I am reading a book about secret ancient mysteries and at the same time I am working with a group that has monthly meetings. I have found something in common that causes challenges with both. They take simple ideas and make them complicated.
In the group I work with they will take a simple idea and over complicate it to the point where the main idea because muddled. The first principle I learned when I became a teacher was if you want to teach, you have to have an objective that explains what you want to teach. And just like in the movies, it has to be as simple as possible.
If I want to teach addition, I don’t want to write the objective that I want to teach the concept of addition because that is a complex idea. I want to break it down to the simplest idea. I want to teach my students to add single digit numbers through memorization of some common addition tables for the numbers 1 through 5. That is an achievable specific simple objective. I can take it a step further and say that I will know that my students have achieved the objective by adding a set of 10 single digit number containing the set of problems unique to addition tables with a 90% accuracy rate. Anything else would be too challenging to figure out.
Walking into a room just saying I want to teach addition is meaningless because you don’t know what type of addition, you don’t know what addition rules are being taught, and you don’t know how to judge if the students learned what was taught.
If someone is presenting an idea to others, the same principles apply. The presenter needs to know what the idea is, what criteria are being used to explain the idea, and have a way to judge if the audience understood.
I feel that’s the same problem with philosophy and religion. Everyone wants to complicate it so much. They create all these rules and criteria for what life really means. The secrets of the ages are filled with symbolism, and it is fascinating, but very complicated.
For me, I want to believe that it’s much simpler than all that. God is. He exists in a plane that is beyond our understanding that transcends our values and judgements. We decide that things are good or evil. People are male or female. Emotions are positive or negative. God exists in a state of transcendence where all of that is one, where good and evil are the same, male and female don’t matter, positive and negative are one in the same just like the yin and yang symbol. Everything that we believe we know is completely right and completely wrong. The only thing that I know for certain is God is. It’s the only thing I need to know. Everything else is just the stuff of humans.
I have accepted the Christian teaching because I believe that God’s plan for me is that teaching. Not because it is correct, but because it is His way for me personally. I believe that I should hold God above all others and that He commands that I love others as I would love myself. I have had faith in God all my life and I will continue on this path for the rest of my life hoping not that Christianity is right and that I will die and go to Heaven, but that this path will lead me to live my life in such a way that I will find greater communion with God, greater gratitude for my life, and greater love throughout my lifetime. Whatever happens after that, I can leave in God’s hands.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
