Several months ago I went on vacation with my mother and sister to New York. We are all different people with differing viewpoints on many subjects; including spirituality. Often this leads to some heated conversations with my mother and I trying to convince each other that our perspective is ‘right’.
One day at the Hayden planetarium all that changed.
Thanks to Neil de Grasse Tyson’s perspective on the creation and expansion of the universe, my mother and I could agree that God /Universe/Source (whatever we want to call this energy of creation) can also exist in the same breath as evolution and expansion. We realized that ‘both things can be true’.
Truth doesn’t exist in a vacuum - it has respective perspective. We can have our opinion/belief/perspective/truth and have respect for that of another.
Making one of us ‘right’ doesn't serve us. I have to make you 'wrong' I if I have to be 'right'.
It leaves me feeling lonely on the mountain top, so to speak. The price for being ‘right’ is sacrificing communion with others. If ‘both things can be true’, I can hear my mom’s perspective without the need to convince her of my rightness. I can respect her and her thoughts and opinions and feelings without feeling less than or more than or attempting to make her feel that way.
‘Both the things can be true’ opens the door for what Ann Voskamp ... calls “eucharisteo“, gratitude, for our differences and a powerful respect for the divinity in each of us.
‘Both things can be true’ opened me up to inquiry, of myself and my Mother. This is the place where our real communication begins, where our differences are embraced and love takes root and the world is changed.