An Argument for Transcendence

Over the next couple of weeks I'll reveal my arguments for hope and the power of love in a series of letters to my niece. This stems from my conception of an assignment at university for a class on ethics. As I struggle to understand various reasons for sustainability, unsustainable behaviors and attitudes, war, conflict, and peace and to understand my fellow human, I cannot rid myself of my eternal optimism. I've been accused more times than I can count in my adult life of being "unrealistic", as though only a pessimist sees the down side of life and that a pessimistic view is a "realistic" view. But in this series of letters to my niece, I will argue that transcendence of the human spirit is the hope for our future and for future generations.

We'll discuss issues such as freedom, love, fear, language, meaning, happiness, justification, rationalization, realism, destruction, civil disobedience, authority, ethics, and hope. I hope you'll join me in this search for understanding, as imperfect...or even unrealistic as it may be. This is my manifesto, so to speak, though I do not claim that it is complete. As Erich Fromm (1941) wrote in his foreward to Escape from Freedom, sometimes we must offer whatever we have to contribute to our collective understanding of our modern crises, even if we "must sacrifice the desideratum of completeness"(vii). I suspect that some ideas will blossom and thrive and take deeper root as their meanings become clearer, and some ideas will fall to the wayside with disuse. This is my struggle to grasp the purpose of man in the context of the greater universe and across time.

Many of my ideas spring from the soil of my own upbringing, my assumptions based on a belief in a Creator. Like Erich Fromm, Martin Luther King, Jr, the Mahatma Gandhi, Viktor Frankl, C.S. Lewis, Madeleine L'Engle, Francis Schaeffer and so many other inspirational voices from the past, I believe that humanity faces critical choices in the path which lies before us. 

How we choose will impact the viability of the human soul, the planet, and the greater universe for future generations. I do not say "will determine the viability", because I do not believe that our destiny is predetermined or set in stone. At every point in the continuum of humanity we are faced with choice and will continue to make choices which will impact the future. I do, however, believe that we were made for "greater stuff", that we were destined (though not in a predetermined sense) for something more transcendent than destruction and war and revenge and hatred.

I welcome your comments and ideas. I hope that you will challenge my imperfect reasonings and that, in a spirit of humility and grace, we may open a dialogue which may shed greater light on our own shared humanity in all of its sublimity and in all of its meanness.