Living Wittily means learning to listen attentively, learn humbly, and consider carefully

It's been some weeks since I was reularly posting here. Various reasons for this amongst them a short sabbatical from blogging - I have been at it for 9 years! It isn't that the world has become less interesting, or that there is nothing to be said or written about that same world in all its complexity, tragedy, potential and possible futures. More a sense that, life on this planet is beginning to feel like being in the passenger seat of a car with a driver hell bent on showing off how many risks he can take without crashing!

The epigraph of this blog is taken from the script of the play A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt. Living Wittily is my way of describing that wit and wisdom that comes from trying to see the world from a Christian perspective. To love God with our minds, is to think about things always with God on the horizon, to think Christianly, and to be humble enough to admit that thinking Christianly is neither straightforward nor easily discerned. Not least because Christians think differently, and in their differences of history and context come at questions of theology, ethics, politics, economics, relationships and most other important matters, from their particular perspective, speaking out of their story, and with their limited vision and their unique experience. And their perspective, story, vision and experience are not mine - though if I listen attentively, learn humbly, and consider carefully, what they bring will enrich and broaden, challenge and correct, many of my unguarded or unexamined assumptions. And out of that comes what makes our human existence and experience more humane, and I would argue, more Christian.

That's why Living Wittily has to be done in  the tangle of our minds. Wisdom is hard won, the precious deposit of decisions, choices, actions, insights, mistakes, memories, encounters and experiences; wisdom is what is left when we are humble enough to have learned from our lives up to now. So here is that epigraph again - a kind of manifesto of this blog, and a re-engagement with this God-loved, broken, beautiful, frightening and unique world.And that wisdom comes from many sources - as noted above our encounters and conversations, similarities and differences with others; our wrestling with Scripture through the long hours, refusing to let go until we are blessed and have some hint as to the name and nature of God, and some sense of what God requires of us. 

So have a look again at the epigraph at the top of this page: it shows the underlying presupposition of what is written on this blog:

God made the angels to show his splendour - as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But men and women He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of their minds.

Comments

[D]

Welcome back Jim!

I have quietly followed your blog for well over half of those nine years. Perhaps I've commented just once or twice.

In that time I've followed and fled from a number of other blogs, but I've always valued your writing. Yours is a unique voice - an admixture of wisdom, lyricism, keen aesthetic sense, and a delight in nature, the divine, literature, and ideas that remains edifying and beguiling.

I hope you you keep blogging for at least another 9 more!

Kind regards,
Damien

[Jim Gordon]

Hello Damien - thank you for your kind words, and the encouragement they offer. When I started blogging it was a reasonably new medium, overtaken now by more immediate and interactive media now. But the Blog allows space to explore, reflect, consider and suggest, rather than merely respond and react. So yes, I'll be keeping on blogging, and glad that some of what is written brings help, wisdom and new thought to those who come by. Grace and peace from Aberdeen, Jim