Master of Religion

David Hansen – Response to Chapter 3

            While listening to someone talk in a local store I overheard them saying some of the most ignorant things I had heard in quite some time. It was not simply offensive, which it was, but the thoughts being expressed were blatantly wrong in a factual way. Their history was wrong and they were spouting the inaccuracies as if they were gospel truth. I found myself growing red with anger when I thought back to the past lesions from my course work. I had a revelation: I was getting mad not because of how wrong the person was in their information but that I kept say, “I can’t believe people think this.” I was angry at the difference between the way I would want things to be and the way things actually are; as T. S. Eliot put it:

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

            Is it possible that part of my conscious mind remembers aspects of the higher being and, seeing the differences, creates internal conflict? Could the destructive aspects which inhibit our ability to love born from these two states of being? If this is true I will need to work on my ability to serenely accept the world as it is while striving to make it the way I would wish it to be. I can not change everything around me; I must content myself with my effort to change that which I can. The anger born from the struggle will only inhibit my ability to make positive changes and will keep me from being an example of change for others.

            Am I on the right path, do you think?

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