Living Wittily is four years old

It's now 4 years since Living Wittily came on-line.  Even by then blogging seemed to have reached its peak and others who had been blogging for a while were giving up and moving on. Any activity that takes time and commitment to maintain on a near daily basis has to have some justification. And there is the challenge of actually saying something worthwhile, that someone else might read, and that might make a difference to their day.

Making a difference doesn't have to suggest world-changing scale. It can mean making someone smile, encouraging someone to keep going, changing a viewpoint, challenging assumptions that are unjust or untrue, opening up new perspectives, pushing back limited horizons, adding to the sum of knowledge (rare I think!), bringing others into conversation, pointing others to good reading as a beggar telling other beggars where there's the chance of some bread. And way at the beginning of Living Wittily I tried to say what the blog would be about, why I thought it worth investing time, ideas, and daily discipline of thought.

In four years there has been a lot of traffic, emails to take conversations further, from friends in Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand and places in between, and a regular stream of comments. I've happily desiderated on poetry and art, discussed theology and current affairs, recommended books and books. And it has been great fun. I often think as I write, and so end up writing what I didn't know I thought! Or I've felt strongly about something and felt better not just by saying it, but by taking time to understand why I felt so strongly in the first place.

But whatever I've written, has come out of the experience and the intellectual life that is who I am. Down the years of trying to live this life we call Christian, on this journey of following faithfully after Jesus, a discipleship of the intellect, I've tried to keep my heart open and my mind generous, itself a spiritual discipline that is the intellectual and affective expression of humility. That is, truth is not so much what we say, but what we seek; listening to the unfamiliar and hearing from another country of the mind and soul, is a disposition of hospitality and welcome; and so amongst the deeply rooted assumptions of my own intellectual life, which I try to tend with an all but horticultural carefulness, is the vastness and beauty of God, the limited horizons of all our human thought, and therefore the graced excitement of knowing that to seek truth, beauty and goodness, is to be truly and fully engaged as a human being, and a child of God. It is to live wittily.