Lenten Day Thirty-three: Hamlet

I love this quotation, and leave it to Shakespeare to have written it.  I can still recall the very first time I read Hamlet and stopped cold at this line uttered by Hamlet to his dearest friend.  Yes, yes, yes!  I went on to teach Hamlet in Freshman College English, probably about twenty times, and though the play began to get old, this line never did.  We do not know everything! I need to repeat this: I do not know everything. I find it particularly striking and meaningful during these current times.

We seem to live in a culture where “truth” is whatever a particular person decides to believe, and that truth has to be embraced by everyone else.  If we reject another’s truth, then we are wrong, or ridiculed, shamed, or damned.  Imagining or thinking beyond and outside the box is frowned on, even feared, if the current book-banning craze is any indication.  Some believe their mission is to protect children from using their God-given brains to think critically, to explore other concepts, to be exposed to ideas different from their own.  Why?  Because they are afraid that their children might find a truth different from their own.

A minister once told me that “if you come across someone who says they know the truth, run.”  That’s another quotation to add to my cards.  How unfortunate it must be to live inside a sealed box of personal truth, to think you’ve finally finished the journey, that you are “there,” that there is nothing else to learn, experience, or explore.  Life is mysterious.  God is mysterious.  This universe is mysterious.  When does life actually begin?  How many other universes exist?  Are we the only human life forms?  Is there really an afterlife?  Why do good things happen to bad people?  Why am I here?  Why are you?  We don’t understand everything because we cannot understand everything.  We are not God. We are not the Truth. “For now,” as the apostle Paul wrote, “we see through a glass dimly . . . we only know in part” (1 Cor. 13:12).  It takes humility to say, “I just don’t know,” but in that humility we open ourselves to wonder and possibility.

Writing this brings to mind a poster I once saw that said, “Jesus came to take away our sins, not our minds.”  We’ve been given minds to think, ponder, meditate, imagine, praise.  We lose all of that when we make our own little philosophies our own truths.

Blessings ~ Rosemary