I've been silent here for a while, the longest hiatus since I started Living Wittily at the beginning of January in 2007. There are reasons, and there are seasons, but I'm back. It would be easy to say I had been having a sabbatical, but that would sound as if non-activity here was intentional. Or that I couldn't be bothered, but that wouldn't be fair on myself - I'm someone who writes to share from that inner place where we each do our thinking, hoping, worrying, arguing, wondering and thanking.
Truth is, I had writing deadlines to fulfil which take priority as they carry obligation, promises and the goodwill without which many important writing projects couldn't happen. Then there is the post-Covid mystery of why when a virus is allegedly gone, its shadow continues to be felt. Several important changes in life are also being navigated and there's only so much can co-exist in a mind spending much of its time and energy being pre-occupied by what is important to the exclusion of most other discretionary pastimes!
And that is an admission of limitation, finitude, or to put it in less rarefied language, you can only do so much, and the amount, I find to my surprise, reduces as the years increase. But there it is. However in all of this, every day is a gift, and each day full of its own gifts. The motto on this Blog was chosen when it started, and it remains the guiding philosophy of what I'm trying to do and say when I write here:
"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."
Stephanie Paulsell, now of Harvard Divinity School, once wrote a remarkable article called "Pastoral Agility and Intellectual Work." In it she argues persuasively, and persistently, that the intellectual discipline required to study whether history, science, theology, philosophy, mathematics, logic or whatever, fulfils the deeply humanist urge to learn, know, understand, and to grow therefore as a human being in wisdom. Such intellectual work requires patience, a willingness to wait while knowledge builds towards understanding.
But not only understanding of the subject studied - understanding of the self that is studying, the mind that is learning, and the world around in which life is to be lived, people related to, communities built and sustained, vocations fulfilled, tragedies and achievements to be navigated. I've read Paulsell's article many a time in the 20 years since I discovered it. I used it in theological education with students impatient to learn, and at times impatient with learning as a delay to actually getting things done.
Living Wittily is a place where I do some of that intellectual work, or report on some of my own findings, thoughts, and experiences in this quite wonderful capacity we have as human beings to look on the world with wonder, and if we're half way wise, to be grateful for every gifted day as time and place where we can do intellectual work, grow in understanding of God, our world, ourselves and each other. That could be called, amongst many other terms we could use, living wittily in the tangle of our minds.
The motto is from Robert Bolt's play, A Man for All Seasons.
The photos are taken in Dunecht Estate in early May, on a day when the new leaves on the beech trees seemed to be suggesting autumn!
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