The Ways of Wisdom: A Reflection on Psalm 51 and Joseph of Panephysis 2

Over the past few days, this series on the wisdom of the Desert Fathers has been focusing a lot on how to live a good and holy life. We had Abba Sisoes talking about shame and fear and their relationship to sin, Abba Poemen bemoaning the lack of truly perceptive monks in the Desert, and then talking about three true guides for the soul: vigilance, self-awareness, and discernment. This theme in the Fathers is a part of the far older Wisdom traditions of the Ancient Near East, a theme that we also see in the Psalm of the day, Psalm 51. And so today, I’d like to take some time to reflect on this text, along with another related Saying from the Desert.

When we think of the personal quest for living a good life in the Bible, one of the stand-out texts is Psalm 51, which is familiar either in part or in full from its long use in morning prayer offices in many Christian traditions. It is a Psalm of repentance, asking for God’s mercy and forgiveness and inspiration and empowerment to live in a new and better way:

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain me with your bountiful Spirit. …
O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.
For you have no delight in sacrifice; if I were to give a burnt-offering, you would not be pleased.
The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. (51.10-12, 15-17)

Here we see what at first seems to be the normal prophetic critique of the sacrificial system, but instead of focusing on social justice, here the critique proposes interiority as the logical foil to it: It’s not burnt offerings that makes God happy, but a humble and repentant heart sustained by the Holy Spirit. So, the sacrificial system is actually critiqued from two sides in the later parts of the Hebrew Bible, with the prophetic critique focusing on actions being supplemented by a Wisdom critique focusing on the state of the heart that lies beneath those actions. This connection between the heart and actions becomes a feature of Jesus’ own teaching of sin when he radicalizes the Law by placing the locus of sin in the disposition of our hearts as much as the actions that stem from it.

The Saying from the Desert Fathers I’ll be looking at today is another short one:

Abba Poemen said to Abba Joseph: ‘Tell me how to become a monk.’ He said: ‘If you want to find rest both here and there [i.e., in this life and the next], in any and every thing say, “Who am I?” and do not judge anyone.’ (Abba Joseph of Panephysis 2)

So when asked about what it means to be a monk, or more broadly, what it looks like to live a good and holy life, Abba Joseph responds with a two-pronged answer. At first glance, the first part feels like something more appropriate to a Greek philosopher than a monk, but as we saw yesterday, self-knowledge also formed an important part of the monastic endeavour. Without asking ‘Who am I’?’ and coming to an honest answer, there can be no genuine understanding, no genuine repentance, and therefore no genuine faithfulness. But I think we can add a secondary meaning to the question here, because seeing ourselves clearly also allows us to understand our identities, and therefore our individual vocations in the world and church. The second prong to Abba Joseph’s answer is basic, essential Christian teaching against judging others. While basic and essential, it is something we often seem to forget, so we need the reminder!

I think the two teachings are connected. If we take the primary interpretation of the ‘Why am I?’ question, seeing ourselves clearly — knowing our strengths and weaknesses, seeing the ways we contribute well but also the ways we typically break faith with others, and so on — knocks us off the perch of self-righteousness that is what so often leads to judging others. At the same time, it also lifts us out of the pits of low self-esteem that can also cause us to judge others in an attempt to bring them down to our level. But if we take the secondary interpretation, knowing who we are and how we are called to contributed as individuals also breaks the cycle of judgmentalism, because the better we see our own lane, the less we care about what’s happening in others’ lanes. We stop comparing, and because we’re doing our own thing, we’re not threatened by others doing their own things.

This is important wisdom, not just for monastics, but for all of us.

May we all come to know ourselves honestly and truly. Amen.