Osler's Razor

I sometimes use the painting above when I teach. I love the Degas pictures it, and it reminds me of the humility I see in the best Christian lawyers (and, frankly, the best non-Christian lawyers, too, just as often).

The woman is pleased with the hat she is getting... she is going to go to a party or show, and people will compliment her on the great hat, and she will smile and say "Thank you!" Yet, she did not make the hat. She didn't even pick it out. The person who did is in the painting, in the upper left, but her face has no details; what good she does, she does in the shadows as the client is the focus. That shadowed figure... that is the lawyer at her best. When we do our best work, often no one knows it but ourselves, and others get the acclaim.

That humility, to me, has come to encompass the need to not feel that I control everything. There was a time when I tried to change things through force of will, but now I accept a more humble role where God is allowed in. For example, I worked for months to put together the trial of Christ at the Church of the Holy Comforter in Richmond. I thought that I would create something deep and meaningful, but what really happened was that I connected that church with Jeanne Bishop, who became a beloved and transformative force in that congregation. I did something well, though not the way that I thought, and that is all to the good.

When we control everything, plan every word, where could God possibly enter in? The confidence of that milliner, of the good lawyer, of the great preacher, is sometimes in those gaps, in trusting uncontrolled space which, perhaps, is already full beyond our wildest dreams. Vocation, love, faith... there is a way in which at their best they are all a trust fall: waiting that split second, falling, hoping for those arms to catch us, our heart to leap, and the world to change.