Returning to the World

Image Credit: NASA

I have just finished Martin Buber's extraordinary work, "I and Thou", and am still reeling from the experience. Every page in my book has been underlined, notes scribbled in the margins - confirmations, questions, refutations (yes, I'm one of those sacrilegious souls who writes in books). So here is one passage that left me deeply thoughtful about how we talk about "progress" and "development". This passage helped clarify for me where the true evolution of humanity is leading - first into our depths, then back into the world:

"The sickness of our age is unlike that of any other and yet belongs to the sicknesses of all. The history of cultures is not a stadium of eons in which one runner after another must cover the same circle of death, cheerfully and unconsciously. A nameless path leads through their ascensions and declines. It is not a path of progress and development...but only the unheard of return - the breakthrough. Shall we have to follow this path all the way to the end, to the test of the final darkness? But where there is danger what saves grows too." (Emphasis added.)

Buber speaks of "the unheard of return" - meaning our return to the actual, lived world of human encounters and relationships. For Buber, this is the essential direction of all true change - returning to the world from a place of aloneness, struggle, alienation. Of course, we must first descend into our darkness before we can return. But it is the process of return that redeems our darkness, gives it meaning, and ultimately, heals us.