“There are two kinds of light,” James Thurber wrote. “The glow that illumines, and the glare that
obscures.” Those who illumine the questions of life walk a dangerous path. They hold up for
examination the very pilasters of the systems that depend on them for its credibility. They threaten old
paradigms and open new possibilities where once only cocksure certitude had been.
As fine as the fabrication of ideas may be, ideas in themselves are only papier-mâché caricatures of the
real thing. Ideas are dangerous, of course. Every dictator knows that. But ideas pretend to be what
they are not until someone gives them shape. People talk and struggle and wrestle with ideas in droves
but the person who pursues them and lives them out, shakes the foundation of the world, and in the
end pays the cost of them for the rest of us. It is people who live their ideas who give heat to the rest
of the world, stir it up and boil it over, make it new and give it truth.
“Light that glows but does not heat,” Coleridge says, “illumines nothing but itself.” To be what you say
you think, however, is a searing kind of elegance. It gives fiber to air.
All great ideas begin in a single, seeking mind, inflame the hearts of those for whom the old answers to
new questions have long since failed to satisfy, are rejected by the keepers of arcane systems but
eventually win the souls of a people who know the difference between spirit and structure. It is the
seeker who leads until the leaders are finally forced to follow. Segregation didn’t work but until
Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver and Martin Luther King, Jr. shook the
chains from their ankles in pursuit of equality, few saw the truth of it and most did nothing about it.
Relics were good business until Martin Luther sought another kind of sanctity. Girls were counted as
nothing until Madeleine Sophie Barat, Philippine Duchesne and Mother McAuley sought them out, took
them in and raised up a whole new population of learned women, a whole new resource for both state
and church. It is those who seek a better world, a holier church, a fuller gospel who finally bring us
home to our best selves.
obscures.” Those who illumine the questions of life walk a dangerous path. They hold up for
examination the very pilasters of the systems that depend on them for its credibility. They threaten old
paradigms and open new possibilities where once only cocksure certitude had been.
As fine as the fabrication of ideas may be, ideas in themselves are only papier-mâché caricatures of the
real thing. Ideas are dangerous, of course. Every dictator knows that. But ideas pretend to be what
they are not until someone gives them shape. People talk and struggle and wrestle with ideas in droves
but the person who pursues them and lives them out, shakes the foundation of the world, and in the
end pays the cost of them for the rest of us. It is people who live their ideas who give heat to the rest
of the world, stir it up and boil it over, make it new and give it truth.
“Light that glows but does not heat,” Coleridge says, “illumines nothing but itself.” To be what you say
you think, however, is a searing kind of elegance. It gives fiber to air.
All great ideas begin in a single, seeking mind, inflame the hearts of those for whom the old answers to
new questions have long since failed to satisfy, are rejected by the keepers of arcane systems but
eventually win the souls of a people who know the difference between spirit and structure. It is the
seeker who leads until the leaders are finally forced to follow. Segregation didn’t work but until
Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver and Martin Luther King, Jr. shook the
chains from their ankles in pursuit of equality, few saw the truth of it and most did nothing about it.
Relics were good business until Martin Luther sought another kind of sanctity. Girls were counted as
nothing until Madeleine Sophie Barat, Philippine Duchesne and Mother McAuley sought them out, took
them in and raised up a whole new population of learned women, a whole new resource for both state
and church. It is those who seek a better world, a holier church, a fuller gospel who finally bring us
home to our best selves.
THE LIGHT OF IDEAS
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