This I believe.

This week, we had a community/spirituality night entitled "This I Believe," based on the NPR radio series and the couple books out by the same title. As the introduction to the book says, "This I Believe offers a simple, if difficult invitation: Write a few hundred words expressing the core principles that guide your life -- your personal credo. ... This I Believe is an exercise in philosophical self-examination in a public context. It rises from the grass roots, where people can begin to listen to each other, one at a time." So we each wrote a short essay and read them out loud to each other, one at a time. The task was more difficult than I thought it would be, and I wish I had taken more time to complete my short essay (I wrote it at the end of a long work day, forgot to print it out or email it, then re-wrote it quickly when I got home), but here's what I came up with...

I doubt myself pretty frequently -- my decisions, my plans, my work, my views. Hell, just reading a well-written philosophical piece can temporarily unravel what I consider to be my firmly held beliefs. But I consistently believe in the value of two things: learning and giving. In learning about others, I learn, too, about myself. I seek to understand -- to understand what makes me who I am, you who you are, and them who they are. And in learning about people, I recognize our similarity and equality. I see that we are equal genders, races, ethnicities, cultures, sexual orientations, people. I see that we are uniquely gifted and flawed, myself included, and that these flaws unite us in humble humanity. 

And what's more, as I learn about the world we as people inhabit, I am inevitably drawn to the grandeur of a divine Creator. There are few things more beautiful to me than the mysteries and phenomena of biology -- the ever-turning circle of life, to be sure, but also the intricate turnings of the citric acid cycle, the blob-like-yet-perfectly-folded shape of a protein, the leap from electro-chemical nerve synapses to consciousness. When I marvel at these processes, I turn to God in humility, confusion and adoration. Learning makes me a better person. This I believe. I seek to learn and to marvel always, and to never close my mind to the possibility that I am completely and utterly wrong.

I believe just as assuredly in giving. After all, how can I respond to God's overflowing love in any other way than to be generous with my own love? In giving myself and my love to others -- family, friends and strangers -- I encounter the divine reality of relationship: that we are all a connected community of beings. In service, I encounter God, for it is in loving the unloved that I can most readily mimic God's example and that I can most faithfully bring about the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. I believe that we can be the best versions of ourselves when we are giving that self away. Because in its essence, "giving" is not just a one-way process; in being present to one another, we become connected. I believe that in the balance of grasping versus sharing, it is sharing that will bring us peace and justice. I believe in giving. I hope that in my life, I will share rather than grasp, and give rather than keep.

I choose to invest my life, and my love, in learning and giving. In so doing, I will be reminded during my times of doubt and questioning of the goodness of God and the beauty of human connection.