Mark 1:40

"A leper came to him begging him, and kneeling he said to him, 'If you choose, you can make me clean.'"

Reflection by Donna Schaper

The leper may have had that dreadful disease of leprosy but he was also full of trust.  If you have ever wanted for trust, you might even be jealous of his skin condition.  Being bereft of trust is an acute kind of poverty.  It rivals the worst of diseases and is in fact a dis-ease, or an absence of ease itself.  Our world has made astonishing medical progress with formerly incurable matters like leprosy.  We haven't done as well with trust.

In a recent New York Times article titled "A World in Denial of What it Knows," Geoffrey Wheatcroft reminds us of the famous saying by Donald H. Rumsfeld, then U.S. Secretary of Defense, that there are "known knowns . . . there are known unknowns. There are also unknown unknowns."  Wheatcroft argues that our malaise is none of the above. It is instead "Unknown knowns." What he means is something different than denial or evasion.  "Unknown knowns are things . . . which are easily knowable, or indeed known, but which people choose to unknow."

We preferred to think that the war in Iraq would not cost us much.  "All the calamities that followed the invasion [of Iraq] were not only foreseeable, they were also foreseen," says Wheatcroft.  We preferred to not know that boom often relates to bust.  Wheatcroft  continues, "What kind of willfull obtusity ever suggested that subprime mortgages were a good idea?  An intelligent child would have known that there is no good time to lend money to people who can obviously never repay it."

Whatcroft does not address global warming, although he could have.  We do know.  Nor does he address the lost generation of Protestantism, a truth that most readers of this devotional do know.  Nor does he address what happens if we skip the full yoga or gym workout with predictable regularity.   In the "unknown knowns," we just choose not to know, in an astonishing absence of trust in our own judgment.

What might be different?  We might choose to trust what we do know.  We might choose to know it.  We might choose the great promise of healing over the great calamity of avoiding it.  We might make common cause with the leper and admit that we have something as challenging as a skin disease.  From there we could trust ourselves and our God to change us.

Prayer

God of lepers and liars, you who are larger than mistakes and even malfeasance, come close and wrangle some truth out of us, before it is too late for us to live a life of trust.  Amen.

About the Author Donna Schaper is the Senior Minister of Judson Memorial Church in New York City. Her latest work is 20 Ways to Keep Sabbath, from The Pilgrim Press. Check out her work at www.judson.org.

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