Consistencies

I met a couple about 55 years ago when I was working in Rocky Mountain National Park. What stuck with me for all these years was their statement, “We’ve been coming here for 40 years.”

I really love the park and think it’s a great place to visit, but I couldn’t understand how someone could do the same thing for so many years. They went on to tell me they always stayed in the same place and ate at the same restaurants. They were really proud of their consistency.

There are lots of folks who love consistency, who yearn for absolutes. They’re more comfortable with certainties in life than with ambiguity. I suppose if their favorite hotel or restaurant closed, it could have possibly ruined their vacation.

The same attitude can be found in many aspects of life. Some folks like to have theme Christmas trees with solid complimentary decorations. They don’t care for the chaos of trees with a variety of decorations and multicolored lights. I assume those folks are also severely disturbed at any challenges to their accustomed way of thinking. That probably also applies to their politics, religion, even the sciences.

The trouble with rigid systematic approaches to life is that people are, by nature, not prone to conformity. What works for me doesn’t, necessarily, work for someone else. Some are far more comfortable with chaos than strict order. It makes me uncomfortable when I’m told things must be a certain way. It makes other folks nervous if alternative ways of thinking are proposed.

We each have experiences which color how we view things. If, for example, someone is raised in a family with a different religion, with a different economic situation, with a different cultural heritage we cannot, logically, expect them to arrive at the same conclusions about how society should function. The reality is, even brothers and sisters who have been technically raised in an identical situation often have different reactions to events and ideas about how to live. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness varies even among siblings.

The severe divisiveness in our society today, particularly in politics and religion, can be reduced to the dialectic of order and disorder. Those who yearn for order, for how things used to be, are uncomfortable with the demands of those disadvantaged by that same order in their experience. Many, for example, believe we should absolutely take the side of law enforcement in every situation whereas others who have experienced injustice at the hands of authorities are far less willing to simply accept that viewpoint.

For many people theology must, as an article of faith, be systematic, to adhere to orderly, rational, and coherent beliefs and doctrine. For those folks who are more comfortable with a less rigid belief system such a systematic approach doesn’t make sense.

The challenge we all face is how to achieve acceptance that those with a different point of view aren’t climbing a different mountain, they’re simply following a different path.