Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a philosopher who spent much of his career trying to decipher how history and time worked. I could never do justice to his deep thinking, but I want to discuss one of his famous ideas.

Hegel believed that a simple process works its way throughout history. An idea is suggested…a thesis. As this idea is pondered, others attack it and offer a counter-idea…an antithesis. Eventually, the two ideas find a way towards a resolution…a synthesis. This is called the Hegelian dialectic.

While I think the Hegelian dialectic is not as ubiquitous in history as he believed, I believe there is a simple truth here: balance.

As a young seminarian, I became exposed to systems theory as it relates to social science. The greatest advocate of family systems theory is Dr. Murray Bowen, a psychiatrist trained in the thinking and practice of Sigmund Freud. But Bowen began to see that individual therapy did not take sufficient account of the fact that human persons are a part of a family…and the functioning of the individual in that web of relationships was insufficiently examined. Murray postulated several important ideas that help family therapists diagnose their clients.

One of those principles is the power of homeostasis. This means that every family has its own comfort zone or sense of balance. That balance looks different in each family, but whatever feels “normal” to the members of the family….that is the comfort zone. And the system will restore that comfort zone when something changes it.

Hegel and Bowen help us see the way truth works…and how the system of understanding truth – and the way we discover it – brings balance by challenging the comfort zone.