Two students were sent into a field of daffodils and later reported on what they saw. One described the flowers _botanically_ (numbers, genus, family etc.), the other _poetically_ ('I wandered lonely as a cloud...')

Who was 'right'?

And what is 'truth'?

Perhaps we can blame Francis Bacon for the theory that knowledge is, in the end, gaining power over nature ('putting nature to the rack') - a mind-set which has dominated Western thinking/ education.

Bertrand Russell put it this way: 'What science cannot tell us we cannot know'.

Cultural anthropologist Edward Hall says 'linear thinking' dominates our culture: 'We have been taught to think linearly rather than comprehensively.'

The problem (as Michael Whelan puts it in his new book 'Without God All Things Are Lawful', Sydney, St Pauls, 1994, ch.11) is that 'the rationalism that dominates the modern Western mind-set has deleterious effects in at least three crucial areas' :

# Conversation (eg. as Deborah Tannen puts it, men tend to engage in _report-talk_ and women _rapport-talk_

# Conservation (industrialists and miners tend not to write nature poetry) and

# Understanding the Bible (which is full of stories, metaphor etc.)

'Perhaps T S Eliot had something like this in mind when he wrote these words from 'The Rock':

The endless cycle of idea and action, endless invention, endless experiment, Brings knowledge of motion but not stillness; Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.'

_Transrational_ thinking saves rationalism from itself. 'The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing; we feel it in many things' (Blaise Pascal).

Whelan concludes: 'We do violence to ourselves and our world when we fail to foster this transrational knowing and thinking... We [must] integrate the rational and the transrational. Faith, which is not a psychological trick but a work of grace, can only thrive in the person who has learned to think as much with the heart and stomach as with the head'.

Shalom!

Rowland Croucher