Loading...At the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in Austin this past summer, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry offered his vision of a Jesus-centered life, which he “packaged” as the Way of Love. It has seven stages – Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, and Rest. Last month I offered some thoughts about the first part – Turn. This month, we continue with Learn.
There is a tendency to think of learning as something that we do in preparation to do something else. We gather skills or knowledge, then the learning ends and we go out and do whatever it is we have been taught. And although we may not be producing anything of value while we learn, so the thinking goes, our future productivity will make up for it. Learning is a necessary evil in a world of bottom lines.
But that may not be the only way to think about learning, especially in a spiritual context. Another approach comes from an unlikely source. In 1950, Alan Turing, the legendary genius of early computing, published a paper in which he wondered whether instead of asking “Can machines think?” we should be asking “Can machines do what we (as thinking beings) can do?” A major part of what he meant by “what we can do” is learn. This gave birth to the field of machine learning.
The full range of meanings that that term may take on is beyond the scope of what I want to say here – and, to be honest, beyond my limited understanding. Suffice to say that ways have been developed for machines to get better at doing tasks by doing them, checking the results they get, and adjusting as needed. They learn in the course of doing.
Implicit in this sort of learning is the assumption that it may not be possible to be fully competent using only what is learned beforehand (by programming in the case of computers). Something original and otherwise unobtainable is produced only by doing.
Translated into the language of Christian love, this means that learning how to love – God, our neighbors, ourselves – happens as we engage in that love in practice. The reading, studying, praying, and other preparation we do is valuable too, but a space is made for the Holy Spirit to expand our love beyond our “book learning” whenever we enact it in the world.
It isn’t hard to see that this vision of learning by loving (and loving by learning) will, at times, lead to mistakes and miscalculations. The maxim “fail cheap, fast, and often” (attributed to many modern experts in business and “life philosophy”) comes to mind. But the raw materials of loving are hearts and minds, not the bits and bytes of computers. Our loving will sometimes wound, a fact that makes repentance and reconciliation important parts of the learning process.
Despite the risks, this vision of learning by doing strikes me as a necessary elaboration on the Way of Love. Although every step – Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, and Rest – is active in its own way, those that are arguably the most outward-looking come only late in the cycle. For me at least, moving doing closer to the head of the line makes the whole exercise more alive.
Blessings
Howie+
