Practicing Civility

SRQ07:The Limits of Tolerance

tomkapostasyLeave a comment

Session SRQ07: The Limits of Tolerance:

Wrestling with Tribalism and Conviction
Total Time: 75 Minutes (40-Minute Lecture/Prayer / 25-Minute Discussion / 10-Minute Videos)

1 Corinthians 12:13

For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

Heavenly Father, thank You that by one Spirit we are all baptized into one body. As we gather for this workshop, help us to embrace our diversity while honoring our unity. Remove our pride, foster respect in our disagreements, and help us to speak with grace, acting as one body in Christ. Amen.

🏛️ Part 1: Managing In-Group Attraction and Tribalism (40 Minutes)

Core Concept: Understanding why humanity chronically loops back into racial, religious, national, and cultural biases, and then blending evolutionary psychology with Reformed theology to build a hopeful case for civility as the ultimate victory of God’s grace.

🕒 0:00–0:17 | Science & Theology in Dialogue

We open with three brief, high-contrast video clips that frame the scientific and spiritual paradox of human progress.

  • Clip 1 and 2  (7 mins): A short pair of explainers on the “Minimal Group Paradigm” (introducing how easily human brains split into “us vs. them” over something as arbitrary as a coin flip or t-shirt color).
  • Clip 3  (2 mins): A brief video showcasing a modern celebration of human cooperation or historic reconciliation (Peaceful disarmament following the end of the cold war.  Recall we have a dozen similar clips in Session 2!)

🎬 How to Facilitate the Video Transition

🗣️ The Leader’s Transition Script

“Look at how low the bar is in that first video. The researcher didn’t divide the students by race, political party, or theology. He divided them over how many beans they guessed were in a jar. And instantly, their brains began allocating more grace, more trust, and more resources to their own ‘bean tribe’ while withholding it from the other. This is the Minimal Group Paradigm in action. It proves that tribalism isn’t a modern political invention—it is deeply ingrained human hardware.]

Gordon Allport’s Contact Hypothesis shows us that the antidote isn’t simply sitting in a room together and arguing over facts. Proximity alone doesn’t heal bias—in fact, unstructured contact can sometimes make it worse. The cure requires four very strict conditions: equal status, a common goal, active institutional support, and shoulder-to-shoulder cooperation.

In our Reformed tradition, we recognize that sin has structural weight—it pulls us back toward the ‘bean jar’ divisions every chance it gets. But Allport’s research gives us the structural blueprint for grace. We don’t think ourselves into a new way of acting; we cooperate ourselves into a new way of seeing.”

🗣️ The Lecture Framing: Why Do We Keep Looping Back?

“For six weeks, we have learned how to look into the mirror. We have diagnosed our personal cognitive biases and our emotional friction points. We’ve practiced pausing, listening, and adjusting. And many of us leave these sessions thinking, ‘I get it now. I can do this.’

But then we step out into the world, look at the news, or walk into a tense public meeting, and we realize that as a society, we keep looping back into the same ancient traps. Racial prejudice, religious supremacy, nationalistic vitriol, and cultural polarization keep roaring back. Why?

  1. What the Scientists Say: The Evolutionary Trap

Modern evolutionary psychologists tell us that humans are fundamentally group-living creatures. For millennia, our physical survival depended entirely on resource pooling, territorial defense, and identifying who was in our tribe versus who was an outsider. [

Our brains developed high-speed cognitive heuristics to instantly categorize people. This is called Parochial Altruism—we are naturally wired to be hyper-cooperative and loving inside our group, and deeply suspicious, cynical, and hostile toward the outgroup. We don’t loop back to tribalism because we are broken computers; we loop back because our biological hardware is doing exactly what it was evolutionarily programmed to do to survive a hostile world.

Jonathan Haidt’s work in The Righteous Mind contains two foundational concepts that provide the scientific explanation for why humans chronically loop back to tribalism. Integrating these two specific insights perfectly anchor the video discussion and bridge the gap into the PCUSA theological framework.

1. The Glitch: “Human Beings are 90% Chimp and 10% Bee”

  • The Concept: Haidt argues that standard evolutionary theory focuses too much on individual competition (the selfish “chimp” side). He introduces the idea of Multi-Level Selection, explaining that humans evolved to compete group-against-group. To do this, we developed a unique psychological ability to become temporary “bees”—meaning we have a hardwired genetic switch that allows us to completely lose our individualism and merge into a hyper-cooperative, defensive hive.
  • Application to the Roadblock: Haidt notes that things like flags, anthems, political rallies, religious rituals, and shared threats are “hive switches.” When the hive switch is flipped, our evolutionary programming takes over: we become fiercely loyal to our swarm and intensely blind, suspicious, or hostile to the neighboring swarm. We loop back to cultural conflicts because our “bee brains” crave the intoxicating feeling of being part of a righteous collective hive.

2. The Trap: “Morality Binds and Blinds”

  • The Concept: This is Haidt’s central evolutionary insight. Our moral matrices were not designed by nature to help us discover objective, universal truth! They were designed to bind us together into teams so we could survive!!! The tragic side effect of this binding is that it simultaneously blinds us to objective reality. The moment we join a moral or political team, we put on ideological blinders that make it structurally impossible to see the validity of the other side’s view.
  • Application to the Roadblock: This explains why “fact-checking” or intellectual arguments fail to stop populist loops. When you attack a political claim, a person doesn’t process it as a logic puzzle; their bee brain processes it as a literal threat to their hive’s survival.

🏛️ Integrating Haidt into the Lecture Script

“If we want to understand why we keep looping back into cultural wars, we have to look at what Jonathan Haidt calls our evolutionary hardware. Haidt writes that human beings are 90% chimp and 10% bee.

Most of the time, we operate like chimps—looking out for our individual lives, families, and careers. But we have a hardwired biological switch inside us: the hive switch. When a cultural issue, a political campaign, or a societal threat flips that switch, our individuality drops away. We become ‘bees’ in a swarm. We merge into a team.

Haidt summarizes the human tragedy with a single phrase: Morality binds and blinds. The very moral intuitions that bind us into a beautiful, loyal community simultaneously blind us to the humanity and validity of the neighboring hive. We loop back to racial, national, and religious biases because swinging a club for our tribe triggers a deep, primitive evolutionary pleasure.

But this is where our Presbyterian theology breaks the loop. John Calvin called the human heart an ‘idol factory’—a theological way of saying our minds are constantly manufacturing false ‘hives’ to worship. In the Reformed tradition, we confess that our earthly tribes—our political parties, our national borders, even our cultural preferences—are not the ultimate hive. Our ultimate loyalty belongs to the Kingdom of God.  Through Christ’s amazing grace, the dividing walls between the hives have been systematically demolished. Civility is the slow, holy work of resisting the urge to swarm, stepping out of our tribal hives, and remembering that the ‘other’ bee is actually our brother or sister.”

2. What the Reformed Tradition Says: Corporate & Structural Sin

As Presbyterians, this scientific reality maps beautifully onto our theological understanding of the world. In the Reformed tradition, we don’t just talk about personal sins—the bad things an individual thinks or does. We talk about Structural Sin and the Noetic Effects of the Fall.

John Calvin reminded us that sin fundamentally corrupted human reason and human desires. When human beings build systems—governments, political parties, media networks, and even churches—those systems inherit our hardwired flaws. Sin gets institutionalized. Therefore, tribal bias isn’t just an individual choice; it is an atmospheric, structural weight that pulls at us constantly. We are fighting an unceasing gravitational pull.

🕒 0:18–0:34 | The Dialogue: Is Civility “Winning” in the End?

Transition the room into a guided, focused discussion utilizing the questions you raised.

❓ Discussion Question 1: Do we have enough evidence of progress to believe Civility wins?

  • The Leader’s Anchor: Yes, because as Christians, our timeline isn’t dictated by the current election cycle or the loudest populist voices on television. Our timeline is anchored in the Kingdom of God.
  • The Progress Evidence: If you look at the long arc of history, human moral circles have expanded dramatically. Ideas that were culturally acceptable two centuries ago—chattel slavery, overt legal segregation, the denial of women’s basic civic agency—have been decisively rejected by the global conscience. The setback loops are real, but they are the death rattles of dying systems, not the final word. In Reformed theology, Christ’s resurrection guarantees that reconciliation and unity have already won the definitive victory over hostility. Civility is simply us learning to live out that future victory in the messy present.

❓ Discussion Question 2: What practical things should we do to address this roadblock?

  • The Limit of Fact-Checking: Populist political claims thrive on feeding the “Elephant” (our gut fears). While truth matters, simply weaponizing “fact-checking lists” against our neighbors usually triggers their Pillar 2 Defensiveness (The Shield). It feels like an attack, not an invitation.
  • The Power of Shared Work: Science and theology agree on the primary cure for tribalism: Contact Theory and Cooperative Action. We do not break down structural biases by reading case studies or arguing about facts online. We break them down by doing shared work toward a common goal. When progressives and conservatives, insiders and outsiders, stand shoulder-to-shoulder to pack boxes for a local food pantry, build a house, or fix a church roof, their brains are forced to re-categorize the “other” as a teammate.

“Looking at the ‘bean jar’ experiment, where have you noticed your own brain creating an ‘us vs. them’ boundary over something completely arbitrary in our community? And looking at the Contact Hypothesis, what is a tangible ‘common goal’ our local church could pursue with people we view as different to force our brains into cooperation?”]

🏛️ Integrating These Into the Lecture & Discussion

You can present these alongside “Shared Work” as a three-part toolkit:

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐

│                   THE THREE ANTIDOTES TO TRIBALISM                     │

├────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤

│ 1. SHARED WORK:      Cooperating shoulder-to-shoulder on common goals. │

│ 2. CURATED DIET:     Refusing to consume caricatures of the outgroup.  │

│ 3. STORY CIRCLES:    Asking for biography instead of debating policy.  │

└────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

🗣️ Discussion Prompt Reveal:

“Looking at these tools, changing our media consumption or changing how we ask questions at the dinner table feels small, but it directly alters our hardwired ‘bee brain.’ Which of these two individual practices—The Curated Diet or The Biography Question—feels like the most challenging but necessary step for you to take this week?”

Solution 2: “The Curated Information Diet” (Breaking the Outgroup Caricature)

  • The Practical Action: Intentionally changing what media, voices, and algorithms your brain consumes to disrupt the “hive switch.”
  • The Scientific Basis: Tribalism thrives on pluralistic ignorance and outgroup homogeneity—the cognitive errors where we believe everyone on the other side is an extreme, malicious caricature. Media algorithms intentionally feed our Elephants the most outrageous, unhinged examples of the political “other” to keep us angry and engaged.
  • How to Apply it in Life: Seek out “intelligible opposition.” If they are progressive, they should stop reading angry tweets about conservatives and instead read a thoughtful, compassionate conservative thinker (David Brooks, Russ Douthat, Yuval Levin, Arthur Brooks, Wendell Berry or George Will). If they are conservative, they should mute partisan talk radio and read a deeply faithful, constructive progressive writer like Marilynne Robinson, Walter Brueggeman, Esau McCaulley, Rachel Held Evans, Trish Harrison Warren, Nadia Bolz-Weber or Jonathan Merritt).
  • The PCUSA Connection: This is the spiritual discipline of discernment and truth-telling. In a world full of false witnesses, a civil Christian vows to stop consuming cultural gossip that turns their neighbors into monsters.

Solution 3: “The Story Circle” (Moving from Policy to Lived History)

  • The Practical Action: Shifting a conversation away from policy positions and toward personal biography.
  • The Scientific Basis: Haidt’s research shows that human moral reasoning is fundamentally narrative-driven. We do not connect through abstract policy data; we connect through stories. When a person states a political view, our brain treats it as an intellectual target. But when a person shares a story about how their life shaped that view, our automated brain switches from defensiveness to empathy.
  • How to Apply it in Life: Teach a simple linguistic pivot for small groups, coffee hour, or dinner tables. When someone expresses a view that triggers your tribal hardware, do not ask, “How can you support that policy?” (which attacks the hive). Instead, ask the Biography Question: “What is your personal history with that issue? What in your life brought you to feel so deeply about it?”
  • The PCUSA Connection: This maps onto the ministry of testimony. We listen to the lived experiences of others, recognizing that God works through real human histories. It forces us to respect the person even if we still disagree with their conclusion.

🕒 0:35–0:40 | Wrap-Up

“If we want to stop looping back into tribalism, we have to stop feeding the structures that profit off our isolation. The most radical thing a Presbyterian can do this week is to deliberately expand their interaction loop.  Do not just celebrate progress in the abstract. Seek out a celebration, a service project, or a community space that is entirely outside your comfort zone. Go not to teach, not to correct, and not to fact-check—but to cooperate. Step out of your tribal fortress and step onto the common ground where God’s amazing grace is already working.”

Throughout this workshop when we look at the Reformed Church solutions, we find the role of tension between valid but apparently opposite principles.  We are imperfectly formed for life in society.  Yet we understand enough to know what we can do personally and how we can influence others to bridge this gap: “follow me”.

This lesson is paired with the next on “tolerance and intolerance”.  In this lesson, we started with the allegedly tolerant purveyors of civility and Reformed Christianity struggling with the apparent intolerance of some “others” who don’t get it.  We see “them” being intolerant of “others” and wonder why it is so!  We see that human nature as described by science and religion is imperfect for our roles in society.  All of us, not just some of us.  Our solution is to work with others and ourselves to see the conflict and work on it.  We jointly build understanding, insight and relationships.  We pull the beam from our own eye.  We build shared meaning and connections through stories and experience.  We reflect on our spiritual nature and the gift of grace and religious practices.  We appear to need these tension-filled challenges to “be all that we can be”. 

Required pre-viewing:

Henri Tajfel and the “Minimal Group Paradigm” with Matt Williams

Other optional videos.

Social Identity Theory: The Science of “Us vs. Them”

Why we create ‘us vs them’ mentalities #psychologyfacts #learning

Settling Feuds: How to Unify (The Contact Hypothesis Explained)

Contact Hypothesis Definition, Conditions & Limitations – Video | Study.com

The Contact Hypothesis/Intergroup Contact Theory

Nelson Mandela & Francois Pienaar moment at RWC 1995

What Was the Marshall Plan? | History

Rebuilding Japan after World War II

Cooperative Threat Reduction Program 25th Anniversary

The Good Friday Agreement: A brief guide

Marriage Equality in America: The Long Battle for LGBTQ+ Rights

📘 Part 2: Tolerance and Intolerance (35 Minutes)

Core Concept: First, unpacking the concept of “Two-Level Tolerance” (Accepting a view’s validity without approving its content), addressing major objections to this approach with empathy, and proposing active validation as the primary solution to building a culture of trust. Second, digging a little deeper into when intolerance may be necessary.  Third, briefly recognizing Civility Pride as a special risk for us!

🕒 0:40–0:45 | The Challenge of Two-Level Tolerance

🗣️ The Lecture Framing: Why Tolerance Feels Like a Threat

“In the first half of this workshop, we looked at the massive, structural wall of tribalism and the ‘Minimal Group Paradigm.’ We established that our brains naturally want to divide the world into clean, neat teams.  To scale that wall, the ministry of civility demands a tool called Two-Level Tolerance.  This is the ability to separate Acceptance from Approval. Level One is Acceptance: recognizing that a neighbor’s alternative view is formed by a valid, genuine human experience of the world. Level Two is Approval: your personal assessment of the moral content, where you maintain the absolute right to disagree or disapprove.

It sounds simple in a classroom. But in the real world, many people reject this formulation, some fiercely. As a diverse PCUSA congregation, we have a deep, religious obligation to not just dismiss this rejection, but to understand it, empathize with it, and validate the genuine fears driving it.

People who struggle with this two-level tolerance are not acting out of malice; they are usually acting out of a profound desire to protect what they love. Let’s look at seven common reasons people reject this model.”

Empathetically Naming the Seven Objections to “Acceptance \ Approval”

  1. Cognitive Collapse: To many, the intellectual line between validity and approval feels completely artificial. If a view is ‘valid’ (meaning it has a logical right to exist), they feel it inherently demands approval.
  2. The Slippery Slope: People fear that if they grant an inch of validation to an opposing view today, they are on an inevitable slide toward full support tomorrow—ultimately landing in complete moral relativism where nothing is right or wrong.
  3. The Need for Certainty: Human psychology varies. Some individuals have a high personal need for cognitive closure and structure. For them, a fluid, two-level approach feels chaotic, inadequate, and emotionally unsettling.
  4. Inherited Threat: Deeply analyzing or discussing foundational moral questions is inherently uncomfortable for some. When you ask someone to evaluate why they hold a view, their brain processes it as a threatening, personal attack on their identity.
  5. The Gut-Level Equivalence: At a System 1, emotional level, our internal ‘Elephant’ screams that to validate is to support. If I sit quietly and allow you to speak without correcting you, my gut tells me I am complicit in your error.
  6. The Culture War Lens: Many faithful Christians genuinely view the rapid shift toward a secular, global, multicultural society as an existential war to be fought. In a war, any framework that looks like a ‘compromise’ feels like aiding the enemy.
  7. The Secular Bias Concern: There is a legitimate concern that the entire philosophy of ‘civility and tolerance’ has a baked-in bias toward secularism—forcing religious believers to privatize their absolute truth claims while secularism dictates the rules of the table.

🕒 0:46–0:58 | Dialogue: The Grace of Public Validation

💡 The Core Argument: Acknowledging the Good, Correcting the Faulty

As a leader, guide the conversation to show that the church shares the underlying concerns of these objections, but proposes a different remedy:

  • Where the Objections are Right: The critics are completely correct that secular society often uses the word ‘tolerance’ to mean ‘you must agree with me.’ They are right that moral relativism hollows out faith. The church must protect absolute moral truth.
  • Where the Objections Fall Short: The error is believing that isolation or hostility can protect the truth. In the Reformed tradition, we trust that God’s truth is big enough and durable enough to withstand a real conversation. Two-level tolerance isn’t a compromise of your values; it is the ultimate expression of Christian humility, acknowledging that while God’s truth is absolute, my understanding of it is always partial.

🛠️ Solution 1: Active, Public Validation of the Objections

The most powerful solution to help others to embrace tolerance is to publicly validate their fears first before asking them to listen to an alternative view.

If a conservative or a progressive feels that you understand their fear of the slippery slope or their desire for moral certainty, their defensiveness drops. When we say out loud: “I understand that you are fighting to protect the moral foundation of our children, and I validate how terrifying this cultural shift feels,” we build the psychological safety required for them to try the two-level approach.

🛠️ Solution 2: The “Enclaved Safety” Approach

Another vital solution is to explicitly reassure participants of their boundaries. We must give people clear permission to say: “I am going to seek to understand your life story right now, but I am explicitly holding onto my moral boundaries. I am not changing my mind today, and I am not asking you to change yours.” Setting this boundary paradoxically frees the Elephant to listen without panicking.

❓ Guided Discussion Questions for the Class:

  • Question 1: “Looking at the 7 objections, which one resonates the most with your own history or fears? When does tolerance feel dangerous to you?”
  • Question 2: “How can we as a church better validate the fears of those who worry about losing moral certainty, while still remaining a house of radical hospitality?”

🕒 0:59–1:00 | Vow of True Tolerance

“True tolerance is not a sign of weakness; it is a sign of immense spiritual strength. It is the crucible where our faith is tested. It takes no spiritual maturity to be polite to people who agree with us. It takes the radical, amazing grace of Jesus Christ to look at someone whose views make us deeply uncomfortable, to explicitly validate their humanity and their fears, and to stay at the table without losing our own identity.

This week, when you encounter a view that frightens or frustrates you, do not launch a counter-offensive, and do not run away into conflict avoidance. Practice the two levels: anchor your feet in the certainty of God’s love and open your arms to accept the reality of the person standing right in front of you.”

🕒 1:01–1:10 | The Paradox of Tolerance

The Paradox of Tolerance, famously articulated by philosopher Karl Popper in his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, presents a vital boundary condition for modern civility: if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant!

For a community navigating complex social and political spaces, Popper’s paradox provides the philosophical baseline for why “being civil” does not mean accepting behavior that destroys civility itself.

🧩 The Paradox Applied to Civility

In a civility workshop, participants often struggle with a major tension: If we value acceptance, respect, and human dignity, aren’t we required to tolerate everyone’s viewpoint, no matter how harsh or disruptive?

Popper’s answer is a decisive no.

Popper argued that we should not immediately suppress intolerant philosophies if we can counter them with rational argument and public opinion. However, he asserted that we must claim the right to refuse tolerance to those who:

  1. Refuse to engage on the level of rational argument.
  2. Forbid their followers from listening to rational arguments because they claim they are deceptive.
  3. Answer arguments with violence or the destruction of democratic structures.

In short: To maintain a civil society, we must be intolerant of absolute incivility.

⚖️ The Boundaries of Civility: Results and Relationships

This paradox establishes the hard line between constructive tolerance and self-destructive passivity.

When to Practice Tolerance (The Norm)When to Draw the Boundary (The Paradox)
Tolerate Individual Differences: Accepting diverse political views, cultural traditions, religious practices, and generational values.Intolerate Attacks on Dignity: Refusing to tolerate language or actions that actively dehumanize others or strip away their basic human dignity.
Tolerate Differing Positions: Engaging with viewpoints that challenge your cognitive models or professional preferences.Intolerate De-stabilization: Drawing a hard boundary against individuals or groups who refuse to engage in good faith or seek to destroy the social contract.
Tolerate Discomfort: Staying at the table when a conversation is emotionally heavy or causes friction.Intolerate Boundary Bulldozing: Halting a conversation when an participant uses threats, absolute ultimatums, or abusive behavior.

🛠️ The Civility Takeaway

Popper’s paradox transforms civility from “soft, passive politeness” into a rugged protective framework.  Civility is the foundational infrastructure that allows our social, political, and economic structures to function. If we allow bad-faith actors to completely violate the rules of engagement—by abandoning facts, ignoring boundaries, and attacking the character or dignity of participants—the entire system collapses.

Therefore, modern civility does not demand that we tolerate the destruction of civility. Drawing a firm, structured boundary against intolerance is not a violation of civility; it is an act of preservation. 

Optional readings:

https://tomkapostasy.com/2026/04/10/authenticity-6-2/

https://tomkapostasy.com/2026/04/10/protecting-your-identity-8-2/

https://tomkapostasy.com/2026/04/10/dei-and-authority-honor-and-loyalty-8-3/

https://tomkapostasy.com/2026/04/10/tolerance-and-truth-8-4/

https://tomkapostasy.com/2026/11/14/ex-6-15-values-and-tolerance/

🕒 1:11–1:15 | Postscript: The Final Mirror

“Before we close our workbooks and walk out those doors today, we need to take one final, uncomfortable step. We need to turn the entire machinery of this workshop back onto ourselves. We must ‘walk the talk’ to the very end.  If we are honest, there is a dangerous trap waiting for us at the exit of a civility workshop. It is the trap of Civility Pride. It is the ease with which we can take these beautiful tools and turn them into a new way to become self-righteous. We are all subject to the exact same forces of in-group promotion and intolerance we just diagnosed. Let us confess the four specific pitfalls of the work we are doing here:

  1. Civility as a Weapon: We must guard against using ‘politeness’ to police other people’s pain. If our immediate response to an outcry against injustice is, ‘Well, I will not listen to you until you speak to me with proper civility,’ we are using this curriculum as a shield to avoid the messy, uncomfortable realities of our neighbors.
  2. The Enlightened Ingroup: We have spent weeks learning about ‘Ingroup Favoritism.’ If we are not careful, this class will become our new favorite tribe. We will look out at the rest of the congregation and think, ‘Look at those unrefined bees out there swarming in their tribal hives. If only they were sophisticated and humble like us.’ The moment we look down on someone for lacking civility tools, we have instantly failed the test of Christian humility.
  3. The Idolatry of Process: We can easily fall into the trap of believing that mutual engagement is a magical cure-all that automatically solves everything. But true engagement is exhausting, and it has real limits. We cannot value the politeness of the process more than we value the truth of the Gospel.
  4. The Tolerant Tyrant: This is the ultimate paradox. We talk extensively about validating the fears of those who reject tolerance. But when someone stands up and says, ‘I cannot validate that view, it goes against my absolute moral certainty,’ our gut reflex is to instantly judge them, exclude them, and refuse to tolerate their lack of tolerance. We demand that everyone else become tolerant, except for us when we are confronted by a rigid believer.

Our confidence cannot rest in the perfection of our tools, or in our own ability to execute them flawlessly. Our confidence rests entirely in God’s grace.

🕯️ Closing Prayer: “Grateful for the Gift of Understanding”

Isaiah 55:8–9

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,’ declares the Lord. ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.’

“Almighty and Creative God, we stand in awe before You, grounding ourselves in the profound truth that You have created us in Your own image. We thank You for the magnificent, terrifying gift of human understanding.  Yet we are equally grateful for the grace to accept what we do not fully understand. We thank You that when the mysteries of nature, life and neighbors remain hidden from us, Your wisdom remains absolute. Give us the comfort of knowing that where our understanding ends, Your grace and love endure forever.  Send us out with open minds and humble hearts, grateful that we are known by You, even as we struggle to know one another.

In the name of Jesus Christ, our Teacher and Savior, we pray. Amen.“

Leave a Reply