Canter Bridge

Ah, to be young!

What glory. What fun. How awful.

Biblical wisdom is not as quick to glorify youth as we are, besotted by tan lines and taut skin. But neither does wisdom deny the splendor of the young. It gives them their due, in this case admiring the strength of young men.

The glory of young men is their strength, but the splendor of old men is their gray hair. (Proverbs 20:29 ESV)

At the same time, biblical wisdom is not satisfied by monochrome obsession with any one of life’s stages. As it admires youth’s undeniable beauty—who would want to deny it!—wisdom knows too the dignity of old age, in this proverb the splendor of an old man’s gray hair. (more…)

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The land is solid and unimaginative.

Meetings of farmers—men and women who work the land seldom sentimentalize it—are not hotbeds of speculation. Men and women of the soil are sensible folk with down-to-earth concerns and an eye on the bottom line.

You don’t debate the land. The land is what it is, a given.

Whoever works his land will have plenty of bread, but he who follows worthless pursuits lacks sense. (Proverbs 12:11 ESV)

Biblical wisdom, too, represents an existential terra firma. It is not given to flights of fancy, ruminations about the unseen, esoterica wrapped up in shiny paper. The wisdom tradition finds it hard to respect speculators. They are, at best, a distraction. At worst, they are fools. (more…)

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Those well-intentioned stewards of spiritual humility who make ‘the depravity of man’ their first and central principle fall easily into a rigidity that does not characterize the biblical witness which they claim as their source. Scripture’s own assessment of humankind underscores human dignity and potentiality at the same time as it holds tight to the brokenness in which these things are realized.

Yet partisans of human corruption, if it is not unfair to understand their purpose in this way, are on to something. (more…)

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One could wish, on a sleepy morning’s reading, for something more inspiring, more … um … spiritual.

Do not love sleep, or else you will come to poverty; open your eyes, and you will have plenty of bread. (Proverbs 20:13 NRSV)

The expression at first seems an exaggeration: Don’t love sleep. (more…)

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The human being, in his or her majestic complexity, is almost inscrutable.

We only rarely know ourselves, and never exhaustibly. How then can we know another?

The purpose in a man’s heart is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out. (Proverbs 20:5 ESV)

What is his end game? What does she want? What is his deepest passion? How can she find what she seeks? (more…)

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A friend looked up at the diseased leaves of the crab apple tree in my back garden this afternoon, one of its limbs hanging down after last week’s storm like an untreated broken arm.

‘Not good’, she intoned with a solemnity so grave that we laughed at ourselves as soon as we had stepped back from the terminal diagnosis it conveyed.

Not good. (more…)

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Biblical wisdom is impatient with the notion of absolute knowledge.

Unless the knower is YHWH, the tradition suggests, all knowledge is provisional. The secret to becoming wise does not lie in finding the key to secret knowledge that is unavailable to others. Nor does it consist of the capacity to crunch more data than others can manage. (more…)

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In a proverb like this, the asymmetry of biblical parallelism matches the imbalance of the righteous and the wicked:

The mind of the righteous ponders how to answer, but the mouth of the wicked pours out evil. (Proverbs 15:28 NRSV)

The subtle (because inexact) parallels between the two lines touch on at least five pairs of expression:

* mind // mouth
* the righteous // the wicked
* the singularity of the righteous individual // the plurality of the wicked
* ponders // pours out
* how to answer // evil

It is a beautiful proverb, light on its feet in term of the possibilities that the Hebrew language affords and penetrating with regard to its diagnosis of human behavior. (more…)

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Though many of the biblical proverbs speak of the power that lies at the ready in the use of words, few delineate the tongue’s power as boldly as the saying found at Proverbs 15.4:

The tongue that brings healing is a tree of life, but a deceitful tongue crushes the spirit. (Proverbs 15:4 NIV)

The italicized words represent a difficulty faced by translators of the text, for the Hebrew expression understood here as ‘a tongue of healing’ can as easily depend upon a Hebrew root of similar appearance that would offer up a translation like ‘a gentle tongue’. The NRSV, for example, reads the proverb in this way:

A gentle tongue is a tree of life, but perverseness in it breaks the spirit. (Proverbs 15:4 NRSV)

The first translation, then, understands the tongue with respect to its healing capacity, the second in connection with its manner of employment. (more…)

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A rough diagnostic of our times lies ready at hand in the profile of those whom we choose to admire.

Our celebrities and our fads are a projection of our values and our desires. Like a modern pantheon, we paint them upon a canvas as peoples choose their deities. If we are not exactly what we worship, we at least aspire to become like the gods we have created for our service. Created to worship someone or some thing, we cannot escape this dynamic nor its determining logic unless we worship our Creator himself. But he demands so much, so we settle. (more…)

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