Chapter 9

Note: Last night I just hit the wall. I tried reading the passage, but it just refused to make sense. Tonight (despite in many ways a more arduous day), I seem to be a little more on top of things. Sorry about the delay!

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Today’s commentary is very short, but that’s because the message of the chapter is so strikingly clear.

Chapter 9 continues with the contrast between Wisdom and the wayward woman, but it spells out a little more clearly why the two are opposed.

The whore is representative not merely of sexual pleasures, but of the attitude in life that forgets about the tough questions and simply goes with the flow. It sounds great to do that sometimes. Life as a Christian can be very difficult, and you’re frequently running head-on against the world’s attitudes and values.

But as attractive as it may be to ignore brutal reality, it’s also stupid.

If a bus is about to hit me, thinking about something else does not protect me from being hit. Reality doesn’t care whether I think about it or not. Reality is what is still there if you stop believing in it. Wisdom says that one needs to understand and accept reality as much as one is able to.

Wisdom isn’t so much the ability to understand the world. If that were so, intelligent people would be wiser than people with less intelligence; the fact is we all know people with a high intelligence who live in a most unwise manner, and people whose intelligence is less developed and yet who possess considerable wisdom.

No, wisdom is more about the willingness to understand as fully as one can – and importantly, to accept whatever truths one discovers, whether they are what we want to hear or not.

And it is through wisdom that life deepens.