Quotes from Esther Lightcap Meek

They bound themselves covenantally to the yet-to-be-known, in their growing expertise, to invite its gracious disclosure of deeper meaning. They bound themselves to that as-yet-unknown reality in taking up such a journey. What they actually found surprisingly transformed their half-understood inquiries as reality swept in and swept them up.

Covenantally binding ourselves (behaving!) includes commitment to the as-yet undiscovered reality, love, patience, humility, listening beyond our previously conceived categories, personal openness, and embracing with hope the half-understood promise of the real, to the end of communion and . . . friendship. All knowing is, at least paradigmatically, knowing whom.

Philosophy is difficult, like looking directly at the tip of your nose is difficult! We rely in every act of knowing on foundational philosophical beliefs.

A pilgrimage of knowing can be a journey of course corrections.

Insight isn't informational; it is transformational. It is a knowing event. A change transpires. Understanding this distinction makes a big difference to all our knowing ventures. The moment of insight transforms the knower, the known, and the knowing.

And what indwelling looks like is this: relying on clues "subsidiarily" to shape a complex focal pattern.

The key to success in temporary analysis is twofold. First: we must remember it is temporary. Focal analysis is not knowledge. Successfully returning to subsidiary indwelling to looking from our practices and skills and analyses to their meaningful integrative bearing on the world—that is knowing.

And I shared with all Westerners a Greek heritage: If ancient Greece was the cradle of Western civilization, I think it fair to say that skepticism was the blanket the baby came wrapped in. How can we be sure we know anything at all?2 It

A major reason, I believe, is this: It does not sit comfortably with a person to affirm, and try to live, the claim that we have access to no objective (outside of myself) truth. People are implicitly aware that this claim calls for as much justification as the claim that we do have access to objective truth.

We tend to think knowledge is information, facts, bits of data, "content," true statements—true statements justified by other true statements. And while this isn't exactly false, we tend to have a vision of knowledge as being only this. We conclude that gaining knowledge is collecting information—and we're done—educated, trained, expert, certain.

We are epistemological beings: we live out an orientation to knowing, whether we "know" it or not.

I have come to believe we should think of knower and known as persons in relationship, where knowing is the relationship. This relationship has covenantal dimensions. By that I mean that the knower pledges her- or himself to the yet-to-be-known, the way a groom pledges himself to a bride.

What's more, in this view, we ourselves are not God; we are creaturely knowers. Our glory as humans is to know from a particular place and orientation, to journey toward what we do not yet know. Always we are on the way. We are on the way with respect to knowing God as well as knowing our world. We understand partially. We know as we give ourselves and as we are known.

Knowing is a pilgrimage. It requires taking personal responsibility, born of love, to pledge allegiance to what we do not yet know. It requires relying on seemingly opaque guidance to venture into the darkness of half-understanding. We invite its gracious and surprising self-disclosure, seeking to indwell its clues to make sense of a hidden pattern. We risk our forever being changed. It is an adventure.

What we think of the one shapes what we think of the other. If you find that you think there is nothing more to reality than what lab experiments uncover or our eyes see, a little additional thought should show that this claim itself is not the sort of thing that lab experiments could ever uncover or eyes ever see.

But we all have a unique way of seeing and relating to the world, too. We are each utterly distinct persons. Out of our distinct love, we notice distinct aspects of reality, and reality responds to us along the lines of our distinctive care. Also, we all view life from a vantage point at least slightly different from anyone else's. And our experiences and training distinguish us from each other. Yet, as persons, we can share and delight in our differences.

Growing in knowing ourselves in relation to the world and to others means being strategically selective in our personal investments, attending to our own gifts and trusting the diverse gifts of others in our team. It means pledge-like guarding of other commitments we have already assumed.

In presuming that knowledge is a mental activity we tend to think of our body strictly as a mindless container—an object. Of course, we understand that our senses take in information and our brains process it. But we see this as mechanical. We actually think computers might duplicate how humans know.

If one knows, one cares; if one does not care, one does not know.

The well-known biblical story of the Magi who journey to find the Christ child and to bring gifts offers an emblematic story of knowing. They are not called wise men for nothing! nor is it a meaningless accident that we use the word epiphany in referring to a moment of insight. Epiphany is the name of the church season in which we celebrate God's revealing himself to these Gentiles--and to us.