Reflection: Pursuit of Wisdom
By Rebecca Pettigrew
PWCA Board Director
Together with other Classical Christian Institutions, our Head of School and Founding Board have been envisioning how our curriculum might take shape as we strive to improve the heart of our students in their pursuit of wisdom. Eric Cook, President of the Society for Classical Learning, wrote a thought provoking essay on Wisdom which we thought was worthy of reflecting on with our readers:
Cook cites Psalm 9:10, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom” and posits that Wisdom begins not with the brain but with the heart. More specifically, pursuit of Wisdom “begins with humble submission, reverence, and awe.” In Scripture, from Moses to Job to Isaiah to Paul, we find “numerous examples of those who encountered God's holiness and subsequently reoriented their lives and priorities.” Each one, Cook writes, “received a glimpse of God's glory and immediately humbled himself through submission and obedience. These men did not arrive at Wisdom after a lengthy, intense, academic gauntlet. . . [they] received a whirlwind of profound, but humbling lessons: God is sovereign, good, and mysterious. His ways are not man's ways.”
From these examples, we discover that Wisdom does not firstly mean “understanding God's will”, but rather it is perception of Wisdom as a kind of “fearful embrace of God as God” - an ongoing acknowledgment that He is God and that we are his dependent creatures. It begins “with a recognition of one's own frailty and humanity in the presence of the divine.” And importantly, “the fruit of this disposition is a reorientation of one’s mind, affections, and will in relation to God, ourselves, others, and the cosmos.”
In this reflection exercise on Wisdom, we strive to answer these questions: How can we, alongside our students, journey toward Wisdom together? In what ways can we encourage, practice, and embody the "fear of Lord" as Classical Christian educators? How can our students encounter God in our school and in their classes in ways that encourage rather than denigrate or dismiss the experiences of awe, wonder, and fear of the Lord: all which seeks to support their pursuit of Wisdom.
Cook challenges us to consider that “...prostration is the only appropriate posture for Christian education.” Then perhaps, this is our challenge as founders, educators, and parents: to continually seek encounters with God in His holiness, to cultivate fear and awe of the Lord in our hearts, and to commit to an ongoing reorientation by Him which will be reflected in our priorities and in the shape of our lives. To embody this, as adults, as educators, and as parents, is to set the stage for that same dynamic in our students and families.
