Share Your Passion: Courting Wisdom: The Discipline of Study

I spoke in assembly today as a part of an ongoing series at Rochester College entitled Share Your Passion. After spending some time thinking through some of the aspects of the Christian life that I love with Sara Barton, the campus minister, we decided that it might be good for students to hear about my passion for study.

Here is my manuscript from the event.

“Share Your Passion”: Courting wisdom…

I guess that it’s appropriate to start this “sharing my passion” time today by talking about a tale of teenage passion. I guess the first time I really noticed her was in my English class as a freshman in high school. Looking back, she had surely been there all along, but I don’t really remember taking notice of her. There was something intriguing, something passionate and inspiring, even mysterious, about her. She not only caught my eye but captured my imagination. We flirted, but only at a distance. I was cautious, questioning, and unsure; but somehow I knew that I loved her.

After a long summer of great but nearly mindless youth group fun, I came back to school as a sophomore. I was on pins and needles, passing by rows of lockers, to step into each new class, anxious to discover if she would be sitting in one of the chairs. At last, there she was. We were in A.P. Biology together. I should have expected it: A.P. Biology. Somehow I knew then that we were meant to be, destined to journey together through life; I wondered if she knew the same thing.

My heart continued to pound in my chest throughout that year and over the next two years. I found myself following her to Harding, hoping to fan the flame of the passion that I knew and felt inside. Looking back on it all from today, fifteen to twenty years later, it seems like I’m such a different person. Many of my hopes and dreams for my life have changed. Time will do that to you. But, I can safely say that I love that allusive, passionate, enigmatic, inspiring girl even more today than I did when I was a temperamental, cocky fifteen year-old or an unsure, questioning college freshman.

I guess it’s right about now that I should be watching Natalie to see if she’s squirming in her seat. See, Natalie was not my high school love; in fact, we didn’t meet until years later, when I was at my third graduate school and she was an undergrad. But, don’t worry. This girl of my dreams, this object of my affection and devotion isn’t simply another woman, but is wisdom herself. That’s right; Terrill gets to talk about cooking; I’m the nerdy guy who is passionate about study.

That’s what I want to talk about today. I want to think for a few minutes about the discipline of study, the passionate of the pursuit of wisdom. I didn’t have the language to talk about it then, no way to make sense of the passion that was rising in me, but I found it in Proverbs. Hear the word of the Lord:

Listen, children, to a father’s instruction,
and be attentive, that you may gain^* insight;
²for I give you good precepts:
do not forsake my teaching.
³When I was a son with my father,
tender, and my mother’s favourite,
⁴he taught me, and said to me,
‘Let your heart hold fast my words;
keep my commandments, and live.
⁵Get wisdom; get insight: do not forget, nor turn away
from the words of my mouth.
⁶Do not forsake her, and she will keep you;
love her, and she will guard you.
⁷The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom,
and whatever else you get, get insight.
⁸Prize her highly, and she will exalt you;
she will honour you if you embrace her.
⁹She will place on your head a fair garland;
she will bestow on you a beautiful crown.’

(Proverbs 4:1-9)

Here’s what I love about this passage and all of Proverbs 1-9. Here, a father or teacher uses the metaphor of wisdom as a woman. He exhorts his son to court and marry Woman Wisdom, to love and cherish her. This is a passionate story of romance, of reckless abandon and deep attachment. But this is not a tragedy. In fact, the teachers understand that this courting of wisdom actually spares the tragedy of falling into the grasp of Dame Folly. Now that I’m married, I realize that this makes a lot of sense.

Study, the pursuit of wisdom is a vital part of our life with God, a key element to discipleship. In fact, as the theologian Anselm once said, discipleship is about faith seeking understanding. The teachers in Proverbs understood this. They realized that “faith seeks understanding passionately and relentlessly, or it languishes and eventually dies.” Faith is a continual dance with God and our experiences and questions are the music that drive our steps and guide us to deeper understanding and fuller transformation. It’s a holistic union of all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

There are two aspects of this metaphor that I want to explore with you today.

The first, is in marriage we discover that we are engaged with a mysterious subject. I think back over the time that I’ve spent with Natalie, through friendship, courtship, and marriage. I have spent over five years studying and learning Natalie. But she’s not simply an object to be analyzed in the safe confines of a laboratory or a problem to be solved. She is a living subject. She is always just beyond the grasp of my mind. Each step along the way, I get to know her a little more fully. But everything I know is provisional and open to surprising change. Because I love Natalie so deeply and passionately, I can never stop pursuing her, trying to understand her afresh, more fully and more completely, even though sometimes the quest leads to new questions, rather than answers.

The same is true of our love of God. As Christians we have faith in a living God, a God that remains a mystery beyond our comprehension. “While a problem can be solved, a mystery is inexhaustible.” And a mystery demands humility; or as Luke Johnson likes to say, we must have “modesty before the mystery.” Our faith in the reality and presence of the living and mysterious God is the starting point, the foundation and the driving force behind our searching and study. If God is living, we must expect for our foundations to be shaken, that our assumptions will be confounded. We will have to become seekers, pilgrims, pioneers with no residence. We will no longer be satisfied with our unexamined beliefs, assumptions, and practices. We want to know all that we can know about God and God’s world. As long as we remain pilgrims of faith, we will continue to raise questions – hard questions – for which we will not always have the answers. Often our questions will lead to new sets of questions, rather than answers. But this is a part of our courtship and marriage with wisdom.

In our courtship of wisdom, not only are we engaging a mysterious subject, but we do so within the the reality of a particular historical context.

Natalie and I live in a real historical situation, not a vacuum. Each new day and each new situation has its own distinctive problems and possibilities. Some of the things that sustained our relationship when we first met in Abilene or shortly after we moved to Michigan no longer suffice today. We continue to move through both the joys and the struggles of life, through seasons where things seem as vibrant as a blooming spring and others that seem as chaotic and uncontrollable as the darkness of winter. Yet, we embrace the difficulty and the struggle, just as fully as we do the times of joy. We are committed to wade through the wilderness of confusion together, trusting that as we do, we’ll emerge as something bigger, something better, something new.

The same is true of our life with God. Our faith does not live in a vacuum. We are in relationship with God today, in our time and in our culture. “Our changing, ambiguous, and often precarious world poses ever new questions for faith, and many answers that sufficed yesterday are no longer compelling for us today. Questions arise at the edges of what we can know and what we can do as people” (Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding). The questions thrust themselves on us with special force in times and situations of crisis, when we can not reconcile our experiences in life with the faith we profess, when we encounter sickness or suffering, guilt, struggle, and death. It is then that the spinning disorientation drives us either to revert and try to hide in the safety of old answers that will no longer suffice or to strive for wisdom, seeking new possibilities and solutions with the help of God.

That is why our pursuit of wisdom, study, is a vital part of discipleship. One the one hand it inspires in us an ever deeper passion for God; on the other, it is driven by our passionate pursuit of God. So now, while you are here in a community that can help nurture your pursuit and love of God, I implore you to cultivate a deep and lasting love for wisdom that will last a lifetime.

It is on days like today that we are reminded of the necessity of the pursuit of wisdom, when tragedy strikes, as it has at just yesterday at Northern Illinois University. The deep disconnect between our faith and our experiences in life drive us back to the dance floor to dance the dark waltz of disorientation with wisdom, trusting that the steps will bring us to a new connection with and understanding of God as the last note of the music fades.