Sunday
Everybody looks at the world through their own lens, a matrix of culturally inherited qualities, family influences, and other life experiences. This lens, or worldview, truly determines what we bring to every discussion.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
We all have a whole set of assumptions and limitations, prejudices and preferences, likes, dislikes and triggers, fears and conflicts of interest, blind spots and obsessions that keep us from seeing what we could and would see if we didn’t have them.
—Brian McLaren
Tuesday
Our brains find it difficult to rest when we feel uncertainty, so we would often rather reach for premature closure on an unwarranted certainty than live with appropriate uncertainty. We may even prefer a pessimistic certainty to a potentially optimistic uncertainty.
—Brian McLaren
Wednesday
Those stories that we will follow are the ones that feel true, feel like they have continuity to our past and that resonate with the trajectory of our lives. We’re looking for the story that doesn’t necessarily change our minds; we’re actually looking for the story that confirms what’s in our minds.
—Jacqui Lewis
Thursday
Jesus inspired and “abducted” people through immersive and imaginative experiences—including parables and powerful metaphors. Following his example, we discover that it’s usually a far more effective portal out of confirmation bias than purely intellectual arguments.
—Brian McLaren
Friday
The more we bump into the folks who are so-called “other,” the more we are stretched and the more we are pulled out of bias. We have new truths, because we have tangible evidence of the beautiful, powerful creativity of our God who made all of this diversity for us to enjoy.
—Jacqui Lewis
Week Forty-Seven Practice
Open to Third-Way Thinking
Pastor Molly Baskette urges us to let go of rigid binaries in our thinking:
All claims to the contrary, Jesus did not preach from a place of rigid binaries and judgments but from a place of continual becoming. He befriended outcasts and lived on the margins of society while staying in relationship with wealthy and powerful people, some of whom became patrons and disciples. He lived in a patriarchal society, but let women correct him and expand his understanding of his mission [Matthew 15:22–28]. Innocent of the trumped-up charges, he allowed himself to be murdered by state violence to expose the injustice of that violence. He asked us to love our enemies, and to bless those who curse us. He warned that those who lived by the sword would die by it.
The churches I’ve served strive to follow Jesus in this “third way”: neither returning evil for evil nor caving in to it. Our God does not hate all the same people we do, nor does our God particularly want us to be rich or admired. Our faith, frail as it is sometimes, is also flexible. It is self-correcting as we have profound encounters with people who are different from us and are exposed to new experiences and ideas. If we are willing to be humble, we can continuously root out our own biases, the weeds of white supremacy that are deeply seeded into the soil of our culture, religion, and country.
Staying in the liminal place of holy uncertainty is deeply uncomfortable. But certainty in the life of faith doesn’t serve us well.
Reference:
Molly Phinney Baskette, How to Begin When Your World Is Ending: A Spiritual Field Guide to Joy Despite Everything (Broadleaf Books, 2022), 113–114.
Image credit and inspiration: Bud Helisson, untitled (detail), 2021, photo, Brazil, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. The lenses symbolize how our inherent biases—like favoring what confirms what we already believe or seeing only those like ourselves—can cloud our vision, reminding us that true clarity comes from looking again and being willing to see differently.
