The Words That Should Never Have Been Spoken

On the Humiliation of Speaking Without Knowing

“Do not boast about your knowledge, for no one knows anything.”

Abba Isaiah the Solitary

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It happened so quickly I almost did not see it.

Someone spoke. They shared something beautiful. Something real. I could feel the weight of it even before I understood it. But instead of stopping, instead of waiting, instead of asking, I moved to respond.

I did not yet understand what they meant.

But I spoke anyway.

The words came easily. Too easily. They assembled themselves with the familiar structure of someone who has spent decades around spiritual language. They sounded right. They sounded coherent. They sounded like they belonged.

But they were empty.

Not because the truth was absent in some abstract sense.

Because I was absent.

I was not standing in reality. I was standing in the image of myself as someone who understands.

Only later did I stop and ask the question I should have asked first.

What do you mean?

And when the person clarified, everything I had said collapsed instantly.

Not gradually. Instantly.

It was as if the floor beneath my words had never existed.

What I had said was not just slightly misdirected. It was completely disconnected from what had actually been offered. It did not touch their meaning. It did not serve their insight. It did not honor their reality.

It only served me.

I saw then with painful clarity that I had not been responding to them.

I had been responding to myself.

Responding to the need to remain the one who knows.

Responding to the need to remain intact.

Responding to the need to exist.

And Abba Isaiah’s words stood before me like judgment.

“No one knows anything.”

After forty years, I still resist saying the simplest and most truthful words available to me.

I do not know.

Not because those words are difficult to pronounce.

Because they dismantle something.

They dismantle the identity that has formed itself around knowing.

It is one thing to possess information.

It is another thing entirely to be possessed by truth.

Information lives on the surface. It can be gathered. Repeated. Organized. Displayed.

But truth lives in the bones. It changes the structure of a man. It makes him slower. It makes him quieter. It makes him cautious.

The one who embodies the fathers does not rush to speak about them.

He trembles.

Because he knows that their words did not come from thought.

They came from death.

I see now how easily I can stand beside their teaching without standing inside it.

How easily I can speak about humility while avoiding its humiliation.

How easily I can speak about silence while fleeing the moment silence is required of me.

Christ, who knew all things, asked questions.

He asked the blind man, “What do you want me to do for you?”

He asked not because He needed information.

But because love does not assume.

Love makes space.

Love does not impose understanding.

It receives.

But I imposed.

I spoke without receiving.

I answered without hearing.

And in doing so, I revealed how much of me still lives outside the truth I claim to love.

This is the violence of knowledge that has not yet become flesh.

It speaks before it bows.

It asserts before it listens.

It exists before it loves.

The fathers did not become silent because they had nothing to say.

They became silent because they had seen how much of what they had said had not come from God.

I am beginning to see this in myself.

Not as an idea.

As exposure.

The most honest words I can speak are the ones I resist the most.

I do not know.

Not as performance.

Not as humility displayed.

But as fact.

As liberation.

Because the moment I stop defending myself as someone who knows, I become capable of learning.

I become capable of receiving.

I become capable of truth.

And perhaps this is where wisdom begins.

Not in speaking.

But in the moment a man finally stops.