My humanity is bound up in yours,

for we can only be human together.

~Desmond Tutu

I dive into a mystery greater than myself….

inquiry for today~ tell yourself what you need to hear…

considered hope….

“To be a heretic today is almost a human obligation,” Jane Ellen Harrison declared from the peak of her thoroughly heretical life. She loved a woman a generation younger than her, loved a world millennia older than hers, loved ideas epochs ahead of her time. Virginia Woolf was taken by “her superb high thinking agnostic ways.” In the nascent evolutionary theory, which Harrison she insisted every thinking person should read, she saw a lens on the human soul and its constellation in societies, saw “how the whole of animal life sets towards the making of the individual, and yet how the individual never is, never can be, complete,” saw how science and spirituality both reach for that “invisible prepotent force on which and through which we can possibly act, with which we are in some way connected.” She believed in the power of collective consciousness and equally in “the value of each individual manifestation of life,” and above all in the merging of the two in “the strange new joy, and even ecstasy, that comes of human sympathy.”

She cherished the “inward and abiding patience” of science, its “gentleness” in understanding the true timescales of change, how long it takes to uproot an invasive untruth from the garden of culture. Religion she regarded as a “necessary step in the evolution of human thought,” but she detested its dogmas — its “net of illusive clarity cast over life and its realities,” the way its doctrines “distract attention from that divinity which is ourselves.” She sought to understand the need for it: “Man,” she wrote when we were all men, “feels and acts, and out of his feeling and action, projected into his con­fused thinking, he develops a god.” Her god was not our maker but our making, not a pacifier for the lonely confusion of being a self but a clarifying force for the cosmos of connection between us and everything that is — that recognition of universal consciousness she believed not only is “the new religion for which the world wait” but “already is, if unconsciously, our religion.” She insisted that in order to attain “real freedom and full individual life, life based on sympathy and mutual interdependence,” we must place this recognition at the center of our institutions. “Repression, vengeance, disunion, are the keynotes of our old disastrous system,” she warned in the first year of the world’s first global war, urging us to take “a step, and a big one, out of the prison of self.”

~Maria Popova