The common mind of the...
Illustration
Object:
The common mind of the people of God is not the mind of one person or few people dominant over the rest, but is a melding of many talents, many ideas.
There's a tendency in our society to belittle that sort of collective energy. We are a nation of rugged individualists, even when it comes to religion. The Revolutionary War patriot, Tom Paine, was a free thinker who once wrote, "my own mind is my church." His way of thinking is part of our national identity.
Rugged individualism can be a good thing, but there's also such a thing as reckless individualism, going it alone when there's no conceivable reason for doing so. In the early days of homesteading in the American West, families often arrived on their forty acres to discover the first land they'd ever owned in their lives. To them, that square of uncut prairie must have seemed like a small kingdom. The first thing many settlers did was to erect a sod hut at the very center of their land: preferably on a rise, from which they could see all that belonged to them.
But that didn't last long. The isolation of the prairie did strange things to families. Depression became common. Some settlers went mad. Many gave up and moved back east. The ones who stayed learned to build their houses not at the center of their land, but at one of the corners: alongside other families who did the same on their land. Those clusters of settlers were able to share one another's joys and burdens, support each other, and together build the most efficient food-production region in the world.
There's a tendency in our society to belittle that sort of collective energy. We are a nation of rugged individualists, even when it comes to religion. The Revolutionary War patriot, Tom Paine, was a free thinker who once wrote, "my own mind is my church." His way of thinking is part of our national identity.
Rugged individualism can be a good thing, but there's also such a thing as reckless individualism, going it alone when there's no conceivable reason for doing so. In the early days of homesteading in the American West, families often arrived on their forty acres to discover the first land they'd ever owned in their lives. To them, that square of uncut prairie must have seemed like a small kingdom. The first thing many settlers did was to erect a sod hut at the very center of their land: preferably on a rise, from which they could see all that belonged to them.
But that didn't last long. The isolation of the prairie did strange things to families. Depression became common. Some settlers went mad. Many gave up and moved back east. The ones who stayed learned to build their houses not at the center of their land, but at one of the corners: alongside other families who did the same on their land. Those clusters of settlers were able to share one another's joys and burdens, support each other, and together build the most efficient food-production region in the world.
