The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding. (Proverbs 4:7)
It’s a double whammy. I’ve started
reading The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard, and my Sunday School
class is reading Renovation of the Heart by the same author. I’m
sensitive to the possibility that I might head in the direction of the
Corinthians: “I’m of Willard,” but he does make me think. In the first chapter
of The Divine Conspiracy, he mentions a lot of the recent and current
ideas (keeping in mind that the book was published in 1998) about what he calls
“Cute Wisdom.” This is what he calls such ideas as “Commit random acts of
kindness and senseless acts of beauty” and “All I really needed to know, I learned
in Kindergarten.” He admits that they
contain a tiny morsel of wisdom (p. 10) but if you tried to live according to
those teachings, you’d be in trouble.
Instead, he suggests that we should say,
“I don’t know what I need to know and must now devote my full attention and
strength to finding out” and “Practice routinely purposeful kindnesses and
intelligent acts of beauty” (p. 10) I’ll admit, if you aren’t practicing any
sort of kindness or beauty, random acts of kindness and senseless acts of
beauty are a step forward, but too often, the practitioners stop there. Opening
the door for one person out of every 30 or 50 that you meet might be a random
act of kindness but opening the door for half of them is kinder and opening the
door for all of them is kinder still. Why should be satisfied with effectively
rolling the dice and performing an act of kindness if they come up snake eyes?
It’s a place to begin, perhaps, but not a place to remain.
Professor Willard points to the
passage above as an alternative to the idea of having learned all we need to
know in kindergarten. While he didn’t describe it this way, that idea seems a
little like saying that all I needed to know about basketball, I learned by
dribbling the ball. I could become a world-champion dribbler, but if I can’t
shoot, dunk, or catch, I’m not going to make the team. Or, worse, if I learn
how to dribble, but only do so about once a year, while standing still, I’m not
going to even be proficient at that.
The first step in gaining wisdom is
to get wisdom. That may sound a little silly, but the point is that in order to
get wisdom, you have to make the effort to get wisdom. I know this
example is lamer than the basketball illustration, but I thought I brought
several pair of scissors home, and I can’t find any. I need to get scissors. That’s
not going to happen while I’m sitting at home reading a novel. I could spend lots of money having them
shipped to me, but even to do that, I must go online, find a pair I want, and
order them. That’s still “getting.” Hoping that they will simply arrive at my
door without any action on my part isn’t getting.
We can’t get wisdom without putting
forth an effort. We should be wary of seeking wisdom where everyone else seeks
it – especially if they describe it as “Easy.” There is always a cost to getting anything,
especially the things most worth having.
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