Thursday of Week 22 in Ordinary Time (Year II)
1 Corinthians 3:18-23 | Psalm 23:1-6 | Luke 5:1-11
Make no mistake about it: if any one of you thinks of himself as wise, in the ordinary sense of the word, then he must learn to be a fool before he really can be wise. (1 Corinthians 3:18)
In my work as a freelance consultant, I usually have to start by asking questions about my clients’ operating environment, issues, expectations, etc. I often have to fight a tendency to correlate my own IT experience with theirs, as that usually ends with me making unwarranted assumptions about what’s happening in their world.
But it also means that I can look incompetent to the client, by asking questions that are deemed “stupid”. Upon further digging, though, it often turns out that they don’t actually know the answers either, which can be an embarrassing realisation when their own subordinates go “well, actually, we don’t have any such thing in place” or “um, that’s not how it works”.
Former U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld answered media queries about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction with his now-infamous “there are known knowns” response. Using his known/unknown matrix, my clients’ known knowns really aren’t. A major part of my day job is convincing them to reclassify these things as known unknowns that require further investigation, before proposing solutions to their problems.
Sometimes, though, that takes major effort. After all, everyone loves to claim that they’re humble, but no one likes to look like he just fooled himself.
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Rumsfeld avoided talking about a particular quadrant in that matrix: the unknown knowns, the things we know, but convince ourselves that we don’t. Mostly inconvenient things like torture, atrocities and miscellaneous war crimes.
And “justifiable” sins, the ones we think don’t hurt anyone to any significant degree, and are therefore “inconsequential to God” – but we still don’t like to dwell on them:
- The extra office supplies we took home for personal use, because “they already budgeted for it, so they don’t lose anything”.
- The many times we enjoyed free rides on buses by “unconsciously” keeping our travel cards in our pockets, because we were too preoccupied with other things, and anyway “LTA keeps raising bus fares, cannot afford lah!”
- The queues for free stuff that we jump by “filling in that gap someone left in the middle”, otherwise “sure run out one!”
- The loading bays we park in because “yah what, I’m loading my stomach mah!”
Part of my daily reflection centers around opening the “inner eye” to the things I did earlier in the day, and whether I’m OK with them. In the process, I often have to struggle with my own pride, answering an initial “I think I handled that situation quite well” with “nope, you took way too much pleasure proving him wrong, even if you didn’t show it…much”.
Unknown knowns may be painful to recollect, but we can’t grow as Christians without acknowledging all our sins, even the secret ones in which we think no one got hurt or even knew. One person is always hurt, one person always knows: the One who suffered and died to redeem us from all our transgressions, only to watch us walk away from Him all over again.
Open my eyes, Lord, to the many ways that I hurt you each day. Show me the depth of Your pain, and help me to turn away from sin and towards You, for You are deserving of all our love and praise. Amen.