Teach us to order our days rightly, that we may enter the gate of wisdom.
Psalm 90.12

In this penetrating psalm the writer meditates upon the eternity of God and the transience of human existence - seventy years is the span of our life, eighty if our strength holds; upon God's power and human weakness; upon the wrath of God and our own frailty. In the face of the terrible majesty of the Creator, we learn by bitter experience that of ourselves we are nothing, that God can turn us back to dust whenever he chooses. And so we begin to see our lives more clearly as they are divested of their apparent power and importance. As age proceeds we may be relieved of many of our possessions and find our personal importance a faded relic, but in the emptiness of worldly things the Spirit of God has a greater opportunity to make an unhurried, undramatic entry into our being. There he teaches us wisdom, which may be defined as an embracing understanding of our place in the total scheme of things, of what we are here to achieve, and of what we are to become in the greater life beyond mortal death.

Wisdom is an understanding of a very different order from knowledge, which is concentrated, specialized and transient, inasmuch as its contours are forever changing as more facts are known and past misconceptions corrected. There seems to be no end to the research that brings with it greater knowledge; as St Paul would put it, "our knowledge and our prophecy alike are partial, and the partial vanishes when wholeness comes" (1 Cor. 13.9). The wholeness he writes about is a wisdom that can embrace the discrete facts of worldly life, including scientific research, and bring them into a wide context of human growth and spiritual development. Knowledge is the commodity of the specialist whereas wisdom knows no intellectual barriers except the capacity to be silent, aware and deeply understanding. It may be present in an inconspicuous worker who has experienced life deeply, while absent from the intellectual giant who has formed few relationships outside the professional milieu acquainted with the work in question.

The true beginning of wisdom is the desire to learn, we read in Wisdom 6.17. The passage goes on to say that a concern for learning means love towards wisdom, a love that means keeping her laws, the observance of which guarantees immortality, which in turn brings a person closer to God. The desire to learn is a product of humility, a state of mind usually brought about after our illusions of self-sufficiency and importance have been torn away by suffering of one type or another. It is one thing to learn a particular discipline with suitable professional training; the result is knowledge. It is quite another matter to learn wisdom, for life itself is both taskmaster and teacher. If we are fortunate we may meet wise counsellors on the way, but they are there essentially to encourage and direct us, so that we may proceed on our unique path in silent awareness and firm dedication.

The exquisite Wisdom poem of Job 28 ends with the dictum,

The fear of the Lord is wisdom,
and to turn from evil is understanding.

This fear is an awe in contemplating the immensity of the universe and the majesty of its Creator. The wrath of God mentioned in Psalm 90 is the law by which creation is maintained, a law written into the cosmos no less than into the human soul in terms of the moral imperative to righteousness. Its essence is the Ten Commandments, and to obey them is to begin to order our days rightly, that we may enter the gate of wisdom.

But something else is needed for us to pass through the gate into the fair country beyond. This is a love of such dedication that we are prepared to give up our very life for our friend (John 15.13), who in the final analysis is everyone around us. Love completes wisdom as it fulfils the whole law.

May I have the vision to live justly with my neighbours now, Lord, so that I may gradually attain the wisdom that comes with experience, is fertilized with love, and pours down in blessing to all whom it touches.