One of my favorite things about dance is also one of its greatest limits: It’s one of the most temporary of art forms. A sculpture can stand and be admired for millennia, a novel can be read and reread by thousands of readers across the world for hundreds of years. But dance, live dance, involves inflections of the body that last for less than a second and are gone, forever. This very temporariness is part of what gives dance its vitality and immediacy, something that a sculpture can only emulate. (A great sculpture can trick the eye into believing that it’s moving, but it’s only a trick, which is not unlike the frames of a dance film tricking your eye into believing that you are watching someone dance in real life. Ultimately, live movement of the body is irreplaceable.)
I was reminded of this when I read this passage on poetry from Rhyme’s Rooms, by Brad Leithauser:
“Rhymes fade and are meant to fade. Evanescence is the essence of rhyme. Our ears move on. Rhymes live, in Shakespeare’s phrase, within a ‘dying fall.’ For a few instants, a rhyme chimes inside the ear, recalling an earlier sound. An echo is celebrated, then discarded as another echo surfaces.” (5)
This quote struck me because it highlighted a connection between dance and poetry: their shared, tiny temporal limits, their “evanescence,” to use Leithauser’s word. I have been tempted to think of poems—especially the great ones by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton—as sculptures, monuments that stand the test of time. But the act of reading poetry, in its most authentic form, is reading poetry aloud, an embodied act, and, by virtue of its embodiment, an evanescent act, like dance. It doesn’t matter if the poetry recited is Virgil or the lines I scratched on the back of an insurance letter: When poetry is spoken aloud, it only lasts in the air for a fleeting, electric instant, a pirouette of sound.
I was born at “the end of history.” My earliest political memory is my mom telling me as a little boy that the Soviet Union was falling apart. Liberal democracy had won. I have lived my whole life taking liberal democratic norms for granted.
In seminary, I thought it was edgy and cool to be into “postliberal” theology. We read people like MacIntyre, Taylor, Hauerwas, Yoder, Cavanaugh, Milbank, Jamie Smith, people who in their own ways were questioning whether classical liberalism had truly created an impartial public sphere. They claimed that classical liberalism, far from being an impartial facilitator, had its own theological values which needed to be exposed and refuted. Reading these thinkers revealed ways in which the liberal order is founded upon violence and sustained by violence. Many of these thinkers were trying to reach back behind the Enlightenment into older modes of Christian thought. Reading them, I had a working model for political theology.
Trump destroyed it.
As rightwing intellectuals scrambled to put respectable theological scaffolding over Trump’s clownery, I increasingly saw people like Patrick Deneen invoking the term “postliberal” to describe their political theology. At first I thought it was a weird coincidence, but over time I came to see that, even though it was quite a bit downstream, the theologians working in the wake of Trump had co-opted the critiques of classical liberalism from people like Hauerwas to their own ends.
Now, as authoritarianism is on the rise globally, with Putin in Russia, Xi in China, Trump in the US, Wilders in the Netherlands, Meloni in Italy, to say nothing of Bolsinaro, Johnson, Le Pen—for the first time in my life, liberal democracy is actually in real danger of being eclipsed.
All of this has caused me to seriously reassess the claims of Enlightenment classical liberalism, upon which America was founded. It has also caused me to deeply question the claims of postliberal theology. Postliberal theology was fun when it was a countercultural way to question American civil religion. Now that the American political order itself is under serious attack, it’s not fun anymore.
Even though I am coming to reject postliberal theology, I am beginning to think that Reformed theology in the tradition of Augustine, Calvin, Beza, the Puritans, their deist descendants, Barth, and the Niebuhrs might offer the most compelling theological defense of the liberal democratic order, one which takes seriously its flaws, but recognizes that it is still the best option.
How do we tell the story of our nation? If our nation is founded on ideas and values that are good and true, where do we claim that these values came from? Where did we come from?
I just finished How the Classics Made Shakespeare, an astonishing book by Jonathan Bate, which raises these questions for me. The book is about all the different Greek and Roman authors who influenced Shakespeare. But what hit me hardest about this book was the way that Shakespeare used these ancient authors as they related to the national story that England was beginning to tell about itself. Shakespeare had the chance to be England’s national playwright, the one who created and enacted a set of myths about the founding and emerging of an English Empire. But from Bate’s perspective, Shakespeare turned down the offer.
He details how the English of Shakespeare’s day were obsessed with ancient Rome. They devoured everything they could get their hands on by Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Seneca, Horace, and others. But for Bate, the English were obsessed with the Romans because they were a young, scrappy and hungry country, hungry for legitimacy on the continent. As Bate says, “Shakespeare lived in a neo-Roman world… His own plays were part of a national project to invent a new cultural heritage on the model of ancient Rome, not least as a form of resistance to the Catholic authority of modern Rome.” (99) England had a lot to prove. And what did you do when you had a lot to prove? You reached back into the ancient world to prove your pedigree. And if you didn’t have the pedigree, you made it up. So the English made up this absurd legend that Brutaine (Britain) was named after a Roman named Brutus, who happened to be the grandson of Aeneas, and who sailed from Rome to Brutaine to start the dynasty of English kings, as a New Rome. Nifty!
If this sounds familiar, it’s because Virgil had pulled the exact same trick with the founding of Rome itself. Rome, another young, scrappy and hungry country, was in sorry need of a more illustrious pedigree. So Virgil made one up, writing a story-poem, a founding myth, the Aeneid, in which Rome is founded by Aeneas. Aeneas, who could say, “I was there!” at the Trojan War. The Trojan War, immortalized by Homer in his Iliad. By grafting the story of Rome onto Homer’s epic poems, the Romans could claim to be a part of the most noble heritage of Greek culture. There was only one problem: Virgil’s story was a lie, imperial propaganda. And now the English were doing the same thing, trying to construct a made-up classical heritage for their burgeoning empire. Historians, artists, and poets joined the project of Roman retrieval. As Spencer put it in the Faerie Queene, “noble Britons sprong from Trojans bold.” London was known as “Troia Nova,” New Troy. Bate: “A key dimension of the Elizabethan process of nation building was the theory of translatio imperii: the westward shift of imperial dominion from Troy to Greece to Rome to England.” (130)
In this environment there was pressure on Shakespare to join this project and become England’s national mythmaker, an English Virgil for the stage. But Shakespeare wasn’t having it. Throughout the book, Bate shows over and over again how in his plays, Shakespeare rejects the Virgil option of a noble founding lie and opts instead for a different Roman mode, the mode of Ovid.
Ovid was much more skeptical of the Roman imperial project. Unlike Virgil, who pontificated that Rome was built on virtue and piety and duty, Ovid was more of a sly realist. For him, Rome was driven by eros and the body’s baser desires masquerading as something more noble. (In this Ovid is perversely sympathetic to Augustine’s critique of Rome in City of God. Augustine mocks Virgil’s mythmaking, and like Ovid, he also sees Rome as built on desire, though for Augustine it is disordered love.)
Bate spells it out: “Shakespeare was almost always Ovidian [and] strikingly anti-Virgilian.” Like Ovid, Shakespeare saw through the facade of English mythmaking, that underneath all the high-minded talk of England as a New Rome built on virtus and pietas, there was nothing but a teeming mass of men and women jostling with a conflicting mess of desires. And, more often than not, these desires overwhelmed and overruled their rational or religious or political goals.
As Bate says, “Shakespeare had no desire to be the Elizabethan Virgil.” (145) In fact he seemed to take the opposite stand, with “a counter-Virgilian, or at least an antiheroic, imagination.” (134)
There is an ethical payoff to this. By resisting the Virgilian mode, which saw war as an expression of virtus and a necessary component of nation-building, Shakespeare “draws the audience away from the image of the valiant hero and towards consciousness of the human cost of war.” Bate shows this most convincingly in Shakespeare’s rewriting of Thomas Nashe’s play Henry VI. Where Nashe’s play was full of nationalist rah-rah, meant to stir the audience into a patriotic frenzy, Shakespeare writes in a new scene where a father holds his dying son on the battlefield, crying, “My spirit can no longer bear these harms.” There is something perversely wrong about war, where sons die before their fathers, and no amount of English mythmaking can justify this horror.
The irony, of course, is that Shakespeare did become England’s national playwright, and, if you can set aside Spencer and Milton, he became England’s Homer and Virgil, too. But the Ovidian seeds of the empire’s own subversion were sown in Shakespeare’s project, too, seeds which would continue to sprout and raise pesky questions.
Shakespeare’s embrace of the Ovidian mode, with its insistence on the diversity and cacophony of human desire, is still with us, and it marks not only the story that England tells about itself, but the story that America tells about itself, too. It’s worth asking in what ways we are still negotiating between the “Virgilian” and “Ovidian” versions of our own story, the story of America.
In Book IV of Homer’s Odyssey, Helen has a short speech where she gets to tell the story of the Trojan War from her perspective. In her speech, Helen says that the Trojan War was fought because of her, because her self was “κυνώπιδος,” literally “dog-eyed.” It apparently means something close to “shameless.” The question immediately arises as to whether it carries the further connotation of someone who is sexually unchaste, and this opens an opportunity for translators to show their hand on gender.
So Fagles (1996) has Helen call herself a “shameless whore.” A bit strong?
Older translations are predictably more delicate and circumspect:
“my impudency’s sake” (Chapman, 1615)
“my most shameless self.” (Butler, 1900)
Pope (1725) goes even farther, infusing her line with a tint of Old Testament guilt:
“the stain of my ill-fated charms”
This is a charged moment! A woman, possibly the most famous “temptress” trope in all of world literature, gets a chance to speak for herself, to give her own reasoning for a horrific war. And jumping into the ring of this translation tradition, Emily Wilson (2018) drops her stunning version of the line:
“They made my face the cause that hounded them.”
Is this genius or is it too tricksy to be valid? “Hounded them” is a delicious play on “κυνώπιδος”/”dog-eyed,” an in-joke for those checking the Greek. But more importantly, Wilson flips the agency! It is the men’s fault for finding her hot, not hers. No blaming the victim here.
It is a confrontational translation choice. Wilson is taking on the entire tradition of male translators before her, and, to the extent that she is messing with the Greek, she is ultimately taking on Homer himself.
If slavish fidelity is the highest good in translation, then Wilson’s choice is sloppy or inaccurate or transgressive. But if strict fidelity is ultimately impossible, translation is a dialogic act of re-creation, and every translator, by virtue of their human finitude, brings their self into the text, then Wilson’s choice is a brilliant move. Helen’s complex mix of action, passivity, and reaction is a foundational set of figures that reverberates through the centuries. It’s worth fighting about, it’s worth subverting, it’s worth smashing and rebuilding.
In the Ancient Near East context of the Hebrew Bible, with its strict gender segregation, any interaction between a man and a woman in public is a fraught moment. This is the background context for Elijah’s encounter with the Widow of Zarephath in I Kings 17.
As Robert Alter points out, there is a literary type-scene in the Bible of the “well betrothal.” In the standard version of the scene, a man encounters a woman at a well and they interact in a way that leads to betrothal and marriage. (Some examples include Abraham’s slave finding Rebekah at a well, Jacob meeting Rachel at a well, and Moses meeting his wife at a well.)
The story often includes the man asking the woman for a drink of water. It is a line that could be read as a chivalric formality or a pick-up line (or both). It’s ambiguous.
Once you can see the basic contours of the type-scene, you can see how the story of Elijah and the Widow of Zarephath plays with the form.
First, it’s odd that Elijah meets the woman not at the female-gendered space of the well, but in the traditionally male-gendered space of “the gate of the town,” the place where the elders of the city would meet. Why is that? Given later references to the widow’s “household,” it could indicate that she is a woman of some status. Or it could be a sign that there is a male leadership vacuum because of the famine. (How did her husband die?) A woman, on the verge of starvation, gathering sticks at the village gate, a place of relative prestige, is a pretty bleak image. But that’s not the most striking subversion of the literary form. The most striking subversion is that Elijah says the standard male line of the type-scene, “Bring me a little water,” but this does not lead to betrothal, marriage, or sex. The standard form of the scene re-affirms a Natural order. The well suggests fertility, the woman giving water suggests fertility, the whole scene suggests the normal reproductive cycle of human life. Elijah and the Widow subvert this “Natural” order. Instead of a fertile well, there is a drought. Instead of a fertile woman, a widow. Instead of a would-be patriarch, there is a celibate prophet. The only source of life in this passage is not the Natural order but the Word of the Lord.
I can’t shake the powerful symbolism of Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist prime minister of India, doing yoga on the United Nations lawn.
In the US we’ve come to see yoga as a fitness genre for white women seeking wellness, peace & tranquility, but this obscures the historical reality that modern posture-based yoga was created in the context of an emerging Indian nationalist identity in the 19th and 20th centuries.
It’s important to note that prior to this, the practice of posture-based yoga was peripheral to mainstream Hinduisms and even seen as an aberration from the best loci of Hindu faith and practice. There is evidence that prior to the twentieth century, mainstream Hindus looked down on yoga as not the best that Hinduism had to offer, even an embarrassment.
Nationalism is defined by the twin habits of creating “old” national myths and obscuring recent innovations. Modi’s Hindu nationalism is no different, as it claims an ancient heritage for modern posture-based yoga, which is false, and ignores the relatively recent creation of modern posture-based yoga in the last two centuries.
The historical reality is that, yes, yoga is an extremely old Indian tradition, but ancient yoga practices (of which there are many different schools) looked almost nothing like what we call yoga today.
Under Modi’s regime, yoga has become a tool of the state to assert Hindu hegemony. He has set up an official “Ministry for Yoga” and has pushed for yoga to be compulsory in Indian schools. Not surprisingly, Muslim and Christian minorities have protested that this would force them to violate their own religious beliefs.
But here’s Modi, doing yoga on the UN lawn. This is not yoga as a vehicle for peace, love, and understanding, but yoga as a tool of religious nationalist ideology.
It’s worth asking, is there any functional difference between Modi the Hindu nationalist using yoga and Trump the Christian nationalist using the Bible?
Obviously obviously obviously, Hinduism and Christianity are so different that even to call both of them religions is to mischaracterize both. And yoga as a set of techniques in completely different than the Bible as a collection of sacred texts compiled over centuries.
But the way that nationalism can instrumentalize and use any religious or cultural identity for its own ends is the parallelism that I see here. More specifically, the way that nationalism can use any cluster of beliefs, practices, and texts that we call a “religion” for violence and oppression is the parallelism that I see here.
Even yoga, something that we Americans tend to see as nonviolent, can be used as a tool of oppression.
I just finished a biography of Benjamin Rush, written by Stephen Fried. Rush was a friend of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. (For all you Hamilton fans, you’ll be sad to know that Hamilton is definitely the evil villain in this book, ha! They hated each other.)
Benjamin Rush was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and for my money, one of the most important Founding Fathers. Reading this book, it was frankly shocking how much of the American political tradition seemingly originated with Rush. Consider this list:
He was an early proto-abolitionist, writing about the evils of slavery even before the Revolutionary War. (A lot of people hated him for this.) In 1773 he wrote,
“[It is] useless for us to denounce the servitude to which the Parliament of Great Britain wishes to reduce us, while we continue to keep our fellow creatures in slavery just because their color is different from ours.”
When the Continental Congress met to write the Constitution, Rush was part of a small group who tried to get the US Constitution to abolish slavery, and recognize full citizenship and voting rights for black people. Their efforts failed, obviously, but it’s amazing to think that he was pushing for all this at that early date.
Almost a century before the Civil War, he was already calling to make lynching illegal and crunching the numbers to argue for reparations for slavery.
He was the first American to politically advocate for separation of church and state, when as a delegate to the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention of 1776, he argued against making political candidates profess faith in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and in the Christian Bible, effectively opening up public office to Jews, deists, and atheists.
He was an early advocate for public education. He wrote that America needed “one general, and uniform system of education, [which] will render the mass of the people more homogeneous, and thereby fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government.”
He was also an early advocate for women’s education, believing that, in a republic, women should be allowed to learn all of the same subjects as men.
He was an early advocate for gun control. Very shortly after the Second Amendment was passed, he was already publicly saying it should be removed and militias disbanded.
He advocated for prison reform, believing that the American penal system treated prisoners in unjust and dehumanizing ways.
I even read a paragraph in one of his essays where he offhandedly mentions that we should consider extending rights and liberties to animals.
He was America’s most famous doctor, the Fauci of his day. He was an early advocate for vaccination. He even set up shop outside the Continental Congress to give smallpox inoculations to any of the delegates who wanted one!
When the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 hit, he advocated for the strongest measures against the disease, and people *hated* him for it. The epidemic got super political, with the two parties treating the epidemic in drastically different ways, and Rush got caught in the political crossfire. (Sound familiar?)
Unlike most of the Founding Fathers — Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams, for example — who rejected many essential parts of the Christian faith, Rush maintained a belief in Jesus as the Son of God even as he tried to reconcile his faith with Enlightenment philosophy. It didn’t always work. And he went through periods of doubt in his faith.
But perhaps the biggest part of Benjamin Rush’s legacy is that he pretty much created the discipline of mental health studies in America. Unlike most doctors and intellectuals in his day, Rush took the unorthodox position that madness was not caused by spiritual or moral failure but by physical causes in the brain and body. This was seen as dangerously revolutionary. He believed that once these physical causes for mental illness were discovered, they could be treated medically.
And in an argument fusing mental health with racial justice that would echo even into the present day, Rush argued that when black slaves acted in immoral ways, it was because of the mental health traumas inflicted upon them by the institution of slavery itself.
In short, the guy was full of ideas, and he never stopped. Reading his biography made my head spin. The book was endlessly fascinating and greatly deepened my knowledge of the world of the American Enlightenment in which Rush lived. Our world is not his, and my beliefs are not his, either, but we wouldn’t have gotten here without his genius.
I find myself sitting in a church when a woman up front reads the lectionary passages for the week from a lectern sculptured in the shape of a large, blackened eagle. The Old Testament reading is II Kings 2, when Elijah passes on the prophet’s mantle to Elisha. It is one of those Old Testament stories that shines not only for its devotional or theological virtues for the faithful, but also as a literary masterpiece on its own terms.
At the climax of the story, right as Elijah is “separated” from Elisha by “a chariot of fire,” Elisha cries out one of the saddest lines in the whole Bible: “Father, father! The chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” It is a cry of profound loss and grief, but the grief is rendered even more poignant because the phrase is opaque to us. Why would Elisha specifically mention the chariots and horsemen, of all things, in this severing moment? Why not say “Don’t leave!” or “How am I to live without you?” or just “No!”
It occurs to me as I sit there that I could go digging for answers as to what this enigmatic phrase means. I could consult a Bible dictionary to learn what the Ancient Near East symbolism of divine chariots was, how Israel must surely keep up with the Canaanite Joneses, furnishing their god with his own slick ride and entourage. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll even find a theological explanation, that the chariots of fire reveal some aspect of the character of YHWH. Or what if “The chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” is simply an Israelite cuss? Something that a lesser man would yell when stubbing his toe, but here befits the awfulness of the moment?
My mind returns to its body, entombed in the skeletal pain of sitting on a pew and the thick, grey, dead air of a gaping sanctuary, to the moment at hand. Having brushed the commentaries off the table of my mind, I am left with a feeling, the feeling of realizing someone else might be in the room with you, the same feeling you would get from hearing a small mammal in the walls, or a ghost knocking around the sump pump. This is the thrill that the unknown may escape you, that there are supernatural insects that your prying hands have not killed and stuffed into the pocket of your toddler overalls.
I realize in that moment that I do not want to know what “The chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” means, that if someone were to sit down next to me and tell me exactly what it meant, it would kill it, like a triumphant dog with a squirrel in its mouth, and I would feel only disappointment and shame.
I want something like a National Park Act for the Bible, to say that there are certain words or sentences or even entire passages that would be better left alone in their pristine beauty, instead of bulldozed over into doctrinal or ethical subdivisions. Is this irrational or selfish or silly? Perhaps. But at bottom, my hunger for meaning also wants meaning itself to escape me and remain throbbingly alive, with the power to raise my hair against my will and raise the dead against theirs.
This poem took me today. Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson, a multiracial suffragette of the Harlem Renaissance, is writing about World War I. She saw World War I as an opportunity for Black people to show their mettle, to earn their place in the civic fabric of the United States. Somewhat paradoxically, she saw the meat grinder of World War I as a path of liberation for Black Americans.
But as fascinating as the background context of the poem is, it was the foreground contemporary resonance that first struck me. How many of us join Dunbar-Nelson in watching the horrors of the Russia/Ukraine conflict unfold, and feel like she did, sitting at home, doing what feels like pointless things, while a heroic battle wages elsewhere? And for us the feelings of connection and estrangement are only ratcheted up higher. Thanks to social media, we are closer to this war than any humans have ever been who are this far from the battlefield. We see the real suffering of real people, and we are rightly moved and outraged. We weep with those who weep.
Yet our estrangement is even deeper than Dunbar-Nelson. At least she could do something tangible with her hands, sewing something of the materiality of the world. For many of us, the same enmeshment in social media that enables us to see the war from a front row digital seat also removes us from encountering the world as it is, before our eyes, in our local spaces, felt to the touch. And most disturbingly, a real war with real people can become a digital abstraction, a gladiatorial spectacle, a NATO Cinematic Universe™️.
In spite of this, there is something redemptive about what this poem offers us. It is a mirror for reflection, and like any mirror, we may not like what we see, but seeing the painful truth may be that first step of redemption. Dunbar-Nelson’s own restlessness forces us to ask what it is that makes us restless about a conflict on the other side of the world and the heroic desire to jump into the fight.
The poem forces us to ask whether her desire, her restlessness, is actually pointed in the right direction. And the same is true for us. Those of us who are Christians like to pretend that Jesus’ death on the cross was a famous event, a viral video, from the moment it happened. This is not true. As Fleming Rutledge says, the crucifixion was an embarrassing death of a nobody at the frontier borders of the Roman Empire in a province far removed from the rich, the famous, the educated, the cultured, and the powerful. It was just some random state torture and execution buried deep in the subreddits of the Roman Empire. It was the furthest thing from anything heroic happening at that time. And it was the means by which God saved the world.
The cross calls us to a different kind of heroism. As tempting as it may be to want to heroically and violently jump into history in a great battle elsewhere, the way of the cross is in the opposite direction, right here, in front of our faces. Not seeking glory but receiving a transformative grace in hidden places. Not giving violence but receiving it with unflinching, prophetic honesty, toward reconciliation. Not pining for Manichaean battles between the forces of good and evil, but recognizing that a far greater spiritual battle is waging inside every one of us. Perhaps the most “heroic” thing we can do is not first to go and fight but to take honest stock of the spiritual conflict erupting within our own souls. Perhaps the most “heroic” thing we can do is not to go and fight but to be courageous enough to welcome refugees and immigrants, from Ukraine, yes, but also Syria, Afghanistan, Haiti, Mexico, El Salvador, even at great cost to our selves and the Economy, that great Golden Calf of American Christianity. Perhaps the most “heroic” thing we can do is confront the fissures of racism that still gape in our communities, awaiting more of us to die to ourselves and listen to each other. Perhaps the most “heroic” thing we can do is sit there with someone as their husband or sister is dying, courageous enough to say the word “resurrection.” Each of us has hidden crosses, right there in front of us, if we are willing to look.
None of this is to make light of the Russia/Ukraine conflict. May our depth of compassion for them only grow as the conflict drags on. But as Dunbar-Nelson, stuck at home during the Great War, stitches “the little useless seam,” I ask: What little healings can we patch together in the little worlds right in front of our faces?
One of the most profound things my parents taught me is that “humility” is a word with many definitions. (The best teachers are the ones who are learning alongside their students, and my parents were visibly learning about this truth when I was a kid.)
What comes to your mind when you think about the word “humility?” For some, humility means not thinking too highly of yourself. For others, it means always giving God all the glory when someone compliments you. For others, it means always putting yourself down, even in jest, so people don’t think you’re too arrogant.
But humility, like all of the works of love, is a quality that looks different in different people. And humility takes different forms depending on its object.
There is a kind of humility directed at God, that acknowledges the infinite difference between God and humanity, the vast “distance” traveled in the Incarnation of Jesus, and the magnitude of God’s grace.
There is another kind of humility directed at Holy Scripture, to not stand over it with critical arrogance, but to sit under the Word of God, to receive its revelation patiently, quietly, openly.
There is another kind of humility directed at the earth, seeing it not as a pile of raw resources waiting to be conquered and consumed but as a vast, interconnected ecosystem of creatures and things all spoken into existence by God, all dependent upon God for their existence, all praising God by virtue of their existence.
And there is another kind of humility, one that I think is very important, but doesn’t first come to mind when thinking of the definition of “humility.” There is a kind of humility that recognizes that we don’t have unfettered access to someone else’s soul and their walk with God.
I have seen great spiritual harm done when someone in spiritual authority assumes that a conversation provides a panoramic view into someone else’s soul. It does not. Any conversation is only a tiny glimpse of someone else’s inner space.
Humility is perhaps never closer to love than when it is the humility of admitting that we only have the tiniest windows into the work of God within another person.
So what does this kind of love-in-humility look like, practically? It means staying curious instead of putting people in premade boxes. It means asking questions before giving advice. It means holding someone’s pain in the solidarity of lament instead of papering positivity over it. It means watching yourself, closely, to see how your own sinful nature flares up when encountering the sins of another. It means believing that even though you will never fully comprehend the person in front of you, God’s Spirit is more present to them than you are. And it means believing that, even though we frail humans are dark mysteries to one another, God’s Spirit still knits us together in Christ, and real, loving community is possible.
grab some water, the kingfishers are on fire 