LIVING AS APPRENTICES

Here’s a conscience-pricking comment from Wendell Berry.

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward the world—to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it. (From The Art of the Commonplace)

It makes me think of Richard Rohr’s statement that

“we all take our own pattern of thinking as normative, logical, and surely true even when it does not fully compute. . . .”Stinking thinking” is the universal addiction. Substance addictions like alcohol and drugs are merely the most visible form of addiction, but actually we are all addicted to our own habitual way of doing anything, our own defenses, and most especially, our patterned way of thinking or how we process reality.”  (From Breathing Under Water, Spirituality and the Twelve Steps)