My education in the day schools at Six Nations was standard Western education with either/or ways of thinking. I excelled in this education. My sister even called me, “Mr. Science.” She said this sarcastically. She also said of me, “Mr. Nice Guy he is not.” I may have been right, but I guess I was not nice about it.

“The western mind is highly trained in rational, dualistic thinking, a lineage that traces itself all the way back to the ancient Greeks. Dualistic thinking is about comparison, differentiation, and splitting apart; in essence, it views the world as either this or that. It is an extremely important quality—one that underlies modern science and all the awesome, life-enhancing discoveries it has bequeathed us. But dualistic thinking is not the only way to make sense of the world. And when it is applied to everything, we tend to run into problems.” (The Growth Equation, A New Way of Thinking)

I ran into problems! Relationship problems! If you hit your head against the wall often enough you might stop and figure out how not to do that. I have been on a lifelong journey to re-learn another way of thinking, that of both/and. Instead of asking myself either/or questions I began to think of the both/and realities I was facing. This is the both/and thinking of my Cayuga home and my Haudenosaunee community of Six Nations. Our people call this the Good Mind.

Jesus’ disciples asked him an either/or question in John 9:1-3, but he gave a both/and response.

As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.

His disciples wanted to know who to blame for blindness, the blind man or his parents, and Jesus said neither. Eugene Peterson, in his dynamic paraphrase says Jesus answered them, “You’re asking the wrong question. You’re looking for someone to blame. There is no such cause-effect here. Look instead for what God can do.”

It was not the parent’s fault. It was not the child’s fault. God demonstrated his goodness in healing the from-birth blindness. There was no need to argue but only to receive and enjoy the goodness of God. Sometimes our either/or thinking wants to assign blame and live in a black and white world of judgment. That sounds like a simple world with easy answers but the reality of our world requires us to think much more deeply.

I wrote a poem that expresses my feeling about the nuances of real life:

There ain't too much I know 

Even though I'm long in the tooth

I used to know it all

I was much older then

I'm younger than that now

Thank you Bob Dylan

For grabbing those words

From my mind here in the future

 

There's only one thing I am sure of

Love wins indeed

Love wins always did

Love wins in the end

Love wins I'm sure now

Love wins no matter what

Love wins hands down

There's only one thing I care about

“God so loved the cosmos that He gave his only Son that whoever believes in him would not be destroyed but would have eternal life.” John 3:16 my paraphrase. This is the one thing that I know when I am faced with so many things that I just don’t know what to do with. God’s love in Jesus to me is what finally matters!

Photo by Alice Yamamura on Unsplash