Musings - on the editor's mind

Are all windows and mirrors Rorschach tests? Is every stimulus each of us receives a look into our own soul? How is it that each of us see and hear the same thing, yet half of us conclude red while the other half insist on blue?

For a long time I have thought of the Bible as a Rorschach test. Take my own sect, historically the Universalists.

Back in the 1750s and forward they found in the Bible a God of Love that welcomed everyone, universally, into heaven. They insisted on that during a time when almost all of Christianity believed in predestination: all but the one percenters went to hell. The lives of Universalists provide a test of courage, fortitude and certainty.

Today we can all choose to read the Mueller report. Or, we already know the facts without having to wade through 400-plus pages. Among our friends and neighbors that take the time to read the report, there will be a huge split, for and against President Trump.

How can that be? The words laying out the investigation are what they are.

Our conclusions say as much about each of us who read it and share our opinions as it does about the president.

The Rorschach test consists of “10 ambiguous inkblot images.” The Mueller report is in black and white, all words.

It cannot be only a matter of facts among those who read to the end. We take as a given the words in the Mueller report: they ought to became the starting line for the discussion. Yet half will say no collusion and half will say lock him up. Very few will give an inch.

Why is that?

I am saving these Paul Simon lyrics for the epigraph of my first book, the words welcoming everyone on the page after the title. “Still a man hears what he wants to hear / And disregards the rest.”

We look outward, words come into our ears, but finding common ground on which to stand together is especially difficult these days.

It seems our interest is not so much looking into another’s soul but comforting our own. Instead of our soul’s light shining outward, illuminating our path and shining on neighbors and strangers, the pull is inward, an internal black hole, a self from which too few of us are escaping or expanding.