Feast of Saint Bonaventure, Bishop and Doctor of the Church
At that time Jesus exclaimed:
I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth,
for although you have hidden these things
from the wise and the learned
you have revealed them to the childlike.
— Matthew 11:25-27
The peace of the Lord be with you. In the early years of my career doing counseling I spent a lot of time working with individuals in recovery. As such, I would very often be reaching out to people who had been involved with Alcoholics Anonymous for a number of years and was always amazed at the tremendous wisdom and insight many of these individuals possessed. One of the tenants of Alcoholics Anonymous is that to recover you must be brutally honest with yourself. One of the popular sayings that I heard frequently was “that sometimes you just don’t know what you just don’t know”. When you put those two principles together, you can begin to recognize how important it is to know when you’re out of your element — when you don’t know what you’re doing, or you begin to realize that you don’t have the command of the subject area that you thought you had. Jesus himself had some of these moments with the Pharisees. It’s not that the Pharisees were bad people, they were just people who were overly confident in their knowledge base despite the facts present about who Jesus really was.
Jesus tells us today to be really teachable we have to be childlike — understanding that there’s always room to learn something more. And very often those new things we learn open new doors and create new possibilities. It seems to me that very often in our modern world people are credited more for what they know than they are for their curiosity or their desire to learn more. While it is important to be confident in oneself, it is equally important to recognize that there’s always more to life than what meets the eye.
May God grant us the grace once again to remain teachable and humble that we may be filled with His wisdom. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.