When I started blogging it was an experiment in thinking, writing and conversation all in one. I do some of my best thinking with a pencil, pen or keyboard – in any case through writing. This isn’t for everyone, and plenty of folk think better than I do without all the in between stuff. But writing involves a process of word selection, sentence construction, self-expression through the discipline of articulation, and is an important way in which I theologise, ruminate, laugh at myself, pin down experience long enough to have a better look at it.When this is done with a pencil, pen, paper in the absence of a keyboard, it’s also a way of making sure at least some of the significant stuff that flows through my stream of consciousness doesn’t float away unobserved, unregarded and unappreciated.
A number of folk comment either on the blog or by email – and some who know me pick up conversation around the themes and idiosyncracies of Living Wittily. I’d never put myself in the same universe of spirituality, theological fervour, lucid expression or obsessive writing as Richard Baxter – but he said of his own humungous output, ‘I was but a pen in God’s hand’. My own claim is that ‘I am but two index fingers prodding a keyboard, to my heart’s content’; whatever blessing it might otherwise produce for those who happen by Living Wittily is just another reason to prod on. The portrait of Thomas More links to the words at the head of my blog page, because I am still persuaded that living faithfully for Christ, thinking Christianly and looking on the world with a sense of the purposefulness and mercy of God, requires of us that we “look humanely forth on human life”, and recognise that we are called to “serve God wittily in the tangle of our minds”. Christian wisdom might be another term for such intentional effort to know, to understand, and to live faithfully after Christ.
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