Living Wittily and serving God in the tangle of our minds

To serve God wittily in the tangle of our minds….

This post was written three years ago when I started blogging as Living Wittily. It's based on the motto at the head of the blog page, words of Sir Thomas More, from Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons.

I read it every now and then to check it is still mostly what I am about – and it is. I've posted it again as a blogging reiteration, a restatement of why the time and energy to do this blog seems worthwhile. This is now the 1001st post – a lot of words. I hope some of them have mattered and made a difference.

……………………………………………………

Almost every word of this phrase has significance for an obedient
following after Christ. At least for me. Unpacking this I use the inclusive
'we' – others may not think or feel this way, which is fine. I would be
interested though to hear from you what you think it might mean "to serve God wittily in the tangle of
our minds".

To serve
implies obedience, but as willing grateful surrender, an inner attitude of
consistent readiness, from which each action and activity derives its value as
an act of devotion following after Christ.

To serve wittily
means an end to naivete, a call to attentiveness and alert observation of the
world in which we live and move, and within which we are called to serve. So
having  our wits about us will mean, (and this only for starters – feel
free to add to this unpacking process)

1. Not being rendered myopic by cultural
   assumptions, but rather
   see the world through the lens of the Gospel – not war but peacemaking;
   not greed but generosity; not lies but truthfulness; not power over others
   but power serving others.
2. Not being pushed around by consumer
   pressures but rather
   being intentionally shaped and transformed by Jesus. And what are the
   economics of the Kingdom; what is it that profits a human being?
3. Not being morally
   domesticated by ethical and cultural accommodations, but rather seeking to live
   in the radical freedom of the Kingdom of God where the only rule is God’s rule. The
   culture of hard realism challenged by visionary compassion; the idolatry
   of the bottom line questioned by gestures of sacrificial extravagance; the
   semantic cosmetics of political correctness superceded by communities of
   Jesus embodying radically inclusive love.
4. Not being embarrassed by the evidence of
   Christendom in decline, but rather
   seeking and embodying a lifestyle more faithfully rooted in the teaching
   of Jesus.

The tangle of our minds –
tidiness and system, an imposed order on life, what P T Forsyth called the lust
for lucidity – none of these answer to the sheer messiness and inconvenience of
the world, our culture and our times. There is that in the Gospel which resists
being combed into shape, style and fashion. ( I use the metaphor as one who no
longer has much use for a comb!) My own experience has been that Christian
theology, ethics and practice have to relate to a world constitutionally ambiguous,
unpredictable, inconsistent – and each human life is entangled in the
consequent joy and suffering that is a human life together.

And it is the tangle of our minds;
speaking here only for myself, my deepest theological convictions, and even my
most passionate spiritual experiences, are often rooted in the life of the
mind. Thought, reflection, consideration, contemplation, reason, understanding,
prayer – however deeply I feel the truth of things, they become most real and I
own them as life convictions mostly as they are received and welcomed as ideas
rooted in experience and expressed in the life God gives me to lead. Loving God
with my mind is an essential not an optional devotional attitude and aptitude
in my own spirituality – and for better or worse.

  So as a motto, ‘to serve God wittily in the tangle of our minds’,
provides a number of perspectives on my personal discipleship. However, in case
I get too serious about this, serving God wittily could also mean humorously,
good humouredly, and with hilarity. Fun and laughter being an essential
presupposition of healthily, gladly, en-joy-ably, serving God.
That sets me thinking about the spiritual discipline of fun – is there a
discipline of
fun, an obligation under God to be a gladness maker?!