Reflection
When we consider yesterday’s answers more important than today’s questions, we fail both the past and the future. In the first place, the past was for its own time; in the second place, it is meant to prepare us to face the future.
Never refuse to ask a question however unwelcome the question may be. In the end, it may be the only thing that saves us from our own ignorance. To keep growing, it is imperative to keep asking the forbidden questions.
When we try to stop thought by stopping people from asking forbidden questions, we only prove the paucity of our answers. What is true will hold up to scrutiny—however much untruth is around us. If an idea be of God—like love and goodness and openness and respect and tolerance and compassion—it will thrive in the most godless environment.
from Aspects of the Heart by Joan Chittister
Prayer
May I seek the truth and act on it.
Action
Consider your own life and the situations around you, personal, communal and national. Where do you see that yesterday’s answers are treated as more important than today’s questions? Where should you change your thinking?
Suggested Reading
And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins.
Mark 2:22
It is easy to say this, but please make an effort not to be discouraged. With the help of God, continue to hope in a better future.
Pope Francis
Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Big thinking precedes great achievement.
Wilferd A. Peterson
It’s amazing what ordinary people can do if they set out without preconceived notions.
Charles F. Kettering
If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
Wayne Dyer
We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.
Anais Nin
By believing passionately in something that does not yet exist, we create it.
Nikos Kazantzakis
A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.
William James
If you only look at what is, you might never attain what could be.
Anonymous
Some men see things the way they are and ask, ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were, and ask ‘Why not?”
George Bernard Shaw
Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
Andre Gide