Living Wittily

Fortingall, the Oldest Tree in Europe, and the Wisdom of a Life Well Lived.

On the recent jaunt to Kinloch Rannoch we diverted down to Fortingall to see Europe's oldest living tree, the Fortingall Yew. The trunk used to be 52 feet in girth and the tree has been around for 3,000 to 5,000 years. It sits at the end of a long country road that runs through a glen and the night we went to see it was sunlit, silent and still. We stood for a while wondering at the long human story witnessed by a tree that was there at least since the Bronze Age. The Exodus was still a thousand years away when this seed germinated; it was already two thousand years old when Jesus called Nathanael from his contemplative siesta under his mature fig tree; and around two thousand five hundred years in the growing by the time Columba's coracle bobbed up on Scottish shores.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The path leading to the tree is like a time line with several engraved slabs reminding those who walk therein of the human achievements and changes over centuries. And I guess standing on a sunny evening under the shade of a tree that has witnessed so much of the human story you are left to wonder, and ponder, at the miracle of human lives and the improbability verging on impossibility of the coming and going of the human story. I found this particular stone deeply moving in its simple witness to the humanising and civilising power of knowledge, learning, understanding and wisdom. In the celebration of wisdom in Proverbs 3 such life applied scholarship is described in an arboreal metaphor "She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her: and happy is every one that retaineth her."

This ancient tree has outlasted around 70 human lifetimes of three-score years and ten. That longevity and 'still thereness' kind of puts the rest of us in our place. The connection between the tree with deep and ancient roots, human scholarship and accumulated wisdom, and the way we live responsibly now, came as a gentle nudge on a summer evening, in an old graveyard,at the end of a Scottish glen, looking at a winding path that led to this ancient witness to life as gift. And perhaps wisdom is knowing what to do with the unique privilege that is our own, individual, unique, precious life.

Wisdom - "a breath of the power of God"

The long passage at the end of this post, from The Wisdom of Solomon, was in the background when I was designing and working the Sophia Tapestry. Amongst the most important resources for living well and living as disciples of Jesus in the 21st Century, is an entire biblical tradition of Wisdom. Not just the often prudential and pragmatic Proverbs (which are no less true of moral for that), where alongside such social realism there are hymns to the splendour and glory of wisdom as one of the fundaments of existence, and a Divinely appointed originator of creation itself.

But the Book of Job as the cry of the human heart to the One who is always acknowledged as God, yet interrogated by a faith that will not settle for rational argument, theological subtlety, or emotional blackmail, from friends or God.

And the wonderfully astringent ascetic acid of Ecclesiastes, who through the questioning and scepticism, the occasional cynicism and pervasive disillusionment, hangs on to the truth that "Thou hast put eternity in human hearts" - for all his agnosticism about the meaning of life, Qoheleth still addresses "Thou", the God we encounter at the deepest levels of the personal. 

And the Psalms contain an entire range of theologies - pastoral, liberation, green, natural, spiritual, practical, systematic (in an unsystematic form!), aesthetic, confessional - and the entire book is laced with Wisdom, what is coming to be known as sapiential theology.

That such literature is a crucial reflective resource for a post-modern culture saturated with information, fascinated and increasingly attached to technology as the clue to the human future, is for me, excuse the term, a no-brainer. By which I mean, the Church in seeking to understand the cultural forces and realities with which we live and move and have our being, requires a way of seeing the world that transcends the narrow vision and finite limits of post-modern techno-communication, global economics, ethical recession and spiritual disintegration. Perhaps one of the greatest poets of Modernity has some wisdom of his own to share:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

T S Eliot, The Rock.

In any case, wisdom is one of those virtues that isn't so much a single virtue as both a fruit of virtuous living and a goal of life lived well. Of course the Wisdom of Jesus is far from pragmatic and prudential - which is another post for another time. For now, here is a celebration of Wisdom as the pervasive vision and vitality of human life lived towards God.

 

The Nature of Wisdom

There is in wisdom a spirit that is intelligent,

holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, clear, unpolluted,

distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, keen, irresistible, beneficent, humane,

steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful, overseeing all,

and penetrating through all spirits that are intelligent, pure, and altogether subtle.

 

For wisdom is more mobile than any motion;

because of her pureness she pervades and penetrates all things.

For she is a breath of the power of God,

and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty;

therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her.

For she is a reflection of eternal light,

a spotless mirror of the working of God,

and an image of his goodness.

 

Although she is but one, she can do all things,

and while remaining in herself, she renews all things;

in every generation she passes into holy souls

and makes them friends of God,.....;

for God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom.

 

She is more beautiful than the sun,

and excels every constellation of the stars.

Compared with the light she is found to be superior,

for it is succeeded by the night,

but against wisdom evil does not prevail.

A Plea for Foolishness as a More Durable Wisdom?

This was published 50 years ago - tell me if it is now obsolete, dated, passe? I have broken up what is otherwise a sustained and relentless paragraph in critique of a fundamental assumption of contemporary Western existence. You may have to read it more than once - that may be because it seeks to expose what we would rather not see.

The whole modern world is one great campaign against risk and uncertainty; as a money dominated world, it is a world of life insurance. 'The modern world as a whole is a world which thinks only about its own old age. It is a monstrous old people's home, an institution for pensioners.

In economics, politics, and constitutional law, as in ethics, psychology and metaphysics, we should, if only we had better eyes, be able to see one thing and one thing only: how much this terrible need for peace and quiet is invariably a principle of enslavement. It is always freedom that has to pay the bill. It is always money that is the master. The glorious insecurity of the present is always sacrificed to the security of the moment immediately following.

That is the real psychology of the contemporary idea of progress: man would like to live his life in the future, to live in advance of the event, so making his present into his past. Taking thought for the morrow, saving for the morrow, actually means throwing away its freedom, castrating its potency and fertility, which are the supreme blessings for human beings.

Every financial transaction is an expense of spirit; the only genuine miser, storing up his treasures, is the lover. This is the most profound teaching of the the Gospel. And we are so much under the domination of money, the Antichrist, that even when we do not openly name it, we constantly take its name for granted. In this commercial world, everything is commercial, even metaphysics, and theology; they too fall into line and cease to have any true presence in their own right. Christianity, like everything else, is detemporalised and thereby deprived of its 'salt'.

Avarice in the form of anxiety about tomorrow is the lord of all the world. The drying up of the heart makes itself felt both temporally and spiritually. The person who rejects the fluiditiy of the living heart, preferring the rigidity of money and conceptual thought, has already chosen the other kind of fluidity, the liquefaction of the corpse.

The question is simply what in any given world is a commercial commodity and what is not. It is by this standard that every world will be judged.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord III A Theological Aesthetics. Studies in theological Style: Lay Styles, (San Francisco: Crossroads) 1986, pages 478-9

Now I guess you could say those are the words of a grumpy old theologian, and that may be so. And it does seem a wholesale condemnation of economic activity for its own sake. But is he wrong? Does he exaggerate to the point where he can be ignored?

Jesus said you cannot serve God and money - so how do we follow faithfully after Jesus in a money dominated culture? What would be the signs that our allegiances are at times tested to the point of capitulation? In the work of the Kingdom of God, how important are financial questions of profit and loss, assurance and risk, generosity and prudence - and should the Church learn again the counter intuitive practices of giving away, free gift, reckless compassion, unlocked resources - and those as acts of freedom and declarations of independence from a cash dominant culture. 

Or is that the idealism of the fool, the naivete of the enthusdiast, the behaviour of one devoid of any practical, viable and responsible strategy? But maybe the strategy is precisely this, the sacramental use of money and possessions to subvert the secular sacraments of compulsive consumption within the free market by deliberate decisions and intentional actions that demonstrate a Christian use of money.

If there is such a thing?

 

Happiness and the red circled pronoun

"Happiness is not made by what we own. It is what we share."

Jonathan Sacks stands in the ancient tradition of Hebrew wisdom, and along with other Jewish sages such as A J Heschel, Chaim Potok and Elie Wiesel, they have taught me many lessons in wise living.

A wise friend gave me a copy of Celebrating Life, a collection of Jonathan Sacks' columns in The Times. In it he tells of his encounter with the famous Lubavitcher Rebbe. In the waiting room another told him this story.

Someone had written to the Rebbe in a state of deep depression: "I would like the Rebbe's help. I wake up each day sad and apprehensive. I can't concentrate. I find it hard to pray. I keep the commandments but I find no spiritual satisfaction. I go the synagogue but I feel alone. I begin to wonder what life is about. I need help."

The Rebbe wrote a brilliant reply without using a single word. He circled the first word of every sentence in red, and sent the letter back. The circled "I" symbolises the ego as the subject of every sentence - now that is a depressing thought.

I've already made my offering to God of what I'm giving up for Lent. And made my promise of what I'm taking up. But it may well be that what most needs giving up is the first person pronoun as the first word of every blessed sentence!