Previously, I touched on what it meant to articulate a moral center, how difficult that endeavor is … if you take the challenge seriously that is. And there’s the rub. How many of us approach the task of centering our world view in a thoughtful and serious fashion. Or, how many of us simply accept what we are given and go through life spewing forth scripted clichés.

I can still remember my mother once again disapproving of my behavior, or the way I looked, or what I believed. If I questioned her ‘wisdom,’ she would give me her patented look of exasperation and thinly veiled disgust. ‘Everyone believes (or thinks or does) this,‘ remained her final argument.

It mattered not what the issue might be since we were touching upon a universal truth according to her worldview. Inevitably, I would scrunch up my face. ‘Everyone in the whole world … really? Do you mean kids in remote China believe and act this way?’ My small acts of rebellion would never win the day for me. No, it merely would result in a rising level of exasperation on my mother’s part. Her world was one of absolutes.

And so was my early world. It was Catholic, ethnic, working class, a world refined in a constrained petri dish of struggling tribalism…an us versus them mentality. Stereotypes and prejudices were omnipresent. It was a stark world of good and evil, of light and dark. Shades of gray, of nuanced or complicated thinking, were discouraged.

I apologize if I’ve shared this too many times in the past but I can recall sitting in my High school religion classes arguing (only inside my own head of course) with the structures being passed on as absolute truth. In that dogmatic world, children were cast into some unthinkable eternity because they had not been baptized? Silly birth control prohibitions were imposed when, even then, we could see that growing populations would create huge societal issues. Ancient gender roles remained within the institutional arrangements of the Church, even as the wider world offered women a taste of equality and opportunity. The infallibility of the Pope (in matters of faith and morals) continued even as the history of the Papacy was rife with atrocious scandals. The list was endless.

Yet, cultural bubbles are immersive and confining. When you are inside, you cannot easily detect the character of the prison in which you are incarcerated. It is, in the end, your world, much like the fish in the fish bowl. Contradictory input is something to be ignored or actively refuted. Most of us have difficulty accommodating diverse thought and contradictory ideas with some of us have more difficulty than others in breaking free from established precepts. After all, cracking open one’s worldview can be traumatic. It is the framework within which we organize the amazing array of stimuli that represents that complex world out there. It is not as if what we understand that reality is, in fact, our creation of reality. We assume all see the same reality even as our individual world is partly a social artifact, something created through the prism of our personal filters.

I can recall confronting my own core set of assumptions and beliefs. That started in high school and accelerated in college. Early on, it was more a process of questioning the religious scripts imposed on me, starting with the precepts contained in the Baltimore Catechism in which we were indoctrinated by the Catholic authorities early on. Then, it was too early for me to do any major restructuring. I merely pushed some beliefs to the side, dismissing them as being illogical or contravening common sense while maintaining the essential architect of my childhood version of reality.

Later on, in college, the challenges to my personal orthodoxy became too numerous. It soon was impossible to patch up my existing edifice. I had to articulate a new structure or rationale for my approach to things. At first glance, that might seem a significant undertaking. Yet, two factors rendered the process doable.

First, I was now operating outside my bubble. The Catholic Church, throughout its history but particularly after the Reformation, spent enormous resources and energy on developing and nurturing separate institutions in the areas of education, health, and so many others. All these efforts were designed to separate and protect the flock from competing views and influences. I would create my own philosophy of life.

Second, I found that I didn’t have to jettison my core or fundamental dispositions. Upon deep reflection, it turned out that my new moral center, while not based on any formal religious or established institutional dogma, reflected Christ’s teachings as well as that of many other major spiritual gurus. Essentially, most ancient moral teachers of note preach some forms of civility, compassion, and community with love and acceptance operating as the key bonding agent. In short, I did not have to transform my world view. I merely had to base my belief system on a more intrinsic type of rationale as opposed to extrinsic mandates and fear of punishment. The good is remarkably self-evident.

Eventually, I sensed that my moral center was going to wind up where it did no matter what. I was predisposed to certain foundational sentiments … equality over superiority, acceptance over division, love over rejection, peace over violence, and kindness over the alternative. I was destined to be a do-gooder (most of the time). Perhaps that is why, even as a teen, I sought work that was aimed at helping others…hospital work, helping disadvantaged kids, making a hopeless stab at becoming a Priest, and then a stint in the Peace Corps. It might help explain how swiftly I embraced progressive politics and my profession of teaching and doing public policy work related to poverty and helping the poor.

And yet, I always remained somewhat detached. I did policy and not politics. I mostly focused on programs and institutions, and not people themselves. I circled problems from 30,000 feet as opposed to getting into the trenches. In some ways, I never got involved.

Is that wrong? I’m not sure. But I have always felt a little guilty about that. I’ve had to accept that, while I’m a decent schmoozer, I am not instinctively comfortable around people. Perhaps, if I were to do it all over again, I would step out of my comfort zone to be a better people person. Perhaps!

While I have more to say on this topic, I realize that the process of settling on how one should center one’s life never ceases. It is an ongoing process. In a way, it is like science. The rigors of analytics seldom give consumers final answers but rather the most defensible answer available based on existing evidence and assessment. However, new evidence is continually available. Long ago, the best minds saw the earth about us as the center of everything. A century ago, our understanding of the scale of the universe was confined to the Milky Way, our own galaxy, in which we were minor players. Today, we know that there are at least two trillion galaxies out there. Our existence is peripheral indeed.

We must keep reexamining everything, changing our minds based on our continuing sifting and winnowing of the world about us. Our belief systems are similar … we arrive at a set of conclusions only to question them once again. At least we should keep questioning them. It is the journey itself that makes the most sense, not easy answers grabbed onto as lifelines. Such a never-ending journey makes life harder, even uncertain. However, I personally would have it no other way. Struggling to understand the majesty and mystery of what is out there is an exilerating endeavor. I know it is hopeless. Yet that is the very quality that makes it such a seductive aspiration.