There’s a little book of essays by Eric Butterworth called “Celebrate
Yourself”. It’s one of those books that I go back
to periodically to remind myself of the simple truths that we
so often allow the illusion of the
world to cloud.
One of the essays is “The Uncommonsense Way”. In it Butterworth points
out that common sense is actually the consensus of the known: “Everyone
knows that you can’t trust people.” It’s this type of consensus
thinking that leads to wars and conflicts of all kinds. “It is only because
people have, from time to time, had the uncommon sense to renounce their past
that they have made even halting steps in personal growth. It is only because,
as a race, we have been able to transcend our past performances that we have
forsaken caves and primitive ways and progressed up the spiral of civilization.”
When the consensus tells you that it’s just common sense
that some conditions are incurable, some students cannot be educated,
some people will never change, some countries will never accept
peace, don’t believe them.
Not one of is a statistic. Not one of us is bound to a mold that
cannot be changed. “Each person is uncommon, unique, an individual
with great depths of potential.”
Many of you know the story of the young man who failed at every
turn in the world of art. He was told his cartoons were inferior
and he had no talent for a career in either classic or commercial
art. He was reduced to using a mice-infested garage for a studio.
When he decided to draw the mice in all sorts of situations, his
friends told him to give up drawing those silly mice. They told
him that “common sense should tell you that you are on a
one way-street to nowhere.”
He set off for Hollywood say, “Common sense is another way
of saying fear, and fear usually spells failure.” It’s
a good thing Walt Disney decided to follow the uncommonsense way.
“In the uncommonsense view of Truth, we are not what we
have been, but what we can be. It is common sense to admit our
weaknesses. But the uncommonsense view is that weaknesses simply
conceal strengths. When we take the uncommonsense view we can deal
victoriously with life.”
We are not our history. We don’t have to live our lives
in retrospect. Today is the day that we understand the Truth of
our being that we are, “the mind of the Infinite expressing
as us and can be all that we can conceive of being.”
It’s good to breathe the air of uncommonsense when we get
stuffed up with what the world says is “only common sense”.
If there are situations in your life that tempt you to give up,
to despair that there will ever be a solution, know this, Spirit
is present in you and as you, right now. The answer to your dilemma
is present, here and now. Emerson writes, “There is a guidance
for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right
word.”
“It is the spirit in a man,
the breath of the Almighty,
that makes him understand.”
(Job 32:8)
In the One Love We All Share,
Rev. Lisa
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