I have a riddle for you. Imagine walking to an appointment
or to do some shopping and coming across someone you know looking out into an
open field. It includes a few trees, say, or perhaps it’s part of a farm or a
section of land inside the city set aside for community gardens. Your friend is
just looking, quite intently, and without realizing what you are doing you
pause and watch. Your friend keeps right on looking. You look at the field and
don’t see anything particularly newsworthy. It’s a field. There are a few birds,
I’ve already mentioned the trees, and though some of it has been carefully
cultivated, parts are quite wild. A shopkeeper from across the way happens by
and comments about your friend, “They’ve been there for hours, you know. Came
two days last week, too.” The shopkeeper shakes their head and walks on. Your
friend is not a biologist, and has no stake personally in this piece of land.
They are simply looking very intently at a field.
Here is the riddle: what are they doing?
Of course, there are many possible answers. They might be
taking a break from a busy day doing something they find deeply relaxing. They
might be thinking about something that has nothing to do with the field but
that requires a quiet place where they won’t be interrupted. Since I’m a
product of the Sixties, one possibility that comes to mind is that they might be
stoned. They might be overwhelmed by secret guilt and are trying to convince
themselves not to commit suicide. They might be secretly lazy, this being
merely one manifestation of their ability to waste enormous chunks of time.
They might… we could, no doubt, fill out the list of possibilities endlessly.
If our minds and imaginations are shaped by the ancient
writings of the Bible, however, one possibility should have come instantly to
mind. It is possible they are gaining wisdom.
Jesus told his followers to spend time watching birds,
considering flowers, and looking at the grass (Matthew 6:25-30). If we did, he
said, we would learn something important about ourselves and about God. Solomon
“saw” and “considered” and “looked” at a field, and as a result “received
instruction” (Proverbs 24: 30-32) that in turn caused him to write a proverb
(33-34). When his wisdom was described, his expertise on trees, animals, birds,
reptiles, and fish is included in the list (1 Kings 5:33). After Job had lost
his family, his wealth, and his health, gone through more loss and grief than I
can imagine, suffered so much, God had him stand still and look at the creation
(Job 38-41) so that the deepest questions of his heart could find an answer.
The Hebrew psalmist David, perhaps when he was out alone caring for his
father’s sheep, looked up at the sky and learned of God (Psalm 19:1). St Paul
argued that moral responsibility was inescapable because human beings were
creatures in a creation that revealed enough about God that order and a sense
of right was the only possible sane conclusion (Romans 1:18-32).
“There is a way that nature speaks, the land speaks,” Native
American environmentalist Linda Hogan says. “Most of the time we are simply not
patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story.”
Remember my riddle about finding a friend staring at a
field? My point—my regret, actually—is not that we don’t take the time to do
what they were doing—and that is a great loss—but that when we needed to guess
what they were doing we probably did not immediately think, “Of course! They
are gaining wisdom.” At least I did not. I am so captivated by my culture’s
fixation (the biblical term is idolatry)
on productivity and efficiency that the notion seems strange, if not wrong.
Which only goes to show how much I need wisdom.
Source: Linda
Hogan in The Sun (September 2010)
page 48.