“The Knowledge of Love”
Psalm 139:1-18
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
9/4/16
Almost every
teacher who has ever stood in front of a classroom has been interrupted only to
hear that most disheartening question: “Is this going to be on the test?” I both
asked it and heard it.
I wonder. Did we doom ourselves to
this question by failing to answer convincingly the more fundamental question: What is the point of learning? Why do we have to learn about ancient Rome
and contemporary America? Why do we have to learn algebra and the Pythagorean
Theorem? Why do we have to learn Homer, Shakespeare, and Faulkner? Why do we
need to know the difference between DNA and GDP?
When middle and high schoolers asked me such
questions, I just regurgitated the party line with all the mind-numbing
dullness with which it had been regurgitated to me. “You need to learn this
information in order to learn how to learn,” I said. “You need an education to
get a good job.” And while these answers are not altogether wrong, they’re just
nebulous and oh, so uninspired – and uninspiring. It seems that a teacher would
fare no worse for having said, “Learn it because I’m the teacher, and I said so.
Besides, if you don’t, you fail.”
In his book To
Know as We Are Known: A Spirituality of Education, Parker J. Palmer says
that two principal things have driven humankind’s quest for knowledge. First,
simple curiosity motivates much learning. Palmer calls curiosity “an amoral
passion”1 because by itself, curiosity leads us toward knowledge for
its own sake and leaves us disconnected from deeper and wider purpose.
The second and
more powerful driver is control. “Control,” says Palmer, “is simply another
word for power, a passion notorious not only for its amorality but for its
tendency toward corruption.”2 Reducing knowledge to power inevitably
reduces both that knowledge and the entire created order to means to an end. So,
all things, animate and inanimate, become assets to be exploited or competitors
to be defeated.
When not
grounded in something deeper, curiosity compels us to do nothing more than to
“learn how to learn.” And control only prepares us to make money at any cost. Such
learning diminishes and dis-integrates everyone and everything around us. And
when we diminish and dis-integrate our world, we destroy ourselves, as well.
Palmer
suggests a third source of knowledge, a source “that begins in a different
passion and is drawn toward other ends.” This differently-acquired knowledge
does not lack for hard information and playful theory. It does, however, guide
us toward truth and wholeness that curiosity and control cannot offer.3
“Our spiritual
tradition,” says Palmer, claims that “the origin of knowledge is love. The deepest wellspring of our
desire to know is the passion to recreate the organic community in which the
world was first created.”4
When guided by
Love, the goal of learning and knowing is healing and restoration. It is to
re-connect ourselves to the deepest truths within and about us, and to
re-connect to those same truths within and about the rest of humanity, and the
rest of the creation. To experience that reconnection is to Know and to Love
God.
Such Love,
says Palmer, “is not a soft and sentimental virtue.” It’s the tough, sinewy,
“connective tissue of reality.” It lays permanent claim to us and often makes
disturbing demands on us. It calls and equips us to be known and knowable Love
in and for the sake of the world.5
Parker Palmer
is not the first to connect Knowledge and Love. Indeed, the title of his book
comes from Paul’s observation, “Now I know only in part, then I will know
fully, even as I have been fully known.” (1Cor. 13:12b) Paul includes this insight in
the same chapter in which he writes, “If I have…all knowledge…but have not
love, I am nothing.”
It’s useless
to argue it, but it’s easy to imagine Paul writing 1Corinthians 13 after having
just mediated on Psalm 139: “O Lord, you have searched me and known me.” God
learns and knows the psalmist. God’s knowledge is deeper than time itself. “My
frame was not hidden from you, when I was being…intricately woven in the depths
of the earth.”
The psalmist
knows that God knows that there is more to each of us than meets any human eye.
God knowingly loves us before we are physical realities to encounter in the
world. The psalmist knows that in God, then
and there get swept up in here and
now. Heaven and Sheol, daylight and darkness, yesterday and tomorrow – God
is not simply present to us in all of this, we are present in God in all of this. To “know fully, even as we have been fully known”
is to inhabit the timeless consciousness that is God – who is Love.
The psalmist
bears witness to the Love Knowledge God not only has for us, but the
kind of Love Knowledge God has in store for us as we begin learning to
love the Love that loves us and to know the Knowledge that knows us.
Doug Elliott is one of my favorite
storytellers to come to Jonesborough. Doug lives with his wife and son on a small,
off-the-grid farm in the Western NC foothills where every day he continues his
relentless, joyous, and impassioned study of and interaction with the natural
world. Quiet and unpretentious, Doug radiates the kind of humility, gentleness,
awareness, and patience I associate with a community elder, one who learns out of
wonderstruck Love for the creation and who shares that knowledge out of
grateful and hopeful Love for his neighbors. And Doug Elliott’s neighborhood is truly all-inclusive.
“We’re all
part of this miracle of creation,” he says. “And sometimes I think that my
desire to know about all these creatures is part of wanting to know myself…I’m
looking for the stories that connect those critters to us…Part of my passion is
trying to find more points of contact.”6
I hear Doug
saying: My passion is learning for the
sake of loving, because true Knowledge and true Love are inseparable.
It seems to me that the church has reduced
God’s omniscience, God’s all-knowingness into mere prescience, into God’s present
awareness of future events. I think the psalmist reveals a much more transforming
Knowledge. Seeing to the eternal core of the creation, God knows the wholeness, the fullness of who we are. And we discover
that wholeness and fullness by Knowing and Loving our communion with people,
animals, plants, water, the soil, and even the rocks themselves, who, Jesus
says, “will shout out” if his followers don’t.
In Christ, God reveals that while
not all is perfect, all is being redeemed in God’s Knowledge and Love.
In a few
minutes we’ll gather around Christ’s table to commune with him and with each
other. As you pass the bread and the cup, I invite you to say to the person
next to you: Know that you are Loved.
1To Know as We Are Known: A Spirituality of Education, Harper Collins, San Francisco, 1983. p. 8.
2Ibid. p 8.
3Ibid. p.8
4Ibid. p.8
5Ibid. p.9
7Ibid.
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