There are two ways to be spiritually secure: one is to attach to a fixed and uncomplicated teaching, leadership, and set of moral standards. Another is to be open to life, ever deepening your understanding and giving up all defensiveness around convictions. The first way offers only the illusion of certainty, an illusion that must be maintained by anxious inflexibility. The second is to live from a deeper source, with values that cannot be codified in a list of rules. Central among these values is love, understood as profound respect for others.
Writing in the sand, p.xvi
I am drawn and challenged by these words because as I stand aloof as an on-looker at my own faith, the tradition I am a part of, I see these two tensions exist in futile revelry. Not only do I straddle both these opposing worldviews and philosophies in my working context, I have also colluded with both like a harlot, guilty myself of the illusion it evoked until my reality and the 'shit that happens' rocked me into the reality of failure and rejection. And at that point of isolated vulnerability, it is the latter that has been the most accepting, restorative and the most honest option for me to pursue as a new deeper experience.
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