A Better Age of Daughters

My heart was warmed recently by a surprise invitation to a gathering of young ladies I used to teach. These young ladies are now in their thirties, and still as pretty as I remember them. Yes, I said this, even though in today's climate saying that your students are pretty immediately makes people want to call the police.

The thing is that I was brought up to be honest especially in the matter of compliments, whether accepting or offering. You could stretch irony, sarcasm, self-deprecation and suchlike only so far, because it was understood that humility was right but that pretence was not. And so if you said someone was clever, you had better have meant it; and if someone said you were a well-behaved young man, you said, "At the moment."

I remember the moment of crystal clarity when I realised I was not particularly good-looking but also not particularly ugly. I sought comfort in the phrase 'pleasantly ugly'. 'Somewhat uninteresting' was my second choice.

The other thing is that my paternal grandfather in particular encouraged us to see the good in people. That extended to trying to see people in the best light not only metaphorically but aesthetically. You looked them over until you could capture the best memory of them — something which modern digital photography tends to obviate by saturation bombing.

And so, yes, the students I remember were pretty. All of them. In different ways. And they have grown up well, and I am happy for them and the surprise invitation I received.

Subpotential

Hrrm. I have to admit I am trying to do too many things with too little. This is not good in many ways, but it does make for greater humility. That is always an asset.

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Update: See, I said it would be a win-win situation. *grin*

Belshazzar

One of the most fearsome images of my childhood was that of Belshazzar's feast. It is the scene, described in the fifth chapter of the Book of Daniel, in which part of a hand appears and writes mysterious glyphs upon the plaster of a wall, illuminated by candlelight. That is what is referred to whenever someone mentions 'the writing on the wall' as a sign of coming doom.

Daniel writes:

But (thou, O Belshazzar) hast lifted up thyself against the Lord of heaven; and they have brought the vessels of his house before thee, and thou, and thy lords, thy wives, and thy concubines, have drunk wine in them; and thou hast praised the gods of silver, and gold, of brass, iron, wood, and stone, which see not, nor hear, nor know: and the God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy ways, hast thou not glorified:

Then was the part of the hand sent from him; and this writing was written. And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.

These are ominous words indeed, and verily, that night, Belshazzar is slain and Babylon falls to Darius.

Sudden downfalls are always, in retrospect, presaged by mounting desires to find glory and claim it for oneself. Bellerophon rides Pegasus toward Olympus and is cast down; Phaethon rides the chariot of Helios to fiery doom; Icarus flies so high that his wings disintegrate; Herod claims glory as a god and is struck down by worms; Nebuchadnezzar claims that Babylon is the product of his might and honours his majesty, and loses his mind. The trick, as with most forms of power, it seems would be to diffuse the energies before they burn you up; it is self-destroying to keep glory to oneself, especially if one does not deserve it.

Whatever people think of the Bible (and indeed, of any other book of lessons), the fact is that there is learning to be had in it. There are reminders of human limits and, with those, the idea of redemption.

Nebuchadnezzar, acting like a beast of the field, is eventually restored; Belshazzar, who has never shown anything but blasphemous license, is not. Icarus, soaring too high, has his broken body recovered by Daedalus, more cautious and slightly wiser. So endeth the lesson.

Worthless?

Today's post was triggered by something somebody said about how worship comes with a sense of one's personal unworthiness. I think that's partly justifiable; after all, you are indeed facing the Infinite and Eternal — compared to such things, you might feel finite and timebound. But further examination proves that the position of unworthiness is philosophically and theologically untenable beyond certain limits.

Let's begin with some simple assumptions. Let's say you are conscious that God is infinitely greater than you, and not bound by time, space or any physical limitation. This makes you feel infinitely small. I would say that you have a perception problem. Why? How on earth are you perceiving (or conceptualising) infinity (whether infinitely great or small)? The Good Book says that God has set the idea of the infinite universe in the hearts of men (see Ecclesiastes 3:11). If this is true (I am assuming you must believe it is so), then you have a piece of that infinity and eternity in you. You are only a smaller infinity, a kind of aleph-null (for the mathematically inclined, look here).

You cannot therefore be thinking of yourself as worthless, only less worthy than you think you ought to be.

But that's wrong too.

Let's go to another assumption. The standard of 'worth' must be external to the things being assigned a value of 'worth', or else it can't be used as a benchmark. God must be the source of this standard, or else 'worthiness' with respect to God is a useless measure. So either you are not worthy enough (according to God), in which case you can't even aspire to come before Him or worship Him or even interact in any other way with Him; or you are worthy enough — and it's not because of you, but because He has assigned you a sufficient value of 'worth' so that you may approach Him.

You cannot therefore be too unworthy, and to think you are is actually some sort of negative pride or false humility (or humility based on false assumptions).

There are hymns with lines like, "I, though so unworthy, still am a child of His care..." and those have quite another meaning. It means that you are indeed unworthy of your own merit, but you are thankful that he has assigned you sufficient merit to be worthy of grace.

But what is the textual evidence for all this? Many Christians think that philosophy is the next worst thing to sorcery, and the textual evidence for it is that human philosophy (the philosophy of men, human philosophers, the philosophy of the world etc) is quite soundly rejected as long as the basis does not accept the major premise. That major premise is of course that God exists and interacts with us, and St Paul, for example, uses philosophy based on this premise quite shamelessly and extensively (his own words, not mine).

So let's look at the text. From searching the Good Book in its many versions, I have yet to see a human claim unworthiness successfully. God does say that many things are worthless or of no value, but the text says even physical training has value. The text also says that humans have been given (or will be given, conditional on their free-willed request or acceptance) many things — gifts, grace, wisdom, peace... the list is very long, and all of it confers and implies God-assigned worth.

Hebrews 12:3 does caution against the peril of considering oneself more highly than one ought (after all, that was the sin of the greatest of the Kherubim), but it also enjoins us to consider ourselves with sober judgement, and the next few verses talk about our gifts. The implication here is clear: don't think too highly of yourself, but do evaluate your worth according to the standards of God.

A similar concept arises when humans are told that the wise man should not boast of his wisdom, the strong man of his strength, or the rich man of his riches; rather if they must boast, they should boast of how well they know God, specifically in terms of the countervailing virtues of kindness (a scholar should be kind and teach, not mock, the less-educated), justice (an officer should be just and not tyrannical in his exercise of power) and righteousness (a gentleman should be righteous in his use of wealth, and be generous, not hold on to it out of avarice).

In other words, you can hold on to your sense of self-worth, provided you know how that worth is calibrated and what it is measured against. It is no sin to be honest, but it is a sin to bear false witness; in this context, 'bearing false witness' means to either inflate or deflate your actual worth. The Good Book tells us not to use dishonest scales or measures. And this is why we have to soberly judge ourselves.

Have we done what we are told to do? Are we fit (as in exactly a match for) the tasks we have been given? The point is that we fail these tests often, but we do succeed sometimes. And when we fail, we suffer the consequences, but we also know that the Master does not hold most failures to be the be-all and end-all.

So, we're not so worthless after all. What we need to do is figure out how much we're worth and then use that capital to do what we're supposed to do.

Humbled

I think of two sets of lyrics, I suppose, when I see or hear the word 'humbled'.

The way I've been wired over the years (or the way my genes betray me, take your pick), one set is religious in origin, one is familial (pehaps tribal) in nature. And both are very English, I think.

The first one is A E Housman's 1887. It's a moving poem on Queen Victoria's jubilee year. But more than that, it is a celebration of the virtues that Housman looked for and described in the men of his time and his country. Here's the fourth verse.

To skies that knit their heartstrings right,
To fields that bred them brave,
The saviours come not home to-night:
Themselves they could not save.

I don't think I'm as good as any of the ancestors I've known. I think I'm less competent, more wicked, inclined more often to steer away from onerous responsibilities. Which brings me to the 1870 hymn, At The Name Of Jesus. This is the fourth verse.

Humbled for a season, to receive a name
From the lips of sinners unto whom He came,
Faithfully He bore it, spotless to the last,
Brought it back victorious when from death He passed.

The Victorians are often mocked for their social traits. But they were surprisingly full-blooded, and their era was full of literary triumphs and tempered optimism. They could meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat them both just the same, as Kipling wrote in 1895. When Queen Victoria died in 1901, an age preeminent in significance to the 20th and 21st centuries died with her. And that humbles me too.