Daily Reading, May 24
Whatever name we may choose—the time between, the threshold, the pause—it is by naming it that we honor it and thereby honor change, movement, difference. When a book recently appeared in England written by the Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, it was significantly given the title The Dignity of Difference. In it Sacks wrote:
Truth on earth is not, nor can it aspire to be, the whole truth. . . . God is greater than religion. . . . Can I recognize God’s image in someone who is not in my image, whose language, faith, ideals are different from mine? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his.
The first step in listening, learning, and changing is to see that different is not dangerous; the second is to be happy and willing to live with uncertainty; the third is to rejoice in ambiguity and to embrace it. It all means giving up the comfort of certainty and realizing that uncertainty can actually be good.
From To Pause at the Threshold: Reflections on Living on the Border by Esther de Waal. © 2001. Used by permission of Morehouse Publishing, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. www.morehousepublishing.com