Humility is overcoming hubris. This time of year spiders remind me of it. In the film Amazing Grace, the story of William Wilberforce begins with him trying to hold onto a mystical experience. He calls it “getting a wet ass and wanting nothing but spider webs.” I am sure his experience inspires these thoughts to some degree.
Outdoor Humility
The storm of the previous day led to the fog last Sunday morning. This time of year, when Summer has only a few weeks left to go, construction becomes frantic. The water condenses on everything even the most delicate structures. When I took my dog out that morning, the sunlight was breaking through some of the cloud cover. I saw spider webs. They were everywhere – the deck, the garden beds, the fences, and even on the ground hundreds of spiders from several different species had been at work. My dog walked through one web. The air was still.
I had no idea there were this many spiders in my back yard. It is amazing. All these small neighbors I never see. In the daylight, I can stand on the deck and see across the yard and into those of my neighbors. But I do not see everything alive in that area. I realize I do not know everything I think I know.
Knowledge Versus Knowing
It is possible to know without having any real knowledge. Aristotle claimed, “All human beings by nature desire to know.” The Proverbs begin by telling the reader to get knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. One should use all resources at hand to gaining these things. Yet, people would rather feel they know without doing the work of gaining knowledge. “There are things nobody knows,” a drunk student claims. The retort is, “how do you know?” I run into claims of special or secret knowledge all the time.
I do not know the number of spiders in my back yard. So, I do not know everything. One of my favorite statements from St. Paul is “Knowledge puffs, but love builds up.” (1 Corinthians 8:1c) The truth is there is no hidden knowledge. There is only information that has not been discovered yet.
Humility and Knowledge
Love builds up. If we have any knowledge, it is not meant to make us superior to anyone else. If he have love with our knowledge, then we can be humble in how we approach others with it. But it is almost impossible to carry on a conversation with only one person practicing humility. Anyone who leads a group study with one know-it-all in the group understands the difficulty one person’s lack of humility causes everyone else.
One benefit of education is knowing there is more to learn. When we decide schooling or training should only be about what students need to know, then we fail to encourage the curiosity required to continue to learn. Instead we create a person who does not have love. Rather the person exhibits hubris as one who is superior in their knowledge. If others do not know as that person knows, the others are wrong. Preachers who use different phrases for a topic than their listeners are used to hearing them understand this.
I once presided over a funeral service for a church member. A person from another denomination complained that I never said the deceased had “been saved.” The person relating the story to me replied, “But that was in everything you said about him.”
Our Needs
We need knowledge. And we need humility to accept two truths. The first is that we ourselves do not possess “all knowledge.” The second is that we must be patient with people who do not understand what we know. Knowing these facts, will help all would-be teachers relate better to one another.
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