A Call to Humility
Dearly beloved of God, imperfection guarantees ignorance. Our very fallibility is the gateway to wisdom, if we allow it to be. In the imperfections of our human incompleteness are sown the seeds of our understanding, and our patterns of understandings which result in our gifts to the world. The more we cling to our own wants and our own judgements outside of God, the more we blind ourselves to the humility which is the foundational to the uncovering of all true knowledge.
Consider the stars: they are perfect in their distant, silent majesty, yet from our mortal vantage point, they are nothing but points of light we cannot touch. To expect some perfection within human comprehensions is to look at the stars and render them flawed, as being completely within our grasps intellectually, as though we could understand all the rules of the universe. To believe we may be full stewards of absolute truth outside our depths in imagination, language, or comprehension is a paradox in arrogance. Such beliefs of human ability in knowledge leave us adrift in the sea of our own ignorance.
The world has suffered a profound loss in Christianity’s abandonment of the wider promotion of humility. In its place, we have seen the rise of scientism, that false idol of reason in material alone as the sole monied arbiter of meaning. Scientism claims access to final answers and truths outside of what we know to be true in Christ Jesus and God, so it is but another form of human arrogant error which denies the very ignorance it cannot even begin to contend or contain. It tells us that all questions must be reducible to equations, that every mystery can be dissected into particles, and that the human body is nothing more than a machine, rather than a temple of God. Nothing but delusions of grandeur over what we cannot control, or even perceive.
Even in our best efforts, those inspired by faith and higher reason, we are still incomplete. The most learned scholar, the most devoted theologian, the most brilliant scientist: all are flawed and all prone to error. No human has ever achieved a perfect interpretation of truth. Even when we glimpse the divine, our visions are filtered through the lens of our own limitations. This is not failure at all however, this revelation being a necessary condition for true faith in God and God’s plan. We are all imperfect, and even ‘personality’ is nothing but a euphemism for it.
Inspiration is not perfection. The prophets were flawed men who struggled with mortal stubbornness and doubt at least as fiercely as any believer. God’s messages to us were never about establishing flawless doctrines but about the divine bud growing through our brokenness on account of being in spite of it. We all insist that all our interpretations must be true at some point and we all often forget that our ideas of perfection are imperfect mirages from inherently flawed perspectives.
Humility is in honesty and awareness, which is identification of self in imperfection. This is part of the first spiritual strength of Magnanimity and not some weakness. This is the soil from which our wisdom grows, when we repent and pray. When we acknowledge our imperfections, we open ourselves to the grace of God’s infinitely incomprehensible perfection. To take on our flaws and understand their origins is an important step on the path to truth, rather than the end of it. This is our movement toward the greater and greatest.