Canter Bridge

If it is true that folly for a season fills life up with irrefutable pleasures, it soon manifests its nature as a lethal disease.

Because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the LORD, would have none of my counsel, and despised all my reproof, therefore they shall eat the fruit of their way and be sated with their own devices. For waywardness kills the simple, and the complacency of fools destroys them; but those who listen to me will be secure and will live at ease, without dread of disaster. (Proverbs 1:29–33 NRSV)

Folly lacks one of the constituent elements of wisdom: it does not self-correct.

Wisdom has a governor, to speak in mechanical terms. Wisdom is self-critical. It thrives on a feedback loop that provides the tools for subtle course corrections and, for that matter, radical ones.

Folly lacks this sophistication. It is bound to proceed in the direction of its own logical extremity. One begins to enjoy its delicacies but finishes the night gorged and puking.

The biblical proverbs understand this dynamic and instruct those who would learn with the most realistic of voices.

The variants of folly kill and destroy.

Wisdom, as we it and its voice personified in the first chapter of Proverbs, turns normal descriptors on their head. ‘Ease’ is often in the prophetic and sapiential currents of biblical literature, associated with facile wealth, corruption, and foolishness. Here, in what becomes almost a hymn to wisdom’s virtues, it is those who listen to Wisdom who will be secure and … live at ease.

Wisdom’s pleasures require a long growing season. They are not quick, indeed they are nearly always the product of long waiting and a chosen patience.

When they ripen, they are very sweet. By then, the fool has met his destruction, his name barely remembered.

Read Full Post »

We do not often marry matters of wisdom and folly to those of love and hatred.

The biblical proverbs do not suffer this hesitation.

Not only does the Book of Proverbs rather daringly personify both wisdom and folly as appealing women in the street, calling out to passersby. It also sketches out the young man’s choice in terms of the strongest emotions of the heart.

Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares she raises her voice. At the busiest corner she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks: ‘How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge? Give heed to my reproof; I will pour out my thoughts to you; I will make my words known to you.’ (Proverbs 1:20–23 NRSV)

Biblical wisdom understands that its alternative is, in the short term, both attractive and rewarding. It is quite normal for the simpleton—the one who will neither take the time nor invest the energy required to discern right from wrong and health from disease—to love his immediate gratification. The simpleton’s life does gratify. Wisdom makes no bones about this.

Likewise, Lady Wisdom knows the personal buzz that the scoffer enjoys as well as the tight-knit kinship that bonds together those who thrive on what has lately been called ‘ironic detachment’. Such a life is, within the limits of its own myopias, a good life. For the moment, it satisfies deep needs.

Not without reason do scoffers acquire an aura of coolness about them. To claim it does not exist or fails to allure is, in its own way, a virtuous but misguided blindness.

We learn also, if we accept Wisdom’s plea to listen to her words, that fools hate knowledge. Theirs is no dispassionate choice in favor of self-entrancing ignorance with no offense intended towards the wisdom they passed over. The affections of the heart are very much in play when we choose a path that over the long run hollows out our soul and cripples our community.

Wisdom and folly are no white-bread choices from among a menu of options, none of which matters terribly.

Our choice does matter, and terribly, no less than love and hatred which ignite the bones and fire the soul.

Read Full Post »

Whether the intended audience of the biblical Proverbs is comprised of the sons and daughters of the court or whether these collected dicta are for the instruction of sons and daughters in the home, the sayings of the wise display a certain concern with the dignity of leaders. Royalty, for the sages, is no laughing matter. The nation’s fate depends to some considerable degree upon justice and mercy working their way into the conscience and conduct of those who hold the levers of power in their hand.

A democratic age squirms at the thought. The wise contemplate the matter with serene realism.

The mother of a certain Lemuel reflects this concern. No tea-totaler, it would seem, she is nevertheless clear-eyed about the damaging effects of strong drink as well as sanguine about its pain-killing qualities.

It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine, or for rulers to desire strong drink; or else they will drink and forget what has been decreed, and will pervert the rights of all the afflicted. Give strong drink to one who is perishing, and wine to those in bitter distress; let them drink and forget their poverty, and remember their misery no more. (Proverbs 31:4–7 NRSV)

Lemuel’s mother knows that behavior located within the gray zones of the ethical map can be tolerated when the hapless engage in it. But when the influential meddle in such stuff, bad things happen. If no man is an island, women and men born to influence cannot imagine themselves to be even a peninsula.

Too much is at stake.

The prudent mother of Lemuel cannot bear to imagine that the relatively modest pleasure of strong drink should end up perverting the rights of the oppressed because the addled brain of an inebriated prince can no longer recall what he’s been taught about justice and its carcinogenic alternatives.

No Bible-thumping here, no jeremiads, no screaming in the street. Just the real-world discernment that those who lead give up certain prerogatives for a quite simple reason: too much is at stake.

Read Full Post »

Careful students of the world come to understand that truth is not always obvious. A superficial scanning of things and circumstances will produce a superficial understanding of them. There runs the herd. A herd provides lots of company, but it is usually mindless.

Although the proverbial anthology insists that the community is the best custodian of understanding—or, more accurately, that there is no wisdom without respectful attention paid to the community and its accrued wisdom—the Proverbs also commend a certain independence of mind. A recent comment on this blog came from a man whose personal motto (digitized, as we do these days), is ‘think hard, think well’.

He might have been summarizing one of the key commitments of biblical wisdom.

Such careful observers—call them independent if we must—know that one must look much deeper than appearances in order to mine the world for its well-hidden nuggets of understanding. Wisdom often turns the table on the casual observer, particularly when he is sure he knows what he thinks he knows. If the voice of the sage does not always address such a person roughly—’You fool!’—it at least offers him an exhortation: ‘Look again!’

Four are among the tiniest on earth, Yet they are the wisest of the wise: Ants are a folk without power, Yet they prepare food for themselves in summer; The badger is a folk without strength, Yet it makes its home in the rock; The locusts have no king, Yet they all march forth in formation; You can catch the lizard in your hand, Yet it is found in royal palaces. (Proverbs 30:24–28 JPS)

The key to this numbered proverb lies in the paradoxical description of its four little creatures. On the one hand, they are very small and, therefore, unlikely sources of understanding. On the other, these critters are presented as ‘the wisest of the wise’ or ‘exceptionally wise’. One might well live out one’s life without looking to such tiny creatures for qualities of character that often elude human beings.

That would be a wasted opportunity to learn. And to live.

Ants, badgers, locusts, lizards. These pull off feats of foresight, security, organization, and access that would be the envy of any thoughtful human being, to say nothing of his community.

Yet because they are small they pass unnoticed, unobserved, and so their lesson is lost.

Unless, by good fortune, one falls under the instruction of the sages, who remind us often and patiently not to be too sure that we know nor too confident that we can anticipate from what corner, person, or thing wisdom will next make itself available.

And then, by strenuously practiced discipline, to look again. More carefully, this time.

Read Full Post »

Contrary to popular belief, the sages who stand behind the biblical anthology of proverbs do not flatter themselves for having an understanding of the world all sewn up.

The maker of proverbs is a student of the world who, for all the order and pattern he discerns, is left astonished by reality’s inscrutable mysteries. On balance the proverbialist stands more in awe of the world than in control of it.

Yet this capacity to marvel must usually be detected between the lines. One sees it, for example, in the juxtaposition of proverbs that on the surface seem to contradict each other. The anthologist knows that they do not, but rather that wisdom takes the shape of working out just which truth seems more pertinent for this moment of complex reality. There is always a bit of guessing, always the need for the ‘judgment call’.

One notes the capacity for wonder also as the counterpart to the sheer audacity of making proverbs. To state things as unequivocably as the proverbs do is, in the hands of a sensitive student of the world, a reckoning with the fact that they do not always turn out to be that way. It is a pointing in a safe direction, a description of 80% of a peeled-back onion. There are always contingencies. There is always the unknown. There remains at all times the possibility of exception. Any sympathetic reader of proverbs—or for that matter, any modern user of a proverb, whether ancient or recent—knows this and does not insist upon silly absolutisms.

Yet if this understated recognition of the world’s wonder lies below the surface, between the lines, barely visible amid warp and woof in the Bible’s proverbial anthology, it occasionally blossoms to the point of articulation. One such florescence occurs amid the ‘numerical proverbs’ of the thirtieth chapter:

Three things are too wonderful for me; four I do not understand: the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a snake on a rock, the way of a ship on the high seas, and the way of a man with a girl.

Wisdom has its limits. Wonder abides at the seam where human understanding is joined to what cannot truly be known.

Eagles soar, the very picture of magnificent serendipity. A snake casts its curling line sideways and yet moves forward on a Spring morning’s sun-warmed rock. A ship, winds changing and sails flying, finds its way across a sea too wide for measuring and puts in to safe harbor. A man, full up with flow charts and deadlines and bills, looks into a woman’s eyes and says three words that throw it all into jeopardy.

There is no doubt that knowledge advances, explains, masters, and controls. The boundaries along which awe must make its home are shifting lines.

Yet the day when a man can no longer scribble his short list of ‘things too wonderful for me’ becomes, in a sense, the date of his death.

Read Full Post »

The Proverbs manage to blend pragmatic hope with pessimistic appraisal of a world that suffers a nagging defect at its core. If this mix approximates to the life experience of many readers, this may in part explain the enduring appeal of this wisdom anthology, to say nothing of its instructive value.

Though wisdom’s voice does not cross over into despair, it probes the case for pessimism with a certain valor.

The leech has two daughters. ‘Give! Give!’ they cry. There are three things that are never satisfied, four that never say, ‘Enough!’: the grave, the barren womb, land, which is never satisfied with water, and fire, which never says, ‘Enough!’

As sentient human beings capable not only of suffering but of reflecting upon the fact that we do so, we find that life itself seems often to be under assault. Murphy’s Law—the stuff of modern-day folk wisdom—rings true because our wounds and bruises remind us that so many things can go wrong at any given moment, and that many of them do.

The biblical proverbialist, too, knows of a certain relentless campaign that seems to be waged at most times and at all opportunity against peace and productivity. The leech, for example, never ceases to suck a creature’s life-blood.

Grave, frustrated womb, thirsty land, consuming fire. These ubiquitous cancers keep up their incessant narrative that the world—to lapse yet again into folk wisdom—is not our home.

Yet this world, at the same time, is our home. The Proverbs know this if they know anything at all.

Here is where we sort wisdom’s long view from folly’s immediacy, declare our preference, make our choice. Here is where we know YHWH’s care or fall prey to accident in its apparent absence. Here is where we construct a family, build a home, learn to read, cradle our grandchildren, plant a tree whose fruit will delight another generation’s mouth, not our own. Here is where we invest that portion of our being that is capable of doing good.

Here is where we lean into insatiable entropy in a faintly quixotic—but YHWH-endorsed—effort to construct a world worth the trouble of it all.

Or chase the wind.

Read Full Post »

The biblical Proverbs know the corrosive effect of things. No naivete lingers in these lines, only the most intelligent realism.

Throughout this biblical book, scarcity with honor has been recognized as an almost distinguished condition, or at least a circumstance that is preferable to familiar alternatives. Wealth, too, has been appraised as a worthy blessing so long as the heart and the conduct of the one blessed by it are well tended.

Yet the passage before us turns to assess the real danger that both poverty and riches bear within themselves. Suggestively, these economic conditions of apparent woe and weal, respectively, are placed alongside ‘falsehood and lies’ on a short list of things worth avoiding.

Two things I ask of you, O LORD; do not refuse me before I die:

Keep falsehood and lies far from me; give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread.

Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, ‘Who is the LORD?’
Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God.

Although the Proverbs underscore the capacity of the wise man or woman to shape life and even to mold a desired future, this articulated fear reckons with forces that are not so easily wrestled into blessing. Finding themselves in such a place, the Proverbs loose a rare prayer to the God who can manage invisible threat.

Read Full Post »