In our spiritual and intellectual striving for truth, as intimate and personal and private as it truly is on many levels, we must remember that the Christian Reality is too huge for one human opinion to master alone.
It is to personal opinion what the entire cosmos is to the Hubble Space Telescope.
Let us not underestimate its hugeness. We are in one place, infinitely smaller than the Entirety, and we must not fall into the arrogant supposition that, standing where we are and informed only by the perspectives of the present moment, we can grasp it in all its fullness. No human could ever rightly claim that, nor even any one civilization. For everything we see more clearly than others have before us, there are as many things that we are blind to that they could see.
So the answer is (far from abandoning the search on an individual level) to search more ardently, yet always refusing to succumb to that arrogance which believes that I, among all the peoples of the earth, can clearly see the whole of the truth because I am listening to myself instead of others.
We must listen to the inner resonances of our heart. They must inform our search for truth, and we discount or ignore them at our own peril, for they ring unmistakably true if they have been formed by a heart seeking what is True and Good above all. But they are not the arbiter of truth nor our inner Magisterium. They can go wrong or become confused! Yet how often do we treat our private feelings and thoughts as thought they, they alone, are the final court of reckoning. They are not: they are only a small part of an Eternal symphony that always has been, that we must join by transcending mere inner privacy of thought and feeling. And we begin by acknowledging ourselves as just one member in a Body that transcends Time, Space, and even individual failings because it is united by one Spirit, One Lord, One God and Father of all. And He is not constrained by our failings: so let us learn from one another and embrace not just new, but old. This is our heritage.
It is to personal opinion what the entire cosmos is to the Hubble Space Telescope.
Let us not underestimate its hugeness. We are in one place, infinitely smaller than the Entirety, and we must not fall into the arrogant supposition that, standing where we are and informed only by the perspectives of the present moment, we can grasp it in all its fullness. No human could ever rightly claim that, nor even any one civilization. For everything we see more clearly than others have before us, there are as many things that we are blind to that they could see.
So the answer is (far from abandoning the search on an individual level) to search more ardently, yet always refusing to succumb to that arrogance which believes that I, among all the peoples of the earth, can clearly see the whole of the truth because I am listening to myself instead of others.
We must listen to the inner resonances of our heart. They must inform our search for truth, and we discount or ignore them at our own peril, for they ring unmistakably true if they have been formed by a heart seeking what is True and Good above all. But they are not the arbiter of truth nor our inner Magisterium. They can go wrong or become confused! Yet how often do we treat our private feelings and thoughts as thought they, they alone, are the final court of reckoning. They are not: they are only a small part of an Eternal symphony that always has been, that we must join by transcending mere inner privacy of thought and feeling. And we begin by acknowledging ourselves as just one member in a Body that transcends Time, Space, and even individual failings because it is united by one Spirit, One Lord, One God and Father of all. And He is not constrained by our failings: so let us learn from one another and embrace not just new, but old. This is our heritage.
