"The knock"

I was thinking to myself and then there came a knock and I wondered if it was made on a door. I wondered thinking upon the sound that I heard there and picturing a door of substantial importance that was being knocked on. What if a very important door exists I then wondered as the tap sounded again. Doors do not offer just passage into the ordinary places alone though, do they, but perhaps they offer a way to somewhere else I considered now. I wondered If such a way to somewhere other then here could be possible. 

if that door could be opened and I could find safe passage inside was going through it's passage going to reveal more then I thought was really possible. The thought made me pause and think. I then heard the knock again realizing it was someone coming back here into this very old world. I then wondered to myself why on Earth would they come back here. 

There were many things I wondered about on that day, but this, the knocking, the other place where it came from, stood out in my mind. 

Hope, I then thought later on, was akin to trust and a confident expectation. Contrasting to that kind of hope at the entrance to Dante's fictional Hell were his writings where the words read, "Lay down all hope, you that go in by me".

 

I picked up the Bible impulsively next and it said “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”  Elsewhere in this book I read “For in this hope we were saved; but hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he can already see?” Again elsewhere“For we walk by faith, not by sight.”

 

Finally I read the following passages and really began to think about them.

 

“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

 

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

 

One contemporary philosopher I then read next understands hope to be more than goal setting, rather as a metanarrative, a story that serves as a promise or reason for expecting a better future.

 

I then read on that he was a postmodernist and believed past meta–narratives, including the Christian story, utilitarianism, and Marxism have proved false hopes and that theory itself cannot offer social hope. He thought that liberal man must learn to live without a consensual theory of social hope.

 

Turning once again to another philosopher he noted that when hope comes into its own is when crisis looms, opening us up to new creative possibilities. With great need comes an unusually wide range of ideas, as well as such positive emotions as happiness and joy, courage, and empowerment.

 

I then began to wonder if we should let anyone tell us "what the truth is?" Why should we trust in these interpreters interpretive capabilities to know the final truth? Why do we, us vulnerable and impressionable minds, seek out the council of others often more learned? We often, it seems, look to them not just for information to shape are awareness of the world but to set answers of our existence in stone for us. In that extra learning of theirs perhaps there just ends up being another way to be more persuasive in delivering theories of really what is the utterly unknown and perhaps ultimately the unknowable.

 

When we hear their speech do we find rest and reassurance in trusting in their ideas? The answers we seek ,after all, might very well be the kind of answers that generally align to what we already knew and what we previously had supported. They are ideas therefore that were part of what we previously had wanted to be true. We therefore

 wanted to rest in that known interpretation of life’s meaning and to have these familiar ideas then drown out all other objections is it fair to say?

 

Is in the pursuit of the truth what is inspired in us a desire to form a position or belief on the truth? That looking for belief ends up being our theory of life’s meaning. Then we hold to our belief while sorting through the other flocks of human beings in the world by making categorical distinctions?

 

But then we in this self guided way separate those like us from those not like us. When we size up the outsiders, do we judge them, and then perhaps do we have the potential to lose sight of them?

 

If we judge then is it not true then that we cannot , in many of us, see the other people’s hopes, dreams, or individual struggles humanely. We may not be able to even empathize or condone or except their very different understandings of "the truth."

 

But what is truth? The rumor that truth comes honestly and fairly to us with universal equality with all people capable of discovering it is just a gross distorted rumor isn’t it? Is the possibility in discovering the truth merely hear say that is passing amid the vulnerable masses. These desperados, us poor people, are the sad interpreters of life who are almost always ill-equipped to know our surroundings accurately. Are simplistic people prepared to hold a license powerful enough to judge their fellow man and know certainly all of humanities only hope in this world?

 

Isn’t truth as hidden and hard to identify as is meaning and what lies beyond us? Aren’t we left to merely take guesses and often wild guesses they end up often being? The unknown doesn’t it haunt us in this way?

 

If we all conformed to a literalist reading of the Holy Bible and there were no scientists or people asking other questions I’d be worried about our self-awareness. Alternatively if there were no group of people studiously examining Jesus sermons and searching for a transcending reality through them I’d be equally distressed since all of this is life business is up in the air. The unknown hides itself from us.