God Has Created A World That Teaches Us Necessary Humility
Religion Unplugged believes in a diversity of well-reasoned and well-researched opinions. This piece reflects the views of the author and does not necessarily represent those of Religion Unplugged, its staff and contributors.
(OPINION) The virtue Christians are supposed to practice above all other moral qualities is love. Every 10-year-old Sunday school student knows that.
This is not to say we always practice love or even that we mostly practice it. Obviously, we don’t. But we should.
If there’s a second-most-important spiritual virtue in the Christian hierarchy of good attitudes and behaviors, it’s probably this one: humility.
READ: Faith Deserves Better News Coverage — And Here’s How You Can Help
I alluded to humility in a previous column about ways in which we can effectively combat hate in our contentious and divided culture.
I want to say a bit more about it, though, for it seems God considers humility so important he’s built it into the very fabric of existence. It’s visible on a thousand fronts, from the ridiculously minuscule role our planet plays in the grand scheme of the cosmos to the daily examples of old people and even pets.
My mother, God rest her, grew up during the Great Depression in a clapboard house on a small farm in southeastern Kentucky. There were three generations under the roof of that little home: Mom, her parents and her paternal grandparents.
I don’t know if mom put it in exactly these words, but I got the sense that if she had a favorite family member, it was her grandfather, Lee Chestnut. She told me many fond stories about her Grandpa Chestnut.
As a young man in the late 1800s, Lee apparently was daring, strong, even violent. He got into trouble with the law in Kentucky — mom never found out what it was he’d done — and hopped a freight train to far-off Montana.
Out West, he became a cowboy. In an altercation over cattle, he killed a man on the range and, with the help of his ranch foreman, hid the body.
Later, when Kentucky had lost interest in his legal problems here, he came home and got married. He bought a piece of cheap land that was mainly forest, and worked as a night watchman to pay his bills while he labored days cutting trees and blasting the stumps with dynamite, trying to turn the place into a farm. That’s the farm my mom grew up on.
By the time mom came along, Lee was an old man. Because they all lived under the same roof, the three generations knew things about one another. Mom had little use for her grandmother, who she found controlling and relentlessly cranky.
When Grandpa Chestnut was still young, Granny Chestnut had unilaterally decided she was done with sex. So she placed a bolster pillow longways down their bed between them and warned Grandpa not to cross it.
“That part of my life was over when I was 40,” Grandpa once lamented.
Yet he stayed with Granny, and even doted on her.
He became a regular churchgoer and a deacon, I think.
He went deaf. Mom said he sat at the very front of the church — on the “mourner’s bench” at the foot of the pulpit, where sinners came to repent — because that was the only way he could hear the sermon. If the preacher droned on too long, Grandpa would tug the tail of his frock coat to remind him it was time for dinner.
At home, Grandpa always knelt beside his bed to pray before turning in. In the quiet house, Mom could hear him asking the Lord to please bless little Alice.
“That sweet old man,” mom would say. “Down on his knees, praying for me.”
Eventually, she started shaving Grandpa’s head because his eyes and hands weren’t steady anymore, and because the attention pleased him.
In the end, he lay helpless in a bed in that same farmhouse he’d built 40 years earlier, suffering from a broken hip, nursed by his son and daughter-in-law.
That’s how his life ended — the former outlaw and around-the-clock worker reduced to celibacy, helplessness and pain, dependent on the care of others.
My wife Liz brought to our marriage a black and white kitten named Walter, who from the get-go was full of sap and swagger. Nearly 15 years later, he’s still with us, still sleeping in our garage.
I’m not a cat person, but I’ve always liked Walter. You couldn’t not like him.
He was both lovable and ferocious. He enjoyed being held and petted, yet patrolled our yard as if he were a lion on the Serengeti stalking a herd of wildebeest. I don’t know whether cats have fantasy lives, but he seemed to think he was Simba. Or maybe Scar.
He scouted and skulked and slithered, and delivered to our kitchen door a steady supply of field mice, rabbits and chipmunks. He strutted around with his tail erect and then, for no reason, charged across the grass at a low, dead run as if shot from a cannon.
Walter’s not fast anymore. He’s arthritic. His teeth are so bad that he can only eat the softest, mushiest foods. He’s trembly and disoriented — he wanders under the wheels of our vehicles as we pull in the garage. We brake and wait on him to take a notion to amble on to his bed.
He can’t groom himself, so his fur became hopelessly matted and painful, and Liz had to take him to the veterinarian to be shaved. His head’s still fluffy, and so’s his tail. There’s some fur around his paws. Otherwise, he’s hairless.
He looks like a kitty poodle, which I’m sure isn’t the vision he used to have of himself. We can’t let him outside for fear that a hawk or a dog will kill him. The hunter has become prey.
But this is where God’s world takes nearly everything great and small. We wind up slow, broken, and afraid. We come into the world helpless, and we leave it helpless.
If we’re teachable, this gradual, inevitable decline imbues us with humility before we’re gone, which in turn leads us toward grace. We lose our delusions of power and importance. We discover our dependence on God and other people. We discover mercy for other poor souls who are struggling too. We discover, indeed, why the greatest of virtues is love.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.