People say that, when they are lost, men are reluctant to ask directions.
The reason people say this is because it is true.
But we are never shy in offering them.
I, for example, was in a museum recently and was asked, by an elderly couple, where they might find a particular painting. I immediately provided complex and almost certainly incorrect directions and I’m rather afraid that, three weeks later, they might still be wandering the galleries wondering whether Jan Van Eyck’s Annunciation actually exists.
I wasn’t trying to be unhelpful. But, in the presence of a knowledgeable Gallery Guard who knew perfectly well where the picture was, my help was just not needed.
Yet still I offered it. I wanted to be seen to know because I am, frankly, an insufferable smart-alec and I want to know everything.
The problem with wanting to know everything, though, is that no-one can.
Not Leonardo da Vinci, not Stephen Hawking and especially not me.
Christians believe that only God is all-knowing.
But this in itself raises a problem: how do we access that knowledge, when our holy books seem capable of interpretation in so many different ways?
One of the simplest statements in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, is this: “Wisdom is with those who take advice”.
It sounds obvious, but I am living proof that it is not easy to do. Yet what is being suggested in that short sentence is that someone somewhere has the answer.
In other words we find wisdom in each other, in collaboration and cooperation, in the collective, in the interdisciplinary. So, a schoolteacher relies on the expertise of a car mechanic; a car mechanic on an accountant, an accountant on a florist and an art historian on pretty well everybody.
I believe God is present in the brilliance not of one person, but of everyone.
We, together, are the all-knowing miracle and I reckon there isn’t a single one of us who doesn’t have a part in that, who doesn’t just need advice but also has advice to share.
So, who knows everything? I don’t. But we do.
And the next time I am asked where the Van Eyck is, I promise to say, ‘I don’t know, but ask that lady over there. She does.’
Here is a detail from Van Eyck’s Annunciation at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.