Monday, January 19, 2015

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

Take time to reflect today, Dr. MLK Jr. Day. 

"Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will."

From "Letter from Birmingham Jail," April 16, 1963

Here are two quotes I like, the latter of which reminds me of John 1:5 for those of you interested in religion, quality literature, or hermeneutics. I put these two, also, because it has taken me around a decade of reading the Bible as an adult to finally feel like I understand the text. Many times I put it down and said, "this is ridiculous. This doesn't make any sense...it isn't realistic." I hypothesized that the failure to understand was my own. The effort to understand is a part of the experience of reading the text. The authors' were not obscure, I was dim and arrogantly considered my little candlelight of intellect sufficient to behold the cosmos of the soul.

There mere act of trying to understand the texts as completely as possible has strengthened, stretched, and rendered more nimble my mind in such a way that these "upgraded" faculties have enhanced my perspective on Life, People, Art, Work, etc. So, religious or agnostic or atheist, I argue that anyone who accepts the challenge of humbling his own "knowledge", his own conception of what is "True" to the narratives of (probably) any Sacred Text will find his mind more capable, his physical senses more sensitive to the depth of Truth, and his heart more at peace, pumping not just blood through his own body, but Love through a metaphysical organ of which all Beings are, arguable, constituents.

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