Cute Wisdom

                     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.