A Little Manual for Knowing Quotes

“They bound themselves covenantally to the yet-to-be-known, in their growing expertise, to invite its gracious disclosure of deeper meaning. They bound themselves to that as-yet-unknown reality in taking up such a journey. What they actually found surprisingly transformed their half-understood inquiries as reality swept in and swept them up.”
― Esther Lightcap Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing

“The key to success in temporary analysis is twofold. First: we must remember it is temporary. Focal analysis is not knowledge. Successfully returning to subsidiary indwelling to looking from our practices and skills and analyses to their meaningful integrative bearing on the world—that is knowing.”
― Esther Lightcap Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing

“And what indwelling looks like is this: relying on clues “subsidiarily” to shape a complex focal pattern.”
― Esther Lightcap Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing

“Insight isn’t informational; it is transformational. It is a knowing event. A change transpires. Understanding this distinction makes a big difference to all our knowing ventures. The moment of insight transforms the knower, the known, and the knowing.”
― Esther Lightcap Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing

“A pilgrimage of knowing can be a journey of course corrections.”
― Esther Lightcap Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing

“In presuming that knowledge is a mental activity we tend to think of our body strictly as a mindless container—an object. Of course, we understand that our senses take in information and our brains process it. But we see this as mechanical. We actually think computers might duplicate how humans know.”
― Esther Lightcap Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing

“Growing in knowing ourselves in relation to the world and to others means being strategically selective in our personal investments, attending to our own gifts and trusting the diverse gifts of others in our team. It means pledge-like guarding of other commitments we have already assumed.”
― Esther Lightcap Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing

“This orientation alone yields rest and shalom in our adventures in knowing. Rest: We may be at peace with our own efforts to know—with their long journey, their incompleteness and particularity, with their dependence on others and on the real itself. We may be confident in our distinct contributions, and confident in the risk. We may delight in the venture. We may hope for and joy in deepening communion with the real. Shalom: This approach honors, heals, and transformatively cultivates the real itself. Humans and societies may hope to be healers and friends of the world.”
― Esther Lightcap Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing

“But we all have a unique way of seeing and relating to the world, too. We are each utterly distinct persons. Out of our distinct love, we notice distinct aspects of reality, and reality responds to us along the lines of our distinctive care. Also, we all view life from a vantage point at least slightly different from anyone else’s. And our experiences and training distinguish us from each other. Yet, as persons, we can share and delight in our differences.”
― Esther Lightcap Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing

“To start to know is actually first a response to a dimly heard beckoning of the wonder-full real. If we can see knowing as a relationship between knower and known, we can see that reality makes the first overture. We can associate this call with our sense of wonder.”
― Esther Lightcap Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing

“It is intriguing that, in the Christian Scripture’s story of creation, God says, “Let there be . . .” and then there is. (This has nothing to do with the question of evolution; oughtness makes reality, however it comes about.) I can relate to this easily when I think of all the birthday party games I invented over my children’s young lives, and all the classes I have invented over my students’ lives. I have said plenty of “let there be’s,” which have brought realities to be. Also, when my daughters each said “I do” at their weddings, they said something normative; they generously let something be, and that brought reality to be. If all real things require a “let there be,” a normative dimension, they require a larger context of persons in which promise and covenant and gift pertain.”
― Esther Lightcap Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing

“What we think of the one shapes what we think of the other. If you find that you think there is nothing more to reality than what lab experiments uncover or our eyes see, a little additional thought should show that this claim itself is not the sort of thing that lab experiments could ever uncover or eyes ever see.”
― Esther Lightcap Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing

“Knowing is a pilgrimage. It requires taking personal responsibility, born of love, to pledge allegiance to what we do not yet know. It requires relying on seemingly opaque guidance to venture into the darkness of half-understanding. We invite its gracious and surprising self-disclosure, seeking to indwell its clues to make sense of a hidden pattern. We risk our forever being changed. It is an adventure.”
― Esther Lightcap Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing

“What’s more, in this view, we ourselves are not God; we are creaturely knowers. Our glory as humans is to know from a particular place and orientation, to journey toward what we do not yet know. Always we are on the way. We are on the way with respect to knowing God as well as knowing our world. We understand partially. We know as we give ourselves and as we are known.”
― Esther Lightcap Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing

“I have come to believe we should think of knower and known as persons in relationship, where knowing is the relationship. This relationship has covenantal dimensions. By that I mean that the knower pledges her- or himself to the yet-to-be-known, the way a groom pledges himself to a bride.”
― Esther Lightcap Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing

“We are epistemological beings: we live out an orientation to knowing, whether we “know” it or not.”
― Esther Lightcap Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing

“Along with this knowledge-as-information approach, we tend to be “epistemological dualists.” We distinguish knowledge from belief, facts from values, reason from faith, theory from application, thought from emotion, mind from body, objective from subjective, science from art. We readily overlay the first members of each pair—knowledge, facts, reason, theory, mind, objectivity, and science. And we set each first member over against its “opposite.” We think we need to keep knowledge “pure” from these “opposites”.
Epistemological dualism cuts us as knowers down into disconnected compartments unable to work together—information here, body there, emotions in a third place. It depersonalizes us at the moment of one of our greatest opportunities for personhood—coming to know. It dispels any sense of adventure.”
― Esther Lightcap Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing

“We tend to think knowledge is information, facts, bits of data, “content,” true statements—true statements justified by other true statements. And while this isn’t exactly false, we tend to have a vision of knowledge as being only this. We conclude that gaining knowledge is collecting information—and we’re done—educated, trained, expert, certain.”
― Esther Lightcap Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing

“Consider the Magi. Arabian astrologers, for years they had bound themselves to study what they half-understood. They studied the planets and stars, not for mere facts and figures about the planets, but because they pursued deeper meaning. They were not "collecting data," building a bank of comprehensive information. They attended to the stars, we may surmise, in a loving and wondering search for wisdom: wisdom of the sort that comes to expression in a harrowing pilgrimage together beyond Arabia, across trackless wastes, across tense racial and political boundaries, into the unknown to find a foreign king to whom they deemed a certain star to belong, a king worth worshipping with their best gifts--treasures themselves fraught with portent.”
― Esther Lightcap Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing

“The well-known biblical story of the Magi who journey to find the Christ child and to bring gifts offers an emblematic story of knowing. They are not called wise men for nothing! nor is it a meaningless accident that we use the word epiphany in referring to a moment of insight. Epiphany is the name of the church season in which we celebrate God's revealing himself to these Gentiles--and to us.”
― Esther Lightcap Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing

“In a college classroom, although it is rarely ceremonially observed or even noticed, there must be a moment where a student says, “Yes! I do hereby accept this challenge. I give myself to it and to what it requires. I pledge to trust the guidance of the professor, to guard my time to make a priority of the work that it will take to gain the skills and carry out the assignments. I pledge to listen deeply and humbly to the text. I pledge faithful support to my classmates. I pledge to be patient. What’s more, I pledge to allow myself to be transformed into what I am not yet. I pledge my troth to the reality I do not yet know. Where no pledge takes place, no education transpires.”
― Esther Lightcap Meek, A Little Manual for Knowing