By Maria Sermersheim
Meditatione Ignis
Spring is well underway, and robins are consistently flying into windows at my friends’ Chris and Luisa’s house. It is their first spring in their new home and neighborhood, and evidently, the robins are quite invested in what they find in their sliding glass door and the neighbor’s car mirror. As we were discussing the robins’ sorry plight and inevitable concussions, Chris suggested that the birds must see their reflections, perceive them as other birds and try to attack them. He said, “It must be hard when you see competition everywhere, but it’s only yourself.” I had to laugh at the way he said it, but his statement also gave me pause: surely I, too, sometimes perceive competition where there is none. Surely I, too, fabricate opposition out of my own misconceptions and misunderstandings. I, like the robins, can run into reflections of my own pride and other vices.
It seems that all of our lives are a project of seeing and acting rightly, which is to say, truly and lovingly. I’m beginning to think that the first step, seeing rightly, is often the hardest. As many times as we may talk through a situation with a friend, as many data points as we may gather about a specific decision or event, there will always be details to which we are blind. Not every relevant piece of information is accessible to us, and due to our own personal experiences, we receive information colored by analogies to the past. Our mind will highlight different aspects of the truth (often unbeknownst to us!) because we are more sensitive to certain particularities. Cognizant of our many handicaps to perceiving the truth, where are we left? Are we always left beholding our own reflections rather than looking through the glass?
The situation cannot be so hopeless as that. Our particular ways of receiving life are part of who we are, and that element is certainly not something to be lamented. Rather, we should recognize humbly that we are always blind in many ways — though we do see by the light of Christ and the gifts of knowledge and wisdom and prudence, we can never comprehend the whole. And this admission of our limitations should be freeing, because we know that true wisdom, to see and act rightly in all situations of life, must come from God. The first chapter of Sirach, one of the books of wisdom literature in the Bible, repeatedly describes how the beginning and perfection of wisdom is fear of the Lord. This is how we must proceed, as the prophet Micah wrote: “You have been told, O mortal, what is good, and what the Lord requires of you: Only to do justice and to love goodness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). Walking humbly means acknowledging our limited ability to perceive the truth of things and allowing the Lord to take our hand and guide us through the many perils of life.
Despite our best efforts, by nature — the beautiful, limited human nature that God created for us — we are always somewhat blind to the full truth of circumstances and events. But if we actively remember our blindness and choose to walk every step of the way humbly with God, then our fear of God will give us a share in wisdom, and we can avoid the fate of the robins. We can act according to reality rather than attack our own reflections.