It’s so easy to tear things apart…

… to use critical thinking, objection, cynicism, resignation – or even a call for freedom – as a way of dismantling what others have built. It’s easy to think that this way of thinking itself – dismissing, critiquing, undoing – is a mark of a sophisticated mind.

And it takes a quite different faculty – perhaps best called love – to weave things together into coherence, to form enduring bonds that can support us.

Superficially it can look like tearing apart – of ideas, concepts, commitments, relationships – is liberation. But while dismantling is often a satisfying activity at least while we’re in the midst of it, and while it frees us for a while, it frequently just frees us into the ruins of what we once relied on.

Often what we’re most called to do is weave the kind of strong net that frees us up even as it constrains and holds fast.

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