The foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength’ (1 Cor. 1: 25)
I’d like to think that I know quite a lot about foolishness. Before ordination, I spent seven years in a religious community, living a life of poverty, chastity and obedience- and, as such, a life which seemed quite extravagantly foolish to most of the people I knew. One visitor to the convent told us that our Home Office security classification was Harmless Eccentrics Grade II’- I don’t know what Grade I consisted of, but I thought that said a great deal about the way we were viewed by the world. And before that, I had lived and worked among people with severe learning disabilities: those who might be described, in the old sense of the word, as simple’. So, when I hear today’s reading from the letter to the Ephesians with its injunction not to act like simpletons or to be foolish, because to do so is contrary to the will of God, I feel somewhat uneasy. Did I really spend thirteen years of my life living contrary to the will of God? Of course, in many respects I may have done exactly that. But in this particular case, I think not
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The key can perhaps be found in our reading from the book of Proverbs. Here, it is clear that wisdom is indeed a desirable quality. This is confirmed by the rest of Scripture, which suggests that wisdom is not only desirable but an actively divine quality. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, we’re told- in other words, wisdom begins with the recognition that we are not the centre of the universe, because that position is already occupied by God.
The true relationship between divine wisdom and simplicity, in its biblical sense, is thrown into sharp relief by the annual press frenzy over A level results. Once again this week we have been treated to the familiar arguments about standards: is an A level today worth what it was 20 years ago? What exactly does an A grade mean these days? Are our young people as well educated, as intelligent, as able to think as they were in the good old days- whenever those are supposed to have been? For me, though I don’t intend to engage directly with those particular questions, there is a bigger issue at stake: what is education itself meant to be for? Clearly, exam results are not to be neatly equated either with intelligence or knowledge. But to my mind the most depressing aspect of the current debate has been the utilitarian approach evident in both the young people taking the exams, and those sitting in judgement on their achievements: these grades will get me onto this course to read that subject which will make me employable in this job which will earn me that amount of money- and that is its only point and its only function. There has been little evidence of a love of learning per se; rather, a sense that qualifications are to be valued above all for their power to point the owner towards material security.
True wisdom suggests instead that we are to be valued not for what we have but for what we are. The role of education in coming to possess such wisdom is evident in Cardinal Newman’s remarks on what he called the Liberal Education’:
[The student] apprehends the great outlines of knowledge, the principles on which it rests, the scale of its parts, its lights and its shades, its great points and its little, as he otherwise cannot apprehend them. Hence it is that this education is called liberal’. A habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation and wisdom . It teaches [the student] to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical and to discard what is irrelevant. It prepares him to fill any post with credit, and to master any subject with facility’.
For Newman, this vision of education was clearly driven by a moral imperative: that the properly educated person would not only be able to turn hand or mind to any profession, but that he would be able to decide what was the right course of action in a given situation, and would be exercised by how to live in right relationship with others and with God. Even the best-educated person misses the point if he or she fails to see that there is something bigger at the heart of the world than my wants, my ambitions, my rights. When I had just done my own A levels and heard that the results had won me a place at Cambridge, my school was visited by a lady from the Industrial Society. She asked those of us who the school considered high-flyers what we wanted to be. I already knew what I wanted to do (though this job was not open to women in those days) but I did not tell her so: she would not have understood. As it was, she set out to humiliate me publicly for my lack of ambition. I could not have told her my real desire: if I had done so, she would only have been contemptuous. But it turned out that all was not lost. Earlier this summer I returned to Cambridge for a college reunion. Twenty years had passed since we arrived, in the middle of the unashamedly selfish, individualist and materialist 1980s. And I was fascinated to discover that, though many of my contemporaries had graduated straight into well-paid jobs in merchant banks, accountancy firms, management consultancy and the Tokyo Stock Exchange, almost none of them are still there. Two have become professional singers; one is training as a social worker; one teaches in a London comprehensive. It’s those of us who went into people’ jobs in the first place who are still there.
In case you’re wondering, however, I’m not trying to draw a simplistic equation between low pay and moral rectitude. That isn’t true simplicity either. To return to Proverbs, there is a distinction between the kind of simplicity that accompanies true, godly wisdom, and the simple-mindedness or foolishness to which the letter to the Ephesians objects so strongly. What has been going on in the church at Ephesus, it would appear, is a kind of abrogation of adult responsibility- a false simplicity, childishness rather than childlikeness perhaps. It’s a kind of false simplicity which is still all too prevalent in our churches, where Father (or Mother) knows best’ and the rest of the congregation is implicitly kept in a perpetual state of spiritual immaturity; this can happen with or without the collusion of the clergy. Regrettably, I would also have to admit that the same can often be true of religious communities: admired from afar as beacons of spiritual perfection by those who don’t live that lifestyle, the simple life’ can sadly become shorthand for total failure to grow up’. A mature spirituality is indeed a matter of simplicity. But it is not this false kind of simplicity. For, as T.S. Eliot reminds us, such complete simplicity costs not less than everything’. True, costly simplicity is the simplicity of the cross, where there is no room for pretence or posturing, but only sheer, naked obedience to the will of God.
Of course, as we know, the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing’. It is so for those who hear with incredulity Jesus’ words, recorded in the Gospel of John: unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you can have no life in you. Small wonder that his hearers found it so hard to understand, harder still to accept. Small wonder either that the Roman world in which early Christianity came to birth rejected it with revulsion as a cannibalistic sect. Such revolting ideas hardly sounded like divine wisdom. And the same is true today, albeit for different reasons. Self-sacrifice is so contrary to the what’s in it for me?’ culture as to be incomprehensible. Yet, as Proverbs reminds us, Wisdom herself invites us in to eat and drink from her own supplies. Only the freely given gift of divine wisdom feeds our minds, only the freely given gift of himself by Jesus feeds our souls, until we are strong and mature enough not to be simpletons any longer, but to choose instead the life of divine simplicity, where nothing else matters but doing the will of God.
Mother Rowan Williams