My favorite quotation of all time was made by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I loved it the first time I read it, back when I was a literature major in college:
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
I always thought “hobgoblin” was a fun-to-say word – almost onomatopoeic – the sound it makes suggests the meaning of the word. A hobgoblin is a mischievous elf in English folk tales, a hairy little man who plays tricks on you. Nothing mean, just pranks.
When I was a high school English teacher, I usually tried to work the quote into at least one lesson plan each year. Most of the kids were surprised by the quote. Consistency is what’s normally considered to be good, not inconsistency. The quote prompted some fresh thinking, I think.
I still throw the quote into discussions on occasion when someone is struggling for the courage to try a different approach to solving a problem, or just simply trying out something new.
Last week I read something about being afraid to contradict yourself, afraid that someone might say to you, “But that’s not what you said yesterday.” The writer gave me a new favorite quotation. He quoted Abraham Lincoln’s response to the accusation of being inconsistent in what he says, “Yes, that is what I said yesterday, but I hope that I’m smarter today than I was yesterday.”
As I was thinking about these quotes, I decided to google “consistency quotes,” and came across one by Bernard Berenson, an art historian of the past century. “Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.”
Hmm. Is he suggesting that if I am totally consistent today with what I believed and what I said a year ago, that I am just as ignorant as I was a year ago?
I keep thinking that I’m learning new things and am actually becoming a little bit wiser every year of my life. The natural result of the learning process is that I should be recognizing some inconsistencies within myself. That’s good, and nothing to be afraid of. That’s progress. That’s something to pray for. Edward Hays wrote the prayer, “Daily may I grow smarter and change my mind, and so contradict myself…”
A closing thought… One of the best parts of the learning process for me is exploring new ideas on the Internet. However, Abraham Lincoln warned us to be careful with that.
On Easter Abbey spent about an hour out on our deck, watching two geese float back and forth on the pond. She said to me, “Mom, did you notice that two of our geese have finally come back home? Two years ago they were here at the beginning of Lent. This year they didn’t come back until Easter. Why were they so slow in returning?”
“Remember, I said I was going to give up HURRY for Lent? You were the one who told me I was always in too much of a hurry to enjoy life. How do you think I did? Did I succeed in giving up HURRY for Lent? What kind of grade would you give me?”
“Wow. If I had been there, I bet I would have been tempted to howl like my wolf ancestors!”
“Hey, Mom. I’m re-thinking the grade I gave you for fasting from HURRY for Lent. I think we both learned three good reasons for not hurrying through life, to not let HURRY become a habit.
Over the last 50 years or so, I’ve tried several different prayer patterns. One of my favorite ways to pray is to sit down at the piano, sometimes with a hymnal and sometimes with just the hymns in my mind, and talk with God through music.
… As a planetary pilgrim,
On Sunday afternoon Mim and I went to a Madison Symphony Orchestra concert at the Overture Center in Madison. We drove to the parking garage where we usually park, next to the Overture Center, but it was full. We drove around a few blocks looking for street parking – without success – so we tried another parking garage. This was the garage where you have to pay by feeding quarters into meters, ten minutes per quarter. Fortunately, I had a handful of quarters in my car. I fed the meter enough quarters to give us three hours of time. I had two quarters left in my hand. I was about to put them in my pocket when Mim said, “Why don’t you give them to those people.” The people in the car next to ours were scrounging through their purses and pockets to try to find more quarters. I walked up to the woman standing by the meter and asked her, “Do you want two more quarters?” I think she and her companions were shocked. She explained that they were going to the symphony but couldn’t get into their usual parking garage. They didn’t know they would need quarters. She gladly accepted my two quarters and fed them into her meter. Mim and I walked away feeling good about being generous with our left over quarters, and our “victims” were delighted to get a couple of quarters from complete strangers.
But then last week happened. World Vision changed one of its internal personnel policies. World Vision is the largest Christian charitable organization in this country. It is the organization that has created the means that enables thousands of individuals to personally sponsor children, one by one, to provide some of the poorest children in the world with food, clothing, shelter, education, medical care, and companionship – direct communication with a person who cares about them enough to provide for their basic needs. Thousands of caring people worldwide sponsor these children, one on one. My mom was among the sponsors. When she passed away, Mim and I continued to sponsor her little girl. More recently, Mim and I have periodically made donations to World Vision for some of their other humanitarian efforts, particularly after major natural disasters. Because World Vision already has networks in place worldwide to care for the needs of their sponsored children and their communities, they are particularly well-suited to provide immediate aid following natural disasters.
What makes me ashamed of being identified with evangelicals is the way many evangelicals reacted to this policy change by World Vision. Thousands of sponsors in the worldwide network of sponsors providing life-saving aid to poor children withdrew their monthly support because of this internal employee policy change. Apparently, standing firm on this controversial political issue is more important to thousands of evangelicals than keeping a personal commitment to a poor little girl or boy to continue to provide food, clothing, shelter, education, medical care, and companionship to her or him.
My heart sank when I heard of this mass exodus of support. I just can’t understand how thousands of evangelicals can be so obsessed with condemning “homosexual behavior” – something Jesus never even mentioned (at least nothing is recorded in the Gospels) – that they would allow a poor little girl or boy to starve rather than allow someone like me to work for World Vision to help feed these children. Clearly Jesus’ priority was to care for the children, not to judge our co-workers.
