I am at a strange spot in my life. I have a rigorous four year BA under my belt with a few extra courses just for fun and a nearly completed Master's degree. To my family and most friends this sounds like quite the achievement and they are proud of me, thinking I know oh so much. To my professors and many of my peers I am just a Masters' student, not that that is a bad thing, but it's common and not all that impressive. Now let me say this straight from the beginning, I am not looking to impress people; not by being smarter than anyone or measuring up anywhere on the academic scale. The issue I am facing right now is knowing enough to know that I don't know nearly as much as I thought I knew.
I thought that I had already come to this spot and just accepted it. There is a certain humility that most college students learn in there senior years, that they are just little students and that whatever grandiose ideas and firm foundations of knowledge they had are often little more than puffs of air. Briercrest is especially good at teaching these lessons because of the academic rigor, honesty, and pastoral care of each of the professors. Apparently the lesson gets re-taught at the Masters' level too but for me it wasn't so much my classes that did it this time as it was simply living every day life.
I was home for Thanksgiving enjoying some fantastic family time when my grandmother puts her hands just above my son's head (oh yeah, I have a son now just in case you read this blog and don't know my personally) and said that she was transferring energy to him. I asked where she had learned to transfer energy and she said that a woman did it to her not long ago and that it got rid of her headache. I explained that what she was doing was called Reiki and how channeling life force was important to some religions. She asked if it was dangerous. I thought about it and decided that it wasn't in this instance. She laughed at me and said that I knew too much. I agreed. I know enough to make things more complicated than they should be and I know enough to be dangerous.
What does it mean to know enough to be dangerous? It means that you know enough to make your own 'informed decisions' and can explain the reasoning behind them to convince people know know less than you that you are right, but you don't know enough to realize that you're quite wrong and unintentionally leading others astray.
On the other hand sometimes I feel like I barely know anything at all. This experience of a new marriage and a new child and new social setting has had me in a constant state of not understanding. Often times I do not understand how my wife works or how I should work in relation to her. (I think this is normal?) I do not know what the future holds for us, even less so now that she is unable to finish her degree here at Briercrest. After a long hard year of bad health and raging pregnancy hormones I am still unsure how or why the landscape changed now that the dust is settling. Life time friendships, gone; relationship with Briercrest, marred; peers, distant; family, here but I am unable to relate to them; my wife, lonely; and I am unable to fix any of them. And I tried in every way I knew how, I advocated, I mediated, I listened to all parties, I prayed, I took action, and at the end of the day I am exhausted and can barely wrap my mind around what happened. And then there are the larger issues in the world that I simply can not see far enough, do not understand and have no answer to; Russia's 'propaganda laws' and the suffering of real people, Western ideologies as neo-colonialism, Japan's nuclear waste pouring into the ocean, Canada's First Nations issues, the crisis in Syria, and Miley Cyrus just to name a few.
I used to think that maybe theology would have all the answers, that magical mixture of the very best humanity had to offer and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Instead I find myself not relying on theology for answers but, as always, upon God through faith. This is not to say that theology has been a wasted pursuit, far from it! The love of God and the love of wisdom are the most excellent pursuits in the world and the foundation for all other good pursuits. True theology brings us to the point of faith though, and in this instance it was through knowing too much and knowing that I know too little.
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