More on Making Sense

[ This is a continuation of the last post on “meaning making” from the work-in-progress The Skeptical Believer. See my previous post. ]

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The messiness of sense-making has certain implications for any thought-filled person, including the skeptical believer. They include the following.

Humility and sympathy. Because the sense-making process has more pot holes than a Minnesota road in spring time, arrogance about what one believes is a form of foolishness. I respect every person of good will who is trying to understand the world and to live justly. I sympathize with anyone trying as hard as I am to make sense of things. I not only respect them, I want to learn something from them. That doesn’t mean I want to trade my understanding of the world for theirs, but it does mean I am open to the possibility that they know something I need to know. Humility will lessen the chances of my becoming a Smoke Blower.

Risk and Commitment. Commitment is not, as some would have you believe, incompatible with intellectual humility. Humility does not necessitate relativity. It is, in fact, the very messiness and imprecision of sense-making that renders commitment crucial. If all it took were intelligence and reason to arrive at the meaning of life and a knowledge of how to live, then all intelligent and reasonable people would arrive at the similar positions and no great “commitment” would be necessary.

Simple observation teaches us that this is not the case. Equally intelligent people equally committed to being reasonable arrive at wildly different conclusions about almost everything. Reason itself tells us that a lifetime of floating without ever committing to anything important is a form of irrationality and not conducive to either happiness or meaning. Given that the sense-making process cannot rightfully promise certainty, it is sensible to make commitments, including to risky belief, rather than wait for a no-risk final answer that neither reason or anything else can ever produce.

Community and listening. No one can make sense of things all alone. Like it or not, we are in this sense and meaning-making adventure with everyone else. Personally, I like it. I have never had a completely new thought and I never will. I owe someone else for everything I think, even if my own exact configuration is unique. Countless people before me spent their lives trying to do what I am trying, and they left an endless variety of records of their efforts: stories, music, paintings (some in caves), dances, weavings, letters, sermons, songs, books, buildings, machines, poems, prayers, protests, manifestoes, benedictions, and on and on. All of them have something to teach me, a few by negative example.

Diversity. Because there are so many ways of making sense of things, and none of them is adequate alone, it is sensible to expose oneself to many ways of understanding. People who limit themselves to reason are not being reasonable. People who limit themselves to the scientific method are not being scientific (ought not one’s experiments in life go beyond the lab or the equation?) People who limits themselves to imagined worlds will miss exciting things in this tangible one.

Perseverance. Because sense and meaning does not come easily, we do well to cultivate the virtue of perseverance. Neither life nor God yields easily to human understanding. At age eight, after learning to read and years of Sunday school, I thought I knew the important questions and the important answers. At age fifteen I still thought I knew most of the questions, but I knew I didn’t have all the answers. By age twenty-two I knew I would never know all the questions, much less all the answers—and it bothered me. The main difference now? It doesn’t bother me much.

Which isn’t to say I’ve given up. I’m not a Pilate who asks “What is truth?” with a bit of a sneer. I am as hungry for an answer to that question as when I was twenty and as willing to listen. It’s just that I believe now that the question is likely to be answered in many different ways, that the answer is less likely to be one enormous assertion and more likely to be a mosaic of many little answers, each hard won, each subject to revision, many contributed from unlooked for places. I can, of course, formulate big assertions—about God and man, about time and eternity, about good and evil—but the truth of those assertions will only be meaningful in the living of them, in the unimpressive details of my life and yours. I need, like Paul, to learn to run the race, even when I am tired, even when it looks like I’m losing, even when it looks like there is still a long way to go. When making sense of things, I need perseverance.