We all want to be good. We all want to make a difference. We want our parents to be proud of us. We want to feel successful. Previously, I have written that to be truly successful is to be a hero, which by definition comes with sacrifice. I have also expressed my personal frustration with how God's calling to submit our will to His will becomes a little overwhelming at times. Eventually, we experience that His yoke is sweet and His burden is light, and we learn to accept our own imperfect participation in His economy of grace. The question today is where does one start on this path?
St. Augustine taught us that our spiritual life starts with God's grace. It is not we that effect our own salvation (Pelagianism) or even we that initiate it by approaching God (Semi-Pelagianism), but rather God who formed us, created us, and placed us into the paradise of joy, and when we disobeyed His commandment He did manifest Himself to us through our Lord, God and Saviour Jesus Christ (Coptic Liturgy of St. Basil). How do we respond to that rapprochement that God is seeking?
If we look at our spiritual life as our "capacity to submit to and accept God's love" then let us evaluate that as any other skill with Maslow's Four Stages of Competence. Briefly, as we learn any skill we first know so little that we do not even know how little we know (Stage 1 - Unconscious Incompetence). As we start to learn, we first simply realize how little we know, without necessarily having learned anything (Stage 2 - Conscious Incompetence). With time, we learn more and more, but it takes very deliberate attention to what we are doing to demonstrate the skill (Stage 3 - Conscious Competence) and eventually the skill becomes second nature (Stage 4 - Unconscious Competence). The most dangerous person is the person who thinks they are competent, but they are simply unaware of their incompetence. 
This awareness of limitations is critical in fields like surgery, where the individual is given full license to do "what they feel is appropriate," which tempts some surgeons to overestimate their abilities. This is equally relevant for people in a position of authority in the church, who are not just responsible for the body, but the soul and spirit of the parishioners. It is for this reason we are discouraged by St. James from becoming teachers because of the high stakes associated with leading someone astray (Mark 9:42; James 3:1). Therefore, I would argue that the most important take home message from Maslow's Four Stages is not that we should learn to be competent but that we should learn to be conscious of our incompetence and aware of our limitations.
If we think deeply about conscious incompetence, we realize that it is essentially our permanent spiritual state on earth because we can only see Him dimly for now no matter how much "competence" we may gain over the course of our life (1 Cor 13:12). Therefore, we cannot be better than Moses who "continually climbed to the step above and never ceased to rise higher, because he always found a step higher than the one he had attained" (St. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses). Our spiritual conscious incompetence is simply a longer, more technical term for humility, which is not a virtue that we should actively seek, but rather a virtue that is a natural byproduct of being conscious of our own incompetence. This increase in awareness comes either naturally, as a function of grace, or from suffering, which Dr. Jean-Claude Larchet teaches us that God, "without ever being the cause of sickness and suffering, can nevertheless allow them to occur, and he can use them to further the ill person's spiritual progress" (Theology of Illness, page 47). Perhaps we must wait for God's surgical excision of the cancer of our pride, but with self-examination we may reach the realization that we perpetually do not know as much as we think we know.
What do we do with this information? I will sit with myself. I will question myself. I will study theology only so far as it brings me to the Eucharist to partake of His Body and Blood in a perpetually anamnestic search for spiritual competence. I will value love over dogma, praying for more bold steps toward radical unity. May God give us the gift of humility to know our limitations, so that we may give space for His grace to work.
No comments:
Post a Comment