into the giant boulders overlooking the sea.
The only foreigners here are the “blow ins” who own small patches of land but come only seasonally, or rent holiday houses that were built to accommodate short-term tourists. Here, everyone knows everybody, at least by sight. Everyone. There are no inns, no small motels, no restaurants, no all-night coffee shops, no bus stations, no truck stops here to attract and serve transients. There could be no local home invasion by random strangers here because there are few, if any, strangers passing through. Clearly, strangers are a by-product of cities, not villages where landholdings have been in the same families for generations.

Places such as this are rare now on a planet where villages have routinely given way to large cities full of strangers and, most of all, full of people unlike ourselves. The race, religion and cultural mores of our neighbors and coworkers, our teachers and civil servants, our doctors and our children’s spouses, our gardeners and our cabdrivers can’t be taken for granted anymore. We are now global villages of “unlikes.” It’s a great moment in human history. But it is a difficult moment, as well. Even the most generous people in the world struggle, nevertheless, to understand why “they” are not “just like us.” Or worse, why they don’t even seem to want to be.

It is a moment rife with suspicion, prejudice, turfism, chauvinism, fear.

Suspicion is rampant. From now on, whatever goes wrong around here is because someone unlike us came along and ruined everything. We can’t understand the accent so we can’t get the help we need when we’re shopping. The car doesn’t work right, we decide, because mechanics from
countries like that don’t know what we’re talking about when we take our vehicle to a garage. And anyway, we don’t like the way they look at us. We think they’re up to something.

Prejudice divides us from them and even them from themselves. We don’t mind foreigners in general, we say; it’s just these particular people who bother us. They should have gone somewhere where people believe in that kind of a god. We don’t.

These people are everywhere now. They take our jobs, and move into our houses but don’t keep them clean. Somebody has to tell them to find a place of their own.

Chauvinism evaluates everyone not like us as lesser. They don’t know what it means to be a citizen here, we insist. They don’t know our history. They didn’t fight for this country. But they’ll pull our economy down because they don’t work as hard as we do.

And at the base of it all is fear. The fear of difference. The fear of otherness. The fear of loss. The fear of change. The fear of the very things that stand to make us even greater than we are. The benevolence of the unknown has escaped us. Differences, as enrichment, elude us.

Difference is the gift that unlikeness brings us. Because of our openness to differences we learn to be in the world in new and exciting ways. We learn that there is more than one kind of way to go through life and do it morally, artistically, happily. We discover that other foods are equally as good for us as anything we have become accustomed to eating. If not better. We begin to understand history and economics and even religion differently. And we encourage
our children to learn other languages if they really want to be citizens of the world rather than simply its onlookers.

Differences bring us out of ourselves into a newer, fuller way of being human. We see other models of family life and begin to reexamine our own in the light of them. We begin to recognize likenesses among us that enlarge our understanding of what it means to be human beings together.

Finally, we begin to realize in blazing new ways that no particular people have a monopoly on goodness or a corner on criminal character, an option on God or an ascendancy on godlessness. We come to own that we are all simply human beings together with a great deal to learn from one another if we are ever going to be fully developed, deeply sensitive and wholly human adults. We gift the world with a new definition of home as a union of hearts rather than as a union of types.

It is, without doubt, the gifts we get from our excursions into differences—the people we come to know whom we could never have met otherwise, the wisdom we see in those we consider simpler than ourselves, the downright goodness of those we fear because we do not know them—that make us bigger of soul, greater of heart, than we could possibly ever have been otherwise.

That is the benevolence of the unknown. That is what is missing in the ghetto formation that comes from hiding in the cave of ourselves all our lives. Until we step out into the large world around us, go out of our way to meet, befriend, engage with the unknowns, we will remain forever the half of ourselves we are now. But if we move toward even one
person who is our opposite, go to one country where our stereotypes have made us blind and begin to see the other as like us, the other country as a symphony of new soul, our own spirit will grow.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry promises us the revelation that the unknown brings and the fullness of life that comes with it. “A single event,” Exupéry writes, “can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.”

To be citizens of the world in a world that has itself become a global village, we must all allow ourselves to be called to life by the unknown. Then, perhaps, stunned by the sameness in us, we will no longer lose sleep worrying about the danger of immigration, the danger of strange religions, the danger that comes clothed in other colors, other accents, other ways to marry and bury and pray and be alive, all of it in the name of one humanity.

Most of all, we will all come to understand that the human race has a great deal more in common than it has differences. Then the stranger, the one totally unknown to us, the one who awakens these realizations in us, will enable us to melt into the stream of life more fully human ourselves. But first, of course, to stop the fear in the night, we must reach out. We must take into our own homes at least one other family or person because of whose differences we can come to see the ways of God in the rest of creation.

I heard of a father who never hugged his daughter good-bye without saying this blessing over her: “May every place you be make it hard for you to leave.… May every person you love make it hard for you to say good-bye.” It takes a lot of living to really understand the pain and the beauty of that kind of blessing. To be so happy anywhere you never want to leave it, to love someone so much you cannot bear to say good-bye, must be one of God’s greatest blessings. It is a life lived trailing a wake of unending happiness. It is a gift given to few.

Rather, life is made up of segments, some of them longer than others but all of them essentially freestanding, independent of the one that has gone before it. We go from childhood to adolescence to adulthood growing both physically and psychologically, moving toward what must surely be the point of human fulfillment. The temptation is to
assume that at some magic number of years, at the time the society calls legal adulthood—or even retirement—that we’re finished, that it’s finally over, that we have reached the summit of development, that we are finally the fullness of the person we have been becoming all these beginning years.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is that our lives are truly works in progress, all of them individually and at different times. We go from this to that, from here to there with only one constant: We are constantly becoming, no less at seventy-five years old than when we were four. The changes at four are predominantly, obviously, physical. The changes at seventy-five are also physical, of course, but the real changes, the great changes in us between the ages of twenty-one and eighty-five, are by then more internal than external.

One period of life follows upon another, sustained only by the spirit that is us. And in each of those periods, we stretch ourselves always toward the sun of our lives, whatever it happens to be at that moment.

Choice is the metaphor of life. We wind our way from one choice to another all the rest of our years. We choose and change and then choose again. We select this education not that education, this job not that job, this partner not that partner. We build up a scaffolding of choices, each of which, sooner or later, one way or another, ends. And then we must begin to choose all over again. One choice is a mistake, the next an achievement until, one alternative at a time, we write on our hearts the map of life we have routed for ourselves.