“It isn't knowledge
It's humility we lack”
—-Don Henley, “Praying for Rain”
It isn’t entirely true, of course. There is always more to learn. For starters, there is the knowledge about each other that seems to be sorely absent among us just now. That, along with the still largely unexplored landscape of ourselves. We have much to hear; much to learn; much to understand.
The sobering reality, however, is that it won’t ultimately be enough. That was the naive and ultimately tragic flaw in the Age of Enlightenment: the fiction that we could educate our way into a whole human community - the embodied Beloved Community that our faith traditions have taught us to seek. We are more educated and knowledgable than any generation preceding us, buried as we are beneath data and facts and the 24-hour news cycle. There is ample data, widely accessible and scientifically validated, about climate change and yet we still ignore it. All ambiguity has evaporated under the scrutiny of credible research about agricultural runoff into the Mississippi that travels downstream to feed the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, but still we spray chemicals in excess of what any crop might need. Despite decades of clear information about the importance of exercise and what we eat, we are increasingly sedentary, consuming ever bigger mountains of junk beverages and food, and spending more and more on health care. We know volumes about racism and the generational implications of trauma, abuse, dehumanization and implicit segregation, but all the information at our fingertips has had little impact. We still act in a historical vacuum and react with prejudicial suspicion and fear.
It isn’t “knowledge” that we lack.
Despite our occasional but fleeting flashes of ingenuity and magnanimity; despite an effervescence here and there of grandeur or moral, communal stature, we largely remain a species of juvenile delinquents - delinquents who have been to the moon, to be sure, and smashed the atom and mapped the human genome and eradicated countless diseases, but juvenile nonetheless, roaming the streets of our common life metaphorically and literally stealing trinkets and breaking windows - with a soul deep within that is aching to grow up.
It isn’t “knowledge” that we lack.
Not long ago, Lori and I visited the grave of Carlo Carretto, the 20th century Italian activist and mystic, in the charming little Umbrian village of Spello across the hillside from Assisi where he had spent the latter years of his ministry. In the months since our visit, I’ve been reading Carretto’s books. In one of them, In Search of the Beyond, he makes the dismal observation that, “I have too often been wounded by ‘intelligent’ people, disconcerted by unloving champions of orthodoxy or by self-advertising revolutionaries who are incapable of an act of humility.”
We know those people he is describing. Wincingly often, we are those people he is describing.
It isn’t knowledge
It’s humility we lack.
We know too much about that which we simply don’t care…
…because it is simply inconvenient;
…or it’s not my problem;
…or it’s someone else’s fault.
It won’t, of course, turn out well on those terms. As the sage behind the biblical book of Proverbs puts it, “When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.” (Proverbs 11:2)
I’ll keep learning - it’s just the kind of thing I do, and there are whole worlds, after all, about which I know little or nothing. But I - we - had better start changing as well; bending out of the inert certitude of our intellection, and into the wonderment of humility in which all that is not me is no longer mere object, but holy subject...
...that not only educates me, adding to my knowledge, but alters me and enlarges us all.
