Book Review: Learning Humility

Title: Learning Humility 

Author: Richard J. Foster

Date: 2023

Publisher: InterVarsity Press

Length: 169 e-pages

ISBN: not shown in e-copy

Illustrations: Lakota-inspired graphics as chapter headings

Quote: "Should I give this next year to see what I can learn about humility by study and experience?"

Richard J. Foster's reputation rests on three extraordinary books that caught my generation's attention in the 1980s, Celebration of Discipline, Freedom of Simplicity, and Money Sex and Power. To these may be added a later book on Prayer. At a time when churches were rejecting old rules that had become empty formalities and nitpicking details for some people, Foster went back to the origins and meanings of the rules and pared them down to their living cores. Why should people dress in black or gray? No reason at all, now. Long ago, when different dyes added different prices to the cost of material, mandating that everyone wear the cheapest practical fabrics, which were probably black or gray, was a way to help people save money to use for the most important things. Do Christians still feel a need to economize on fads and luxuries in order to direct money into more useful channels? If so, how can they do that? 

While too many churches that used to have strict rules, including Foster's Quaker groups and the Seventh-Day Adventists in whose school system I read Foster's books, leaped at the chance to become "Feel-Good Universalists" who rejected the rules and those who found a use for the rules, radical Christians felt blessed and enlightened by Foster's unpicking of worthwhile meaning underneath what had become useless uniforms of membership in groups many radical Christians found it necessary to leave behind us. 

Another trend in Christian thought in the 1980s began with the Carter Administration's official policy of seeking peace with Native American religious teachers. This led to a fad for syncretism, which Ward Churchill ridiculed in a book called Indians R Us. The cover of that book featured a caricature of another writer banging a drum. About the quarrel between the two (toxically masculine?) writers, and whether either one really had either indigenous ancestors or indigenous teachers, this review of Foster's book has nothing to say. What can be said is that many living Americans who are legally identified as Black or White have known, documented indigenous ancestors, and can legally change their identity to Red if they find it possible to reconnect to their Native kinfolk on some reservation or other. As regular readers know, my father and I never tried to reclaim Cherokee identity in any official way because we'd had the benefits of Whiteness when Whiteness had benefits and trying to change, now, seemed tacky. My brother, while living, and later the man youall know as my Significant Other, while living, did identify as Cherokee, and that was my Significant Other's legal identity. Richard J. Foster said little about himself in his groundbreaking books, but his ancestors included Anishinabe (Chippewa) people, and his book cover pictures show the influence of their DNA. His later books have referred to his heritage and study of indigenous traditions.

Well. This is a private thought, which I want to state as humbly as Foster states some of his private thoughts in Learning Humility. In that book Foster retells, more tersely and wrenchingly than I've ever heard or read it told before, the horrible story of the Lakota people who were attracted to what was called the Ghost Dance movement among Plains people. A Paiute visionary called Wovoka claimed to have seen that, by participating in a special dance wearing special shirts, people would become invincible warriors, the relatives they had been losing to plagues introduced by White immigrants would return to life, and peace and prosperity would return to their land. Though Wovoka's message was nonviolent, cowardly "Indian agents" were frightened by the sight of tough Lakotas dancing in the snow. This led directly to the massacre at Wounded Knee. 

Reading this story, I recalled what happened when a small group of Cherokee warriors adopted Robert Bench, or "Chief Benge," as their war chief. Benge was a Scotch-Shawnee social outcast who had learned the Cherokee language because his mother worked as a domestic servant in a Cherokee family. Though characters based on him were played, in local dramas, by tall, dark, and handsome biracial actors, Benge was about 5'6" with "sandy" reddish hair. He did qualify as a Cherokee war chief because he led war parties including ten or more Cherokees, but he was, in fact, a terrorist who just liked to watch White men die. (He felt less hate for White women and children, and let several of them survive.) My home town's first claim to fame was that one of our early White settlers killed Benge, but greedy Easterners who wanted a pretext for war weren't satisfied. Benge's raids led directly to the Trail of Tears.

What came to mind was that in both cases a great nation suffered a horrible defeat because too many people paid too much heed to someone from a less enlightened group of people. Perhaps the Lakota should not have rejected Wovoka as thoroughly as the Cherokee should have rejected Benge, but they should have been cautious about following their messages. The Lakota had probably seen evidence of their "Indian Agents'" cowardice before, and they knew it is dangerous to startle a coward who has a gun.

Perhaps I'm being led to write that American Christians should respect our indigenous cultures, and ancestors if we have them, but we should be cautious about regressing back to pre-Christian beliefs. Not that everything non-Christian people say amounts to regress. Much that they have said and written testifies to the One Spirit that leads all human beings to acknowledge the same morality as being right, whatever compromises individuals have made. I find nothing that is less than Christian in Foster's reflections on the Lakota teachings he considers in Learning Humility, but in the Lakota lore I read in the 1980s and 1990s I found some things I did not believe could be useful for Christians.

On a more positive note--why would an Anishinaabe want to make a thorough study of Lakota writings, or a Cherokee or anyone else whose ancestors didn't come from the Plains? Why are Lakota cultural artefacts what the world thinks of as Native American? There are solid historical reasons, on which Foster touches in his book. North America had many different cultural traditions before Europeans moved in (though some of those traditions show traces of European influence--people did drift across the Atlantic Ocean, in both directions, before Columbus). Some of those traditions were more viable than others. I think it's not helpful that people act too "sensitive" to consider why this was the case. We know that some indigenous groups were wiped out by diseases, although they were once numerous enough to have become viable nations; others were scattered, their cultures obliterated; others survive as small social groups from which the survivors tend to move away; and just a few can still be described as defeated but still viable nations. The Cherokee, Iroquois, Navajo, and Dakota/Lakota/Nakota nations, and the Inuit, are the survivors. This was not due entirely to chance. There were things people in those groups did that helped their nations survive. 

One of those things, I think, can be identified with that word kota, however different groups of people also called Sioux pronounce the form of it that means their ethnic group. Foster agrees, and cites an historian who came to that conclusion. Kota meant "friend," not in the sense of a close or lifelong friend, but in the sense of a good peaceable neighbor who either wants to trade with you or leaves you alone--who does not approach you with any intention of fighting or stealing. Sometimes it too was heard and written as koda or kola. Anyway it was the word all the "Sioux" and some associated, not assimilated, groups adopted as a greeting to almost everyone they met. They were bold, confident hunters in a place where game was abundant. They could afford to say "let's be friends, let's live in peace," to the world. That didn't always serve them well, but often it did. It made them the dominant group, though not an oppressive "governing" group, on the Plains; it gave them the resilience to survive contact with Euro-American culture. 

I believe the idea behind greeting everyone with "kota" happens also to be the one that has made these United States a dominant nation today. It is a good idea. It is seeking our own good without trying to take anything away from others, coexisting peaceably with people we don't want even to try to control, trading with people or leaving them alone. That Cherokee and Iroquois people trace the same idea to their own cultures, and Anglo-Americans to (Foster humbly refrains from saying it in this book) the Quaker impression of Christ and Christianity, is not as important as some want to think. Not everyone in any of these groups either preached or practiced this idea of friendly peaceable life, but enough people in each group concurred on it to explain why we in the United States are not trying to control or colonize the rest of the world, why we have been shamed out of various missionary and business ventures by the mere suggestion of colonialism.

In the context of traditional Christian discussions of "the Christian virtues," this approach to life has to be classified as a form of humility. 

So, whether or not Foster used enough words to explain the connection between Lakota history and Christian writings on humility to some Christian readers, that connection is apparent to anyone who thinks about it without prejudice.

I mention this because some Christians have expressed disappointment with Foster's later work. How can a Christian scholar stoop to the kind of syncretism that would ever cite a non-Christian writer's ideas about a Christian virtue? There are reasons. Describing the approach to life that served the Lakota people well is a humble way of suggesting humility in political thought to present-time Americans.

That's a long enough description, I hope, of the basic plan of Learning Humility. What else needs to be said about it? The form may need introduction. It is a personal journal. When younger, Foster says in the book, he might spend fourteen hours in a day researching, citing, polishing, refining, remixing, and generally perfecting his bigger books of broad scope and stunning coherence. At eighty, he felt that his "brain was fried" after a few hours of studying and writing; long meditative walks helped shape what reads like a blog where most of the posts don't fill up your computer screen, but he wrote only a few hundred words a day, following an outline but not polishing transitions. Often he presents a topic, says "I'll sit with this for a while," and doesn't mention it again in the book--a very Quakerish approach. 

I anticipate some critic out there picking on this quality of Learning Humility, and to that critic I say: if your books are more polished than this one when you are eighty years old, then criticize away. 

If I were asked to write a book about humility, what might be expected, and what I'd do, would be a detailed consideration of only the Bible verses that either mention or describe humility. If you were, you might plan your book some other way. Foster describes himself remembering, but not always in detail, all the relevant writing he's read in the past, ordering a few new books and revisiting a few familiar ones, to consider humility in a Lakota document and an Anglo-American document each month over a year. Benedict of Nursia, Bernard of Clairvaux, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Evagrius of Pontus, George Herbert, Julian of Norwich, Thomas Kelly, C.S. Lewis, Andrew Murray, John Michael Talbot, Thomas a Kempis, Evelyn Underhill, Dallas Willard, John Woolman, and Philip Yancey are cited. He also draws on observations of nature during his daily walks and trips into town, and visits with friends and relatives. The result is these modest and Quakerish notes that a younger writer, or one in a different church, might use as the beginning of a book. The reward of a long career of writing well is that Foster's fans will be satisfied by his journal as it is.

Does this post need music? It does. John Michael Talbot, the Catholic monk, and Terry Talbot, the "western" rocker, are brothers. Each has produced some good recordings but there's little question that their all-time best album was the one--only one--they did together. Both were guitarists as well as singers. Terry's is the lower voice heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIWPW3AVXfo .