God has created a universe that teaches us necessary humility | Opinion

The virtue Christians are supposed to practice above all other moral qualities is love. Every 10-year-old Sunday school student knows that.

This is not to say we always do practice love or even that we mostly practice it. Obviously we don’t. But we should.

If there’s a second-most-important spiritual virtue in the Christian schema, it’s probably this one: humility.

I discussed humility in a previous column about ways in which we can reduce the hate that’s ever-present in our divided culture.

I want to say more about it, though, for it seems God considers humility so important he’s built it into the very fabric of existence. It’s visible on a thousand fronts, from the ridiculously minuscule role our planet plays in the grand cosmos to the daily examples of old people and even pets.

My mother, God rest her, grew up during the Great Depression in a clapboard house on a farm in southeastern Kentucky. There were three generations under the roof of that little home: Mom, her parents and her paternal grandparents.

I don’t know if Mom put it in exactly these words, but I got the sense that if she had a favorite family member, it was her grandfather, Lee Chestnut. She told me many fond stories about Grandpa Chestnut.

As a young man in the late 1800s, Lee apparently was daring, strong, even violent. He got into trouble with the law in Kentucky — Mom never found out what he’d done — and hopped a freight train to Montana.

Out West, he became a cowboy. In an altercation over cattle, he killed a man on the range and, with the help of his ranch foreman, hid the body.

Later, when Kentucky had lost interest in his legal problems here, he came home and got married. He bought a piece of cheap land that was mainly forest, and worked as a night watchman to pay his bills, then labored days cutting trees and blasting the stumps with dynamite, trying to turn the place into a farm. That’s the farm my mom grew up on.

By the time Mom came along, Lee was an old man. Mom had little use for her grandmother, who she found controlling and cranky.

Grandpa Chestnut had become a churchgoer, and even a deacon, I think.

Mom said he sat at the very front of the church sanctuary — on the “mourner’s bench” at the foot of the pulpit, where sinners came to repent — because he was nearly deaf and that was the only way he could hear the sermon. If the preacher droned on too long, Grandpa would tug the tail of his frock coat to remind him it was time for dinner.

At home, Grandpa knelt beside his bed at night to pray before turning in. In the quiet house Mom could hear him asking the Lord to please bless little Alice.

“That sweet old man,” Mom would say. “Down on his knees, praying for me.”

At some point she started shaving Grandpa because his eyes and hands weren’t steady anymore, and because the attention pleased him.

In then end, he lay helpless in a bed in that same farmhouse he’d built 40 years earlier, suffering from a broken hip, nursed by his son and daughter-in-law.

That’s how his life ended — the former outlaw and energetic worker reduced to helplessness and pain, dependent on the ministrations of others.

In a new century and a different species, I’ve seen this same type of journey echoed.

My wife Liz brought to our marriage a kitten named Walter, who from the get-go was full of sap and swagger. Nearly 15 years later, he’s still with us, still sleeping in our garage.

I’m not a cat person, but I always liked Walter. You couldn’t not like him.

He was both lovable and ferocious. He enjoyed being petted, yet patrolled our yard as if he were a lion on the Serengeti stalking a herd of wildebeest. I don’t know whether cats have fantasies, but he seemed to think he was Simba. Or maybe Scar.

He scouted and skulked and slithered, and delivered to our kitchen door a steady supply of mice, rabbits and chipmunks. He strutted around with his tail erect and then for no reason charged across the grass at a low, dead run as if shot from a cannon.

Walter’s not fast anymore. He’s arthritic. His teeth are so bad he can only eat the mushiest cat foods. He’s trembly and disoriented — he wanders under the wheels of our vehicles as we pull into the garage. We brake and wait for him to take a notion to amble on to his bed.

He can’t groom himself. His fur became hopelessly matted and painful. Liz had to take him to the veterinarian to be shaved. His head’s still fluffy, and so are his tail and paws. Otherwise, he’s hairless.

He looks like a kitty poodle, which I’m sure isn’t the vision he used to have of himself. We can’t let him outside for fear a hawk or a dog will kill him. The hunter has become prey.

Watching him has reminded me that nearly every creature on Earth winds up slow, broken, afraid. We come into the world helpless, and we leave it helpless.

If we humans are of the variety who happen to be teachable, our decline imbues us with humility before we’re gone. We lose our delusions of power. We discover our dependence on God and other people. We feel mercy for other poor souls who are struggling too. We understand, indeed, why the greatest of virtues is love.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.