posted January 28, 2010 01:54 PM         

If we speak with unflinching authority and assurance, it is only because it is the custom of our people upon which we are all most dependent. "But the tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison," (James 3:8). The tongue is said to be the last and most difficult member to tame, and I can well confirm it.

We naturally long to make statements, to stand firm, and to assert. Questions, on the other hand, require patience, tact, humility, diplomacy, and, more than these, the courage, or ripeness of will, to confront uncertainty.

Such a thing seems almost unnatural to us, for it would appear counterintuitive, to question when the will is ripe. Nevertheless, although this is the exception, it is not hard to trace from the rule. It is merely the anomoly; something in nature which does not dominate (and the survival of which must not depend on dominance); it is rare to nature, and, yet, as natural as any other natural thing.

We must be certain, yes, but we must be certain, foremost, of our ignorance, and that there is no other course left open to us now but to inquire, and to confront the contradiction which halts our progressing assertions and bisects our path, like a river too wide and deep to cross. We must fashion a boat! We must evolve.

Beavers are not born building dams, -- well, perhaps, now they are, having only acquired the instinct through habit, practiced over many generations. Who knows that someday humans will not be born asking questions; rather than making statements? Perhaps asking questions will be as instinctual to us as gathering materials and building his dam is to the beaver. A great deal of what we call instinct is just tradition; deeply, generationally, ingrained habits, which, nonetheless, must still be remembered, taught, and passed down. Don't animals have their teachings and traditions, as we have ours, though we interpret these as "instincts"? But to return now to our point of origin, and the point of our discussion.

We learn, practice, and master what we teach; and we cannot but be in the process of learning while teaching, for there can be no mastery which is perfect (and has dispensed with learning), except it be divine, and scarcely accountable to mortal eyes. On earth, it is one of the finest things to see, that a man always has more to teach, who has discovered, having learned to discover, just how much he has to learn.

posted January 28, 2010 04:23 PM         

quote:

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We are all learning what we are teaching

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