Beyond Mendacity

The Sermon of the Mouse

Erudition comes in pieces, in the form of facts, theories, and formulas. Education comes whole out the total experience of living. We are not what we have been formally taught, rather what we have learned from the whole of the world.

And it is not simply a matter of "nature or nurture." Those two are the same. Our societies nurture us, but they do so by the means their nature affords them. If some of us are born ill-equipped to function so-called "normally" in the world, what difference would that make if the world into which we are born were a nurturing place.

The great moralists teach us, but they do not make us. The great religions may save us from "certain kinds of fear," but they cannot save us from the comforting forces of hypocrisy.

But then . . .

How is it that we encounter the occasional saint? How is it that men like Ghandi come to be born into a world like the world that eventually killed him? How is it that so much goodness emerges in a world constantly at war?

Perhaps the answer lies in private places of the soul. Perhaps as the poet Rilke suggested, not exactly in these words, there is in all wild things the shadow of goodness. That's hard to believe, but how else explain the miracles.

The cynic in me says the shadow Rilke sensed was only his personal pain seeking relief in a wish.

But so what, my nobler angels cry, the wish is the father of the dream, and the dream the mother of a new beginning.

We dream, therefore we are.