I came across this quote today as I was reading Karen Armstrong’s latest book 12 Steps to A Compassionate Life. In it she writes, “Religion is at its best when it helps us to ask questions and holds us in state of wonder and at its worst when it tries to answer them authoritively or dogmatically.”
I find her observation refreshing and reassuring because I have far more questions and far less certainty today than I did 20 years ago. And, it is not the doctrine or the dogma that hold my faith together now, but things like gratitude and grace and forgiveness and awe.
I can’t believe I am the only one who experiences faith that way.
Or, experiences that which we know and name as God that way.
Maybe the way forward for all of us in this wonderful, crazy, sometimes awful, often awesome world is less about thinking the same way or believing the same thing and more about all of us learning to take a step back and to look at it all and to look at each other and simply say “Thank you.”
What do you think?
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