Here is a story from Robert Grudin’s Time and The Art of Living:
A man made a long pilgrimage to a holy city.
As he neared the city he saw, looming among the lower irregular shapes of other structures, the walls and roof of the great temple that was the object of his journey.
Yet again and again, as he searched through dark narrow alleys and small marketplaces, he failed to find its entrance.
As best he could, in a language not his own, he made inquiries of the townspeople; but all of them, taught in a newer religion, seemed neither to know nor to care.
After much frustration, he was directed at last to a priest of the old faith, who told him that the great temple had in fact long ceased to possess a formal entrance, but rather could be entered in many ways, through any of a large number of the narrow houses and tiny shops which surrounded it.
Yet in the end this revelation gave the pilgrim no help at all.
Each house or shop he entered seemed so dark and squalid, its furniture so alien, its occupants so forbidding, that it seemed manifestly incapable of opening into the grandeur and freedom of the temple vault.
The man left the city in bitterness and sought an easier faith.
Some of the questions that arise for me when I read this story:
- What am I searching for?
- Does my searching reflect my deepest aspirations?
- When do other people seem alien, unknowing, or uncaring?
- What do I regard as dark, squalid, forbidding, or unacceptable?
- When do I tend to give up?
- When I change directions, is it based on new understanding or truer intentions? Or do I opt for false convenience?
- What am I not noticing?