Wisdom and Whatever
Encouraging Godly Wisdom in Our Children
by Ken Myers
© 2008 Homeschooling Today Magazine - Volume 17 - Issue 4 - All Rights Reserved
In the 1960s, when a telephone rang anywhere in America, it made a fairly predictable sound. It was a sound made by a pair of small bells, which is why we said the phone was “ringing” and not “buzzing” or “beeping.” That rich, metallic sound was universal, because almost all phones in the country were made by the same company (Western Electric), and the sound they made was produced by standardized metal bells being struck by real metal clappers, energized by electromagnets.
| Not only do kids need to learn that many good things take time to happen, they need to learn that we often need time to grow in knowledge and understanding. |
Phones came in only three or four styles and half a dozen colors, and they were all, of course, hard-wired into the wall. Car phones belonged only to millionaires and movie stars. Long-distance and local service came from the same company, and at pretty much a standard rate. There was no call waiting, no caller ID, no speed dial, no call forwarding, no voice mail, almost no answering machines. And there certainly were no personalized ringtones; just bells. In other words, there just weren’t many options.
Today, phones are all about options. Forty years ago, you would only replace a phone if it stopped working. Today, people get or think about getting new phones or new features for their phones every several months, and the list of options from which they can choose is staggering (although it’s hard to buy a phone that still has real metal bells inside).
The pattern of our experience with phones is just one example of a larger pattern that characterizes contemporary life: the proliferation of options. Next time you go grocery shopping, take note of how many different options there are in every aisle where not that long ago there were dramatically fewer choices. Varieties of potato chips, of yogurt, of breakfast cereal, of lettuce, or of fruit juice, to name a few, are staggering. The Internet is a huge engine of choices. Students doing research papers in a school library a few decades ago had to choose from three or four encyclopedias and a small reference section to find resource material. Now there are hundreds of thousands of sources (many of them not very reliable), as well as countless sources of distraction that often keep the research from ever happening.
The verb that we use most commonly to describe our engagement with the Internet is “surf,” suggesting a skimming across the surface, delighting in superficial pleasures, often enjoying the act of choosing more than the thing chosen. Rarely is the Internet an occasion for “diving,” for the kind of activity that is deep, slow, intense, and lastingly memorable. Surfing allows us to keep our options open, which is for an increasing number of people what life is all about.
The proliferation of options and the commitment we develop to keeping our options open are patterns of experience and consciousness that are reshaping attitudes toward life, not just toward phones, potato chips, and information. When everything seems to be optional, nothing seems to be very real, because nothing seems necessary or limited. Surrounded by so many options, it becomes easier for a person to feel that his or her essential identity is that of a sovereign chooser. Life is no longer a pilgrimage of humble discovery about reality, learning to make better choices so as to fit into the pattern of things God has made. Rather, life is a chaotic but potentially pleasurable bouncing from one trivial (if self-defining) choice to the next.
One of the ironies of our cultural moment is that the expansion of the range of choices people can make has led to a diminished sense that any of the choices matter very much. And so the valley-girl slang phrase “whatever” has become an apt slogan for our era, and for many people a strategy for coping with so many choices and changes. As Thomas di Zengotita writes, “Haunting the moment of �I can experience whatever I want’ is the moment of �What difference does it make,’ because this moment, the moment of the shrug, is essential to our mobility among the options.”
Beyond surfing and shrugging
There have always been challenges to the encouragement of wisdom. If wisdom were easily caught, the book of Proverbs would read much differently than it does. Folly has always been the quick and dirty option, with wisdom requiring discipline and deliberateness. But most cultures have reserved places of honor for a variety of disciplines of living that required time and care to master: learning to play musical instruments, prepare a variety of tasty and nutritious meals, and translate Latin; learning to tend a garden, draw or paint, and sew clothing; learning to make furniture, and learning to build lasting relationships. In most human cultures, such crafts and skills were often necessary to survival and those who mastered them most adeptly were accorded great respect. The place of the “master craftsman” was highly regarded.
While some people still aspire to these sorts of patient achievements, a growing proportion of the population is absorbed with the possibility of instant consumption rather than any sort of time-consuming production. Even reading a book is considered too big a commitment for a growing number of educated Americans (cf. the National Endowment for the Arts 2007 report “To Read or Not to Read,” available at www.nea.gov/research/ToRead.pdf). In this kind of climate, the very idea of growing in wisdom becomes an implausible demand. First, it lacks the promise of immediate gratification. Second, it involves a limiting of options at a time when expanding options is assumed to be the key to happiness, since what one actually does is less important than the fact that one chooses to do it.
So we are raising and teaching our children in a world in which strong and principled convictions are increasingly out of place, a cultural mood in which detached coolness has become the norm. If we want them to be wise, we first need to recognize how destructive this contemporary mood is to the very project of wisdom, and how countercultural we and our children must be if we want to strive to be wise. Wisdom is more a matter of a posture toward the world than it is the memorization of moral rules and the dominant posture of the culture we are now living in is opposed to the orientation of a Christian heart.
Walking in Wisdom
The posture of wisdom is a steady attentiveness of the heart and mind in an effort to discern the moral order God has established in the world. While the “culture of options” makes it feel as if our choices are the ultimate and only reality, godly wisdom encourages the opposite mentality. Wisdom assumes that there really is something out there prior to our choosing, something real to know and something worthy to become. The biblical picture of wisdom assumes that God has established an order to human life in the very structure of our createdness. That order is perceived as we proceed from the fear of God, to a humble knowledge of God’s Word, to a careful attentiveness to God’s world.
Wisdom is sometimes thought to be an airy and ethereal affair, detached from the mundane details of real life. But biblical wisdom is profoundly practical, concerned with recognizing how the nitty-gritty details of life can only be properly understood as fitting into the structure of divinely-shaped reality. Wisdom is, in Derek Kidner’s memorable phrase, “putting godliness into working clothes.”
The links between the order built into creation and the practicality of wisdom are evident in passages like Proverbs 3:18-23:
[Wisdom] is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her; those who hold her fast are called blessed. The Lord by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens; by his knowledge the deeps broke open, and the clouds drop down the dew.
My son, do not lose sight of these— keep sound wisdom and discretion, and they will be life for your soul and adornment for your neck. Then you will walk on your way securely, and your foot will not stumble.
The wisdom literature in the Scriptures regularly mixes references to the physical aspects of creation with discussion of moral matters. Commentator Derek Kidner observes that this twoedged concern implies that “what is implied here is a single system, a universe; and what is invited is the study of it in a spirit of humility, so that we may take our due place within it willingly and intelligently.”
Wisdom requires recognition of the kinds of creatures we are, the kind of world in which we live, and the ways in which we benefit from surrendering to reality. “It is by reflecting on what actually makes for the best in human life and social relationships,” writes David Atkinson, “and believing that God wants human beings to flourish, that the wise are able to pass on to others what they have discovered… [T]he moral education which Proverbs offers is closely related to a sense that this world is an ordered creation of a wise God. The order of the world, as the Psalmist also found (cf. Psalm 19), is reflected in the moral order which ensures human flourishing.”
“Go to the ant, O sluggard;
consider her ways, and be wise...”
If we want to encourage an attitude of wisdom in our children, we need to commit ourselves to encouraging them to be attentive to creation. It is unfortunate that the increased interest in nature stimulated by the environmental movement of the past forty years has been accompanied by so many pagan and pantheistic ideas. As a result, many Christians have falsely assumed that a passionate interest in nature is a preoccupation of liberal tree-huggers. But the Biblical pattern of growth in wisdom displays a great concern with the ways of natural phenomena. In I Kings 4:29-34, we read a remarkable description of the wisdom of Solomon, praised for being wiser than anyone on earth. When the author of this inspired text summarizes the content of Solomon’s wisdom, he writes: “He spoke of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon to the hyssop that grows out of the wall. He spoke also of beasts, and of birds, and of reptiles, and of fish.” Solomon’s imaginative engagement with God’s world provided wisdom for living because activities in the world of plants and animals had instructive likenesses to the patterns of life of men and women. Jesus exhibits a similar eye for instructive metaphors in many of his parables, and in pithy sayings like the injunction to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.
The lives of children are increasingly lived indoors and online. Richard Louv reports the comment of a fourthgrader from San Diego named Paul, who explained “I like to play indoors better, ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.” Louv warns of the dangers of what he terms “nature-deficit disorder,” a condition that alienates children from creation and encourages the idea that reality is whatever we want it to be, not what’s “out there.”
When our children (or anyone) are disengaged from the order of creation, we are more susceptible to various contemporary follies that arise from a failure to perceive God’s ways in the world of space and time. It’s easy to believe, for example, that old things are necessarily inferior to new things, or that any pursuit that can’t be achieved quickly is of dubious value. Involvement with plants, animals, and the settings in which they thrive reminds us of the benefits of time; an important lesson in a sped-up culture for those trying to understand the meaning of patience and long-suffering. Raising children who are not suspicious of old things is a remarkable achievement in our time.
Wisdom can also be encouraged as our children learn to understand how things develop in history. Too often, contemporary Christianity is presented as a set of timeless truths (sometimes packaged as self-help insights). But while there are timeless truths in the Bible, the real story of salvation is—well, a story. It is about God entering history, about God working out our salvation in and through time. Cultivating a narrative sense is naturally learned by hearing stories and it is further enhanced by attentiveness to the real-life stories of places, whether the history of the town, city, or region in which we live, the history of a family, or the history of a piece of land (from woods to farm to subdivision, from railroad to biking trail, from farmland to reservoir, etc.).
Wisdom takes time
Acquiring a sense of the goodness of time is an important aspect of wisdom. Not only do kids need to learn that many good things take time to happen, they need to learn that we often need time to grow in knowledge and understanding. Living with the pattern of instant analysis and response to events by broadcast and web-based journalists and bloggers, it is easy to grow up with the assumption that having an opinion about everything right away is more important than cultivating considered and careful opinions. About ten years ago, C. John Sommerville wrote a book called How the News Makes Us Dumb: The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society, (Intervarsity, 1999). His main point was that the pressures of daily (or hourly) deadlines cause journalists to rush to judgment and encourage us to regard the first person with available commentary—even on a complicated issue—as the most helpful. A healthy dose of experience with living things (like gardens or fruit trees) reminds us that important life lessons take time to acquire and assess.
Several years ago, I interviewed Eugene Peterson, who has for a long time been concerned that pastors are tempted to look for quick fixes to help their congregations. He said to me that he often recommends that pastors read books about farming by Wendell Berry. Berry has spent decades quietly reflecting on patterns of life that involve the relationship between topsoil, economics, community, and myths about progress and human happiness. Peterson claims that if pastors would just substitute the word “church” every time Berry used the word “farm,” they would acquire a lot of wisdom about shepherding their own flocks. Unfortunately, many pastors seem more interested in the edgy unreality presented in books by entertainers or management consultants or advertisers than in the homely and often wise observations of Wendell Berry.
Peterson’s advice has relevance for parents as well. It reminds us that the wisdom we covet for our children will likely be acquired by them in unsensational and homely settings over a long time. Rather than trying to “program” our kids to live wisely, we need to create healthy “ecosystems” for their lives, so that the order God has placed in creation is not crowded out by foolish, self-indulgent fantasies.
Ken Myers is the host and producer of the MARS HILL AUDIO Journal, a bimonthly audio magazine examining issues in contemporary culture from a framework of Christian conviction. He was formerly a producer for National Public Radio. He and his wife homeschooled their two children—one who recently graduated from the College of William and Mary, and the other a student at the University of Virginia.
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