Information Overload

 I found this week's quotation, by Edgar Allan Poe, puzzling... "In forever knowing, we are forever blessed. But to know all, were the curse of a fiend."

Then I thought about it some more... Perhaps he means that when we use the knowledge we have for good and useful purposes, we are "forever blessed" but that if we take in everything we see, hear, and read uncritically, that would be "the curse of a fiend".

I know several friends who have taken holidays from social media this year, because they have found reading all the thousands of news items and stories, and worse, the comments below them, made them feel belligerent and depressed by turns. When we engage with posts that are spewing hatred and intolerance, or with whose views we disagree, root and branch, it can be difficult to remain objective, not to get sucked in.

I think that each of us needs to choose our battles carefully, to decide what matters to us, what we "forever know" and to defend those things against people with diametrically opposing views. The whole Black Lives Matter movement is a good example... when uninformed people ripost with "All Lives Matter" or with racist comments, it is easy to rest on our white fragility, our white silence, our white apathy, shrug our shoulders and scroll on down. Rather than engaging honestly and deeply with the conversation, explaining why the balance has been skewed for so long, and what we can do to ensure that black voices are heard, black people and others with non-white skin matter, and to help dismantle the system of white supremacy in which we were born and brought up. I have blogged about this recently. 

One of the key Unitarian tenets is the defence of freedom of belief. But not without limits. Espousing freedom of belief requires us to take a responsible attitude towards what we read and hear and see, and to discern critically what truth it has for us. So that if we see or hear or read untruth and misrepresentation and hatred, we can defend the belief or people being attacked. We are limited human beings, so it is not possible for us to "know all". But I believe it is possible to choose to inform ourselves as much as we can about subjects which are consonant with our values, and be prepared to engage with others in meaningful discussion about them.

And not be scared of being perceived as traitors to our class, our families, our people, if that is what it takes. It is as simple and difficult as that.

Learning vs Experience

"If you want to know something, ask an experienced person, not a scholar." This nugget of Chinese wisdom is something I have learned down the years.

In the first half of my life, I was a great believer in learning from books. And it served me well, for quite a long time. I finished school, got my degree in Librarianship, got married and settled down to live the rest of my life.

As time passed, I began to realise that there are so many things that you simply cannot learn from books, from staying in your head. So many things that can only be learned, or dealt with, overcome,  by hard-won experience, by living from a place of love and risk. Love. Vulnerability. Death. Generosity. None of these can be taught. They have to be experienced.

Book-learning is good, in that it gives you a theoretical grounding in whatever it is you are trying to learn, but it is not until you try to put that theory into practice that the learning "goes in". It is no accident that William Blake put Innocence and Experience at opposite poles. Until we have experienced something, all the book learning in the world will not help us. We will remain in a state of innocence (by which I mean unknowing) until our self-confident edges have been knocked off by some life experience.

Take counselling as an example. As part of my ministerial studies, I did a certificate in counselling skills. I read the recommended texts and thought I knew how to do it. But it was not until I and my fellow students started practising on each other, working in triads (one "counsellor", one "client", one observer) that I began to understand how the theory I had read about really worked. And the same thing happened in the three years of my spiritual direction training. The wise tutors at the London Centre for Spiritual Direction had it spot on - we spent the first half of each session on the topic of the week, and the second half on putting what we had learned into practice by "doing" spiritual direction on each other. Without all the practice I had undergone, I would not have had the confidence to hang out my spiritual director shingle.

And sometimes, I have read a book about a particular spiritual topic (Richard Rohr's Falling Upward comes to mind) and could not understand it at all, until I underwent life experiences which helped the meaning of the words fall into place in my heart.

Where the book learning can help, I think, is that the wisdom shared in books can support us through whatever experience we are having, so that we come out the other end wiser and stronger, kinder and more compassionate than we were before.

The Key to the Door

This week's quote is by Charles Dickens. "Auch eine schwere Tür hat nur einen kleinen Schlüssel nötig." Which being translated, means: "Even a heavy door needs only a small key."

I have found this to be so true, throughout my life. It is possible to worry away at a seemingly insuperable problem, then inspiration comes, and everything falls into place. 

The metaphor of a key opening a door is a common one in our society. Without a key, it is difficult to step through the door of new knowledge, new insight. It is no accident that the word is also used to introduce the translation of lines on a graph, or figures in a diagram. Without the key, the graph or diagram remains incomprehensible. But with the key, it all begins to make sense.

Keys come in many shapes and forms, both literal and metaphorical. When I was growing up, it was a tradition to be given the key to the door of your parents' house on reaching the age of 21. 

"You've got the key to the door / never been twenty-one before." went the song.

In this case, the key is symbolic of the entrance into the world of adults. These days, children grow up far more quickly, and are considered 'adult' at the age of 18. By which time, many have had their own latch-key for years. And have been engaged in adult behaviours for years, too.

A key can also be a nudge from God, a revelation. Reading the first two pages of Alfred Hall's Beliefs of a Unitarian was a significant key for me, unlocking the wonderful faith of Unitarianism. It really did feel like a revelation from God, when I read those pages, more than 40 years ago. I felt as though I was stepping into a new world, which suddenly made sense to me.

Books can often be keys to new worlds of understanding. So can films, television shows and the Internet.

They can also unlock knowledge we would rather not have. But once the door has been unlocked, it is not possible to 'unknow' the knowledge it has been hiding. We have to incorporate it into our lives and, if it has alerted us to some evil in the world, it is our responsibility to do something about it.

Like Pandora with her box, we have to live with the knowledge we gain. Fortunately, we always have hope, the only virtue that remained when she had opened the lid.

Knowledge vs Wisdom

For many young people (and some not-so-young) May and June are the most stressful months of the year. It is the time of year when all their accumulated knowledge, gained by hard work in classroom or lecture theatre or library, is tested. And on the results of those exams, their entire futures often depend.

It seems so unfair that our academic year is structured to end in the Summer, although I understand why it does: in former times, children had to be available during the Summer months to help with the Harvest.

But it is so hard to have to be indoors, either revising, or in an exam, when outside the sky is blue, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and there are so many fun things they would rather be doing. I can remember sitting my O and A levels in a sweltering, airless gym, wishing I could be anywhere else.

Looking back across the many years since then, I wonder at how little of the knowledge and facts I crammed into my brain in those days has come in useful in later life (except in pub quizzes!). Admittedly, I am eternally grateful to Mr. Griffith-Jones, the English teacher who passed on his love of good literature, but otherwise, not much else has had any lasting meaning for me, or influence on me.

It makes me wonder whether we are teaching our children the right things in school. I think that perhaps there is too much emphasis on gaining knowledge, on the accumulation of facts, and not enough on learning the important lessons of life, through gaining wisdom.

Perhaps wisdom cannot be learned through study, but only through the experiences of our lives. Wisdom is more about being awake, about paying attention to what is going on around us. Wisdom is more a way of living in the world; of responding to it, following the best that we know. it is about working out what we believe is right and good and true, and then trying to live wholeheartedly, with all of ourselves, as Brene Brown would say.

There are many great teachers of wisdom around, if we could only learn to wake up and pay attention to them. We may learn wisdom by reading the words of wise men and women, or by listening to the worship leader in church or chapel on a Sunday; but I think that a surer route is through our own life experiences.

There is nothing to beat actually experiencing something to teach us the wisdom it holds. For example, a child can be told repeatedly that fire burns, but it is only when she sticks her finger in the candle flame that she learns.

The opportunities to gain wisdom are all around us - in the wonders of Creation, in our interactions with one another, and in the things we see, hear, smell, touch, and taste.

Let us resolve to be awake and pay attention.