quote of the week

“I believe that the major challenge today is to stay with the uncertainty, the chaos and confusion, and not to want or expect firm answers, complete systems, or clear models. We must attempt to explore our own confusion, examine it, and not rush back to the past for a bygone order, nor move sideways to completely embrace (in often uncritical or romantic ways) the religious systems of other cultures. We have to learn to remain in the present with an attitude of what Keats called ‘negative capability’, which is the ability to be in doubts, uncertainties and mysteries without any irritable search after fact or reason. We live in ‘interesting times’ and the temptation is always to wish that things were otherwise, that life were simpler, more basic, with less tension. These times require a certain courage or openness since we are forced to live on the wild side, to questions and doubt so much, to walk over the rubble of the past while at the same time encountering the raw and informed energies that will become the archetypal foundations of a future world-view. We owe it to the future to ensure that culture moves forward in an authentic manner, and that the ‘solutions’ discovered for our spiritual crisis are not spurious or false.”

– David J Tacey (Edge of the Sacred, published by Harper Collins, 1995, pages 195-6)