On Being a Beginner (Again and Again and Again)

Grace at the Threshold of Knowing

There is a humiliation that comes with beginning again.

Not dramatic humiliation, not a public collapse. More like a quiet, persistent hum: the realisation that for all your experience, you are still at the threshold. Still learning how to listen. Still catching your tongue before speaking. Still being startled by the sharp edges of things you thought you understood.

There’s no name for this kind of grace in most theological glossaries, though the Desert Fathers knew it well. Abba Moses said to a brother: “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” The cell, of course, being the place of limitation, of discomfort, of return. The place where nothing clever shields you from your unfinishedness. The place of beginning.

We live in a world obsessed with expertise. With control. With branding your voice. With knowing the right terms and applying them at the right time to secure credibility and avoid discomfort. We curate theologies like CVs—systematic, efficient, highly legible. And yet real theology, lived theology, is rarely like this.

Simone Weil, in her notebook writings, says: “The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.” There is something hollow about knowledge when it calcifies. When we cease to be surprised by God. When we stop allowing ourselves to be interrupted by the stranger at the door—or the silence at the end of a long, dry prayer.

I think this is why the mystics are always so hard to quote in essays: they refuse closure. They aren’t interested in winning arguments. They are beginners, perpetually, and they make you one too.

The Prologue to the Rule of St. Benedict opens with “Listen, my child, to the teachings of a loving master, incline the ear of your heart.” Not ‘assert,’ not ‘defend’—but listen. A command given not once, but again and again throughout the Rule. This is the heart of Benedictine conversion: not moral perfection, but the willingness to be taught.

The beginner, in the Rule, is not a phase to pass through. They are a kind of spiritual archetype. In Chapter 58, the novice must knock at the door again and again. Not because the community doesn’t want them, but because the Rule needs to know that the person is truly willing to stay. To be shaped. To relinquish self-authorship.

That same chapter says that the novice “must be clearly told all the hardships and difficulties that will lead them to God.” It is not easy to begin again. But it is holy.

This insistence on patient formation stands in stark contrast to much of contemporary Christian discourse, which rewards instant opinions and visible success. But the monastic path—like the path of real discipleship—requires that we shed not just our sin, but our certainty.

Karl Rahner once wrote, “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all.” But I wonder if we might reframe this slightly. The Christian of the future must be a beginner—or they will not be Christian at all.

Because if God is, as Aquinas taught, ipsum esse subsistens—Being Itself—then every true encounter with God will unmake what we thought we knew. We do not become fluent in divine things; we become more fluent in the art of unknowing, more willing to let the scaffolding fall.

This is what the Cloud of Unknowing teaches us: that our intellect cannot grasp God, only our desire. Not the sharp desire of acquisition, but the aching desire of surrender. Of showing up again, to a God who will not be mastered.

To be a theologian, then, is not to accumulate answers, but to become increasingly supple to the questions. Not to dominate doctrine, but to be humbled by it. Not to climb, but to descend—to that vulnerable place where we admit that we are still, always, at the beginning.

So what would it mean to be part of a Church that embraced beginning?

Not in the shallow sense of “starting over” every time something becomes uncomfortable. But in the rooted, Benedictine sense of conversion of life: the daily decision to be reshaped. To admit we need reformation, not only of structure but of posture.

A Church that tells the truth about its mistakes.

A Church that does not mask ignorance with noise.

A Church that says, we are still learning how to love each other.

I think of autistic people like me, whose very presence in the Church often disrupts the script. Whose needs ask for recalibration, not accommodation. What would it mean for the Church to receive not just autistic people, but autistic disruption, as a holy beginner’s gift? What if that, too, is grace?

What if every interruption is an invitation to listen better?

What if the novice at the door is Christ?

I want to be wise. I want to be articulate. I want to have something to show for the miles of reading, praying, serving, suffering. But more than that, I want to be soft. I want to stay interruptible.

So here I am, again, beginning.

Not because I have failed.

But because I am still being loved into shape.

Still becoming.

Still listening.