Take the lid off your box.
Did you know that Christianity is a box? It’s a box we stuff God into and then we climb in and shut the lid. We like being in the box because it’s a “safe” controlled environment.
“Oh God of TRUTH deliver us from the cowardice that shrinks from new truth, from the laziness that is content with half-truths, from the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth” …a philosopher’s prayer.
This is how we live in our box. If we are presented with a new truth that doesn’t fit in our box, we slam down the lid and cower in fear that somehow even thinking about a new truth will cause us to lose our salvation. Generally, we live quite contentedly in our box.
We are comfortable with half-truths and tradition because otherwise it would mean we would have to study and think for ourselves…it’s much easier to just listen to our spiritual leader and let him/her tell us what we should believe and do and…
We arrogantly, though unintentionally, think we know what we know. As I’ve stated elsewhere, the hardest things to learn are the things we already know.
A wonderful and true quote from Abraham Joshua Heschel…
“A vibrant society does not dwell in the shadows of old ideas and viewpoints; in the realm of the spirit, only a pioneer can be a true heir. The wages of spiritual plagiarism are the loss of integrity; self-aggrandizement is self-betrayal. Authentic faith is more than an echo of a tradition. It is a creative situation, an event.”