Like a Child

Starting graduate school last Fall was a bit intimidating. I was surrounded by very, very bright students. Students who had studied much more theology than I had. Students fluent in the language of complex theories, precise hermeneutics, and classic metaphysical or ontological debates.

But I did not want to be intimidated. I wanted to show that I, too, belonged in graduate school. So after my first class at Harvard Divinity School, I walked up to the TA and made sure to use big words. I enthusiastically thanked her for her "trenchant" remarks to begin our class discussion.

"Trenchant?" she asked, a bit puzzled.

"Oh, no." I thought. I didn't use the right word. Now I look like a complete moron.

In fact, "trenchant" isn't exactly inappropriate in that context. But it is a bit unusual, if not awkward. And it took me a few weeks of graduate school to learn that although we have much to learn from Rahner's notion of the supernatural existential, the intricacies of Christology and soteriology, nuanced exegetical findings, and deep and rich tradition of Sacramental theology, our faith shouldn't be confined to big words or complicated theories.

Today's Gospel (Mt. 11:25-30) brings us back to the crux of our theology and reminds us that it's not about only about the theoretical, but also the practical. In other words, theology isn't just about books and knowledge, but about everyday experiences of grace. That's because theology is something we do.

This reminds me of another story:

There once was a young man who embarked on a journey to consult a sage about the meaning of life. After his long journey, he arrived at the home of the sage. The sage greeted him and offered him some water. The young man happily accepted. The sage took out a glass of water, put it on a table before him, took a pitcher of water, and began to pour it into the glass. Because the glass had already been filled, water spilled everywhere. The young man shouted, "But sir, the glass is already full!" The sage replied, "I know. And so are you. You are too full to learn from me."

We get a similar lesson from today's Gospel. It is easy for us to come to God confident and reasurred by all we have learned or all we think we know. But it is also easy to fall into a trap of thinking that we can know enough or even everything about God. My Foundations of Systematic Theology professor, Fr. Richard Lennan, taught me a valuable lesson early last year: no matter how much we study or what we think we know about God, God is always bigger. Always.

So it is actually quite dangerous to get caught up in theories and theologizing. Holding onto these studies can make us feel proud and confident in our faith, but it can also prevent us from learning further.

This is not to say that no one should waste their time learning about God or that Catholicism is somehow anti-intellectual. Instead, that we need to be careful about our studies and temper them with experiences in the world, in which we are constantly surprised by the goodness ... and unexpectedness of God at work in our life. This ultimately reminds us to rely on God's grace and not a specific definition of grace.

So today, instead of focusing on what we know or think we know about God, let us be like the "little ones" Jesus talks about, filled with awe and wonder, ready and open to receive God's grace and grow in it.