In his Sonnet 116 (of 154), Shakespeare warns, in its third line, “love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” One’s love is not lessened by the beloved’s illness, disfigurement, or death, or even by his (or her) infidelity. If it does, it is not love. Infidelity? Try forgiveness…
“To err is human; to forgive, divine,” Alexander Pope reminds us in his Essay on Criticism. He also admonishes us not to play theologian in his Essay on Man. He warns, “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan / The proper study of mankind is man.” He has timely advice for us in his famous poem “A little learning is a dangerous thing,” for, here he tells us it can give us delusions of superiority born of superficial understanding unwarranted by our relative ignorance. There is no fool like an educated fool. Having scaled the heights of “alpine” knowledge, we soon realize that there is always more to learn when we see before us “distant scenes” of yet more mountains ahead: “The increasing prospect tires our wand’ring eyes / hills peep over hills, and Alps on Alps arise.” The beginning of wisdom, it has been said, comes with the awareness of one’s ignorance. As Plato tells us, Socrates famously said of himself, “I know that I know nothing.” Some of us try to be humble, but such humility as his is close to saintliness.
John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), is at once an adventure story and a religious allegory with practical life lessons. At one time, together with the family Bible, it comprised virtually all of a Puritan American settler’s home library. It chronicles the journey of Christian, a pilgrim in search of salvation in the Celestial City in the next life. With the help at different times of the good companions he meets on the way, among them Help, Faithful, Prudence, Piety, Charity, and Watchful, he survives a fall into the ‘Slough of Despond’ (despair), an encounter with the demon Apollyon, imprisonment in Doubting Castle, and the lure of material excess at Vanity Fair, resisting the trickery of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Mr. Malice, Mr. Liar, and Mr. Money-Love among others, along the way. Today’s Celestial City is undoubtedly the Casino, and its patrons include the Simpletons, Mr. Spendthrift, Ms. Gullible, and Mr. Money-Love, too.
In a largely illiterate society, much folk wisdom, many aphorisms, had to be learned by word of mouth or read aloud, as few could read, books were expensive, and libraries except among the privileged few were unknown. Yet the wisdom of one’s elders was respected, as they were the guardians of the culture, as they continue to be today among indigenous cultures worldwide. They were, and are, memory keepers, repositories of their people’s shared memories. Not so long ago, children in the Western world were regularly assigned poems, important quotations, prayers, songs, and anthems to commit to memory. It was one way to transfer the culture to the next generation. Now, in the brave new world of teacher training, this is regarded as, at best, a colossal waste of time and effort, clearly better devoted to exposure to the toxic world of “social media.” Yet the reason why, despite the imposed atheism of a totalitarian Communist orthodoxy in the former Soviet Union, and the destruction of churches and persecution of priests, Christianity did not die in the ruinous wasteland that was the Marxist dystopia. Faith did not die in Russia. The knowledge of Christian hope and love was passed on to children by their babushki, their grandmothers, who risked severe punishment in doing so. Today, the Russian Orthodox Church has survived, and thrives, in spite of a government run by a man now known as a thug with imperialistic ambitions, and, perhaps predictably, an ex-KGB operative.
