same difference

The creation of the heavens and the earth, and the diversity of your languages and of your colours are many wonders for those who reflect.
---Q:30:22

May our love not be centered upon ourselves! May this love not incite us to love only those who are like us or to espouse ideas that are similar to our own! To only love that which resembles us is to love oneself; that is not how to love.
---Tierno Bokar.

He who only sees ratio only sees himself.
---William Blake.

It is important to find one's own space (not to 'own' space), to find one's name, but it is equally important to find the right direction and pace; there's a skill in that...working with time and not against it (and for that one surely needs a sense of the timeless?).

There are many things that cannot and should not be said, spoken of. Stop, look, listen. Look both ways. But there are many beautiful, wondrous things, many different types of good-and beauty always shines through.

Every direction you find is chosen by you or chosen for you. The line between is incredible. Some stars are constant, others less so. Each lives in relation to another.

~~~

This is a tough one. On the one hand there is, at the political level, respect for difference, the uttermost need to respect the individuality of the person in all their uniqueness. Religiously, too, the notion that you can or should view other people and traditions through the lens of your own particular perspective, as if everything could be reduced to the terms of your own self-understanding is the door to fanaticism. What place, then, for mystery,for uniqueness, for 'unknowingness'? Is there not a kind of violence involved in (or implied in) looking at the world and other people in only one way? You must do as we do, or else..., the domestication of the exotic.

And Bokar...are these not startling words that shake you from any preconceived ideas?

On the other hand, though, is there the possibility, at the political level, of marking people off as radically different in order to dispose of them or, less extremely, to deny them certain rights? Is the idea of 'sameness' the same as 'universalism'? To see someone as fundamentally the same as you, with the same rights, the same aspirations, the same loves and failings...isn't that the meaning of the Enlightenment project (a project that has such a bad name nowadays)? How to be attentive to difference whilst at the same time affirming one's shared roots ('unity in diversity'...tawhid). Simone Weil: rights and obligations.

Bokar: This is where you stumble. What do we love if not ourselves! How do we see if not through our own eyes? Do we seek contact with some radical other or do we seek ourselves in the other, the other in ourselves. Mirrors. Tarkovsky.

This love of home, the nostalgia for it, for 'coming home'. Does it not exclude too much? The narrowness, hierarchy and conservatism of 'home'. And yet, it was always here. Mystery is not to be sought outside our human lives. Why are our images of God always human? (Thoba! So much for Muslim sensibilities!). But no, even here, the 'attributes'. We talk of God's 'hands' (if not his eyebrows).

What do we seek? We. Not 'I'. Not 'the other' as some vague, non-specific being, but a person. A reflection, not a projection, of ourselves.And to be reflected in turn. To be on the same wavelength means what, exactly? Is this image of 'brokeness' and completeness, that has been with us since God knows when, the story of our lives?