Searching for Truth in a Fragmented Age
Despite all of the media available to us today, searching for the truth within the mess of all of it can be difficult. That's why Rambling Spirit tries to distill all of the information out there into one big picture.
Rambling Spirit is more than just books, a blog and a magazine. It is a tool for navigating the search for truth, goodness, and beauty in a fragmented world. That's the thematic continuity running through everything here.
The truth is not an obscure concept. It is the incarnate word of God, and God is reality. So, the truth is the way to understand reality. Without the acceptance of universal truth, the reality around us becomes abstract and less real, in fact unreal. When the truth is not in our hearts, we try to manipulate reality to our liking.
But the truth is also more than reality because God exists beyond reality. It doesn't contain him. Rambling Spirit has tried to capture this mysterious, elusive aspect of the truth. The truth is so much more than we can observe with our senses. That is what makes the search for it so alluring, so wondrous. The truth can be known, but we usually don't know it as well as we think we do. What we need is the humility to accept that, not a philosophy of relativism that says truth doesn't exist.
The fragmented age we live in doesn't help with our search for truth. Excessive specializations have made it difficult to see the big picture. When we don't see the big picture, we don't see how everything is part of one cohesive reality. Seeing the big picture makes it hard to believe in your own version of the truth, because you know such a truth cannot exist if it is incompatible with the big picture you see. Thus, claiming everyone can have their own truth is not open-minded. Such a claim is ignorant of the coherent reality all around us.
But, we can spend our entire careers focusing on one specialized profession. It can sustain us financially and give us a strong sense of fulfillment. All of that is good, but it's important to find ways to connect our specialization to other specializations. Doing so will help us see how all truths intertwine. When we see how they intertwine, we get a clearer view of the beautiful big picture of the full truth God has made for us.
A common example of this is language. I can study English my entire life and never learn another language. But, say one day I decide to try and learn Spanish---I mean really dive into it as a passion and hobby. Then I start to see all the cognates shared between the languages, I start to see the common roots between many of the words. The more I study it, the more I see that the two languages aren't just connected in many ways; they're part of a huge coherent network of languages that all share similar concepts and roots.
If this is true for languages, it must also be true for the sciences, history, the arts, religion and everything else. It's all connected in the amazing web of truth. When the saints talk about the beatific vision, or about seeing the face of God, I believe this coherent and harmonious oneness is what they have in mind. When Christian artists make mosaics, forming an image from various different colors and materials, they are portraying this profound harmony that exists within our diverse reality.
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