Chapter 2: “Out Of The Everywhere Into Here”

None of us chooses the hour or the place or the circumstances of our birth. We do not choose our parents, our ethnicity, our native language, our physical features, or our nonphysical characteristics. We come from, as 19th century Scottish writer George MacDonald (1871/1963) mused, “out of the everywhere, into here” (p. 236), but that here—not the here—is different for each one of us, and this difference is what we have in common. We belong to a humanity that is perpetually in media res —each of us is born into the middle of others’ stories and others are born into ours—into Kenneth Burke’s (1974) “unending conversation,” so to speak (pp. 110–111). Many, if not most of us, also sense we also are born into a larger story, the origins of which lie beyond. Beyond what we can’t quite say, but humanity has expended much effort in seeking to know and to articulate answers to the questions of where we come from, why we are here, how we should live, and what it all means. Little effort has been expended in developing a systematic method of exploring how individuals become aware of these questions for themselves, of how individuals seek to find answers to these transcendent questions, of how and by what means individuals grow in their understanding of that which seems to be beyond knowing, and of how individuals respond to their own growth.