How To Be Wise: Growing in discernment and
love
Rod Garner
SPCK £9.99
(978-0-281-06893-7)
Church Times Bookshop £9 (Use code CT205
)
THE day before I sat down to write this review, I was preparing
a homily for the following Sunday's eucharist, and I found myself
once again consulting a much-thumbed book with the glorious title
Will My Rabbit Go To Heaven? And other questions children
ask. It is one of the most intelligent theological works that
I possess: children have the ability unselfconsciously to ask the
most difficult and important questions, and an adult response to
them must be truthful but not over-complex; honest and not
patronising. The book addresses big questions clearly and
simply.
By contrast, I also have on my shelves many "theological"
volumes that seem to make a virtue of using impenetrable language
at great length to state the obvious under the appearance of
sophistication.
I suspect that Rod Garner will have none of this. How to Be
Wise is a brief book, clearly written, about a big subject.
Wisdom is something that presumably most of us aspire to in one
form or another, and Garner gives us various pointers on the way.
For the Bible reader, of course, there is a substantial body of
wisdom literature, and, after a chapter trying to define what
wisdom is, the author takes us to this wealth of material, focusing
especially on the book of Ecclesiastes. The Fourth Gospel is a
natural stopping-point after this.
The latter part of the book takes the reader to perhaps less
immediately obvious places: to the importance of literature and
music, and the place of our feelings in the development of
emotional and intellectual intelligence. Last of all - and perhaps
one of the most important things - comes the place of silence.
Wisdom is not what we know, but also what we realise we cannot
know.
The book ends with a short prayer, given to the author years
previously: "Lord, temper with tranquillity my manifold activity,
that I may do my work for thee with very great simplicity." The
author himself remarks: "Only after silence can I begin to pray
such words with hope and integrity."
In a contemporary Church all too often bombarded with noise from
within, Amen to that.
The Revd Peter McGeary is Vicar of St Mary's, Cable Street,
in east London, and a Priest Vicar of Westminster Abbey.