Filling Buckets

“Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” -- Yeats

I heard this quote the other day and it struck me. I started thinking about it and turning it over in my head and it slowly dawned on me that it applies quite neatly to my search for faith. I have spent most of my life filling buckets -- taking in information, processing it, filing it away in the appropriate sections of my mind and then moving on to the next piece of information. I think I imagined that if I filled the bucket to the top that I would magically come to a place where belief took over. That if I knew enough about God and applied that information correctly, I would come to a place of knowing God.

It didn't occur to me until much later that knowing about God and knowing God were two very different things. It wasn't until God lit the fire in me that I realized the difference.

I was raised in the church (Baptist) but I was never on fire. The only thing I really got from my early religious training was a mild sense of frustration and confusion and a few drops in my bucket. I drifted away from the church as a teenager but kept searching. I looked again at Christianity. I researched Eastern religions. I looked into neo-paganism. I read a lot of Dawkins and called myself an atheist. I learned a lot and still value each and every little bit of knowlege I dropped into my bucket but I was never fulfilled. I was never turned on. When I came out of that long period of searching and assessed the situation I saw that I had not only filled one bucket, I had filled thousands of them. Thousands of buckets filled to the top and yet I was still cold.

I had learned. I had memorized facts. But I had not been educated.

(to be continued...)