Mere Orthodoxy | Christianity, Politics, and Culture

Seeking Wisdom Without Training Wheels: An Exhortation to Christian Graduates

Written by Brad Littlejohn | May 29, 2024 11:00:00 AM

The below is a commencement address delivered earlier this month to the graduating class of New Covenant School of Anderson, SC.

I. Introduction

As each of you graduates prepares to step out into the wide world before you and do the work God has called you to do, it is important to realize that, however unglamorous that new job or that next stage of your studies may be, you are undertaking a kingly task—sharing in Adam’s work of dominion, and acting as emissaries of Christ your high king.

As such, you would do well to learn from the example of Solomon in 1 Kings 3. Facing his own kingly task, he prays, “And now, O Lord my God, you have made your servant king in place of David my father, although I am but a little child. I do not know how to go out or come in,” and he cries out to God for the gift of wisdom. Hopefully you, like Solomon, have enough wisdom to know just how desperately you will need wisdom for the path ahead. You have been the beneficiaries of a rare and remarkable training in wisdom. And yet you are headed for a painful crash if you think you can coast. Today the training wheels are being taken off, and you will discover whether you have actually begun to learn wisdom, or simply leaned on the wisdom of your elders.

While we like to use the metaphor of “training wheels,” unfortunately the most important parts of life are not like riding a bicycle. Once you learn to ride a bike, you’re generally good to go. Even if you don’t set another foot on a pedal for the next ten years, I’d wager that most of you would be able to hop back on the seat of a bike at age 28 and take off down a trail with only the briefest of wobbles. But when it comes to faith and wisdom, muscle memory will only get you so far. In the domain of the soul, entropy tends to work on overdrive. Think back on the times that you’ve had a real spiritual mountaintop experience, perhaps at a summer camp or a short-term missions trip. I’ll bet each of you have had at least one experience where you came back feeling spiritually on fire—the scales had fallen from your eyes, you recognized the shallowness of your former mode of life, and you were going to be a transformed person from now on: new devotions, new desires, new dreams. And how long did that last? A week? A month, if you were lucky?

“Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and immediately they sprang up, since they had no depth of soil, but when the sun rose they were scorched. And since they had no root, they withered away.  Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them.” The fact is that doubt, selfishness, and folly are our default setting, and we will always tend to revert to this setting unless we consciously cultivate faith, charity, and wisdom.

"The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight,” Solomon exhorts you. You have been given the beginning of Christian wisdom. Now what does it mean for you to continue to pursue this wisdom? How can you continue to cultivate the seeds that have been planted, ensuring that the sun does not wither them and the thorns do not choke them? Tonight I want to give you two exhortations about how you can continue to grow in wisdom as you strike out on your own into a darkening world.

II. Learn to Pay Attention

My first exhortation is this: learn to pay attention. Wisdom grows only through observation, through sustained attention to the fine-grained contours of reality. I have spoken to you all before about our Adamic vocation of naming the world. It is our unique task and privilege to call the myriad creatures which God has crammed into every nook and cranny of this world by name. In doing so, we learn to love them and delight in them—and through them, in their Creator. We also enable them, mute and voiceless as they are, to give glory back to God through the medium of human speech. But tonight I want to shift the emphasis. We study the world, name it, categorize it, and draw comparisons not just to glorify and enjoy God, but so that we can better live out our own vocation within the world.

We see this throughout biblical wisdom literature: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin”; “Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways and be wise.” The Book of Proverbs is one long catalog of careful, attentive observations of the non-human and human world in order to make sense of how to live well within it. We often think that experience is the teacher of wisdom; that if you’ve been through a lot, and been on the earth for awhile, you will be wise. But this isn’t quite right. It’s entirely possible to live a long and difficult life full of adventures and hard knocks, and to depart the world a simpleton. Experience teaches nothing if you’re not willing to pay attention. Indeed, this is what separates the wise man from the fool in Proverbs: the one pays close enough attention to learn from what happens to him, while the latter just coasts along on the surface.

From this standpoint, all of us are in grave danger of being fools. For perhaps never in human history has there been a generation so accustomed to skimming along on the surface of things. We surf the web, skim articles, scroll through feeds, but do we ever attend?

A century ago, T.S. Eliot wrote that ours was an age “distracted from distraction by distraction.” He had no idea. Today we have created distraction machines a hundred times more powerful than anything Eliot knew, and we’ve placed them everywhere and auctioned them to marketing executives who research how best to distract you—even gas pumps have little screens now, and if they don’t, you can always just pull out the one in your pocket. Lewis warned in The Screwtape Letters of our propensity to lose ourself in nothingness:

Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

This problem then is obviously not unique to the digital age—Lewis himself gives the example of aimlessly browsing “a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper,” and fifteen centuries before, St. Augustine lamented his propensity to get distracted from meditation by the sight of a dog chasing a hare. But there is no question that the digital age has poured gasoline on the fire of our native restlessness.

Attention requires patience and presence, two things that our world relentlessly devours. Technology has steadily given us ways of getting everywhere and everything faster, but instead of giving thanks, and using all the time we save on necessities to slow down and ponder everything else, we keep craving faster and faster. We deceived ourselves into thinking that by putting a world’s worth of information at our fingertips, we could somehow make ourselves more educated, but instead we have simply made ourselves more lazy—or perhaps given our native laziness freer rein. Why bother to actually study a topic when you can just skim the Wikipedia page and get what you need from it?

Don’t get me wrong; such things are powerful tools, and I use them regularly. But I also lament my growing inability to patiently attend to a long and careful argument or rich novel, and my tendency to deceive myself into thinking I’ve actually learned about an issue because I’ve Googled it for a few minutes. Since the actual created order is always moving and changing slower than the feed in my pocket, it is bound to lose out in any competition for my attention. We long since grew bored of actually looking at sunsets or mountain vistas, although we’re more than happy to capture them for Instagram. And as for other people, the greatest source of wisdom? Well, we’re very unlikely to have the patience for them—most of them make awkward small talk, or tell long, circuitous, repetitive stories, or share way more opinions than they have a right to.

But why should we need to pay attention? We no longer have to be present even where we are present. If you’re cursed to carry around a smartphone in your pocket, I’m sure you’ve found yourself, bored at a party or a meeting or even a Bible study, pulling this out so you could be virtually present somewhere else more interesting. Quite possibly, you had a good excuse—you’d suddenly remembered something that had happened in the past that you had meant to check on (the outcome of last night’s meeting, or playoff game); or thought of something in the future you needed to do, that you wanted to put a reminder on your phone for. And perhaps it wasn’t even your fault—the phone buzzed in your pocket, after all, and demanded your attention. For it goes without saying that whatever someone somewhere else has said to you in a text message must be more important or urgent than whatever someone in the room is saying. We have trained ourselves, in short, never to be fully present in the present. Why should we be present, when something more interesting is surely happening elsewhere? We have gained many things in this technological bargain, to be sure. But what have we lost?

We have lost the ability to be fully engaged in a conversation, to fully attend to the argument of a book, to take uninterrupted delight in the sight of a child playing or a bird soaring. Our attention flickers briefly over the surface, and on to something else. The result is Screwtape’s dream come true: “An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure.”

For God intended us to take pleasure in the world, a world which is indescribably beautiful and glorious, if only we could open our eyes to take it in, a mirror of his own glory. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God; it will flame out, like shining from shook foil,” declares Gerard Manley Hopkins in one of my favorite poems. Lewis elaborates in Letters to Malcolm:

This heavenly fruit is instantly redolent of the orchard where it grew. This sweet air whispers of the country from whence it blows. It is a message. We know we are being touched by a finger of that right hand at which there are pleasures for evermore. There need be no question of thanks or praise as a separate event, something done afterwards. To experience the tiny theophany is itself to adore. Gratitude exclaims, very properly, ‘How good of God to give me this.’ Adoration says, ‘What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!’ One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun. If I could always be what I aim at being, no pleasure would be too ordinary or too usual for such reception; from the first taste of the air when I look out of the window—one’s whole cheek becomes a sort of palate—down to one’s soft slippers at bed-time.

We live in a grass-is-always-greener world. If we get restless, and we quickly will, we can hop in our cars and travel somewhere better and more beautiful. If we can’t do that, we can digitally be wherever we want to be. And if we must look at our own grass, and it’s not green enough, well, there’s always a filter for that. Don’t get me wrong—sometimes you really are in the wrong spot, and God is calling you elsewhere. One week from now I’m actually selling the house my parents built and moving to northern Virginia—hopefully that doesn’t make me a hypocrite. But most of the time, the thing you are waiting for and looking for, the satisfaction you’re counting on coming from elsewhere—it’s already there in front of you, and all you need to do is look around you.

And I should stress again that although those passages from Hopkins and Lewis exhort us to attend to God’s glory in the non-human creation, we should not be nineteenth-century Romantics about this. God displays himself to us in beautiful sunsets, yes, but above all, as Hopkins writes in another poem “through the features of men’s faces”—yes, even the warts. We go through each of our days wishing we could just skip forward to the interesting parts, wishing we could get out of this tedious conversation or finish with the agonizingly slow checkout clerk, and we do not pause to take in the astounding image of God standing in front of us.

You will not grow in wisdom unless you can learn to pay attention.

But of course, this can’t be done by good intentions alone. You can’t just leave this ceremony feeling inspired, and suddenly overcome a lifetime of bad habits. It will require concrete disciplines. If you have one of these, consider getting rid of it—I’m ditching mine next month. Or at least, set aside times of ascesis, a couple hours a day away from perpetual distraction machines, or a couple months of the year off of social media. You will, to be sure, miss some opportunities—you might not see the party invitation until it’s too late. Or you might even miss a job opportunity that could’ve been yours if you’d pounced on the notification. But the things you will miss will be a trivial price to pay compared to your immortal soul. Plan regular times each week to get out into nature, and plan long conversations around a firepit. Schedule coffee with a friend and promise each other to leave your phones in the car, so you can fully and solely attend to one another.

Whatever it takes, learn to pay attention.

III. Live Not by Lies

My second exhortation is this: live not by lies. Some of you may be familiar with Rod Dreher’s book by this title, which draws on the wisdom of those who resisted Communist rule in Eastern Europe to equip Christians to resist the soft totalitarianism of our own cultural antichrist. But it’s easy to warn against the lies of our political and cultural opponents. My own warning is more far-reaching.

Each of you have grown up in a world in which the boundaries between truth and fiction, reality and imagination, have grown increasingly blurred. Earlier this week, I was reminded of one of my favorite clips, from Flight of the Conchords’s “Think About It.” One member of the duo says, “My wife and I weren’t able to have children; that’s why we chose to imagine them. The doctor suggested it, and we’ve found it incredibly rewarding.” The other hesitantly informs the audience, “One reason Bret’s wife wasn’t able to have children is that…she’s not a real woman.” Bret concedes, “Yes, the kids certainly take after her in that respect.” It’s a hilarious skit, but we are entering a world where it may not be that much of a joke. With the rise of AI, it has become entirely possible to have a meaningful relationship with an imaginary friend or girlfriend, and some services in fact advertise themselves as providing a virtual wife for those unable to find a real one. I swear I am not making this up. Presumably it is only a matter of time before such “couples” purchase imaginary AI children as well—something presaged in Stephen Spielberg’s 2001 film AI.

Perhaps the most sobering prophecy of our future, though, is Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi masterpiece, Inception. In one haunting scene, the main character visits a dream parlor, where unconscious users lie stretched out, hooked up to dream-sharing machines. “They come here to fall asleep?” he asks. “No,” the proprietor answers. “they come here to wake up. The dream has become their reality. Who are you to say otherwise?” Indeed, who are we to say otherwise?

The digital world does not present fundamentally new temptations—it simply caters in an incredibly powerful way to the temptations that have been with us since Adam. The biggest lies are the ones we tell ourselves. Each of us constantly spins ourselves a story that will make us feel better—making excuses for that sinful indulgence or snide remark, speculating about the motives of that friend who slighted us, so we can stew in a self-satisfied brew of bitterness, or grossly exaggerating our own contributions to a recent enterprise so we can be the hero of our own stories. Often, we begin by knowing what we are doing in some measure, knowing that we are putting a spin on things, but pretty soon we begin to believe our own stories, and by the time we repeat our own lies to others we’ve forgotten that they were untrue.

Chatbots that tell us whatever we want to hear are simply technological amplifications of our tendency toward self-deception. And they’re also just an extreme version of what most of us have already done with social media. Most of the photos we post are photoshopped and filtered to make ourselves or our photography skills look better. The updates we post present a carefully-curated self, one that is much wittier, more ironic, and more self-possessed than the real you. When we weigh in with opinions, they are often enough not our real opinions (if we even know what those are anymore), but the opinions we expect to be expected of us, opinions formed in slavish imitation or knee-jerk reaction to other opinion-spouters.

Of course, to make this observation is to highlight again that the problems of social media are simply an intensified form of age-old human problems, against which the wisdom of our ancestors sought to warn us. Previous generations wrote about the dangers of the crowd, of self-alienation through habitual conformity. Tolstoy is a master at portraying this. In one scene of War and Peace, a young man is asked to recount a battle he was part of, and ends up finding himself spinning a story far more dramatic and heroic than the sordid and confused affair he actually experienced.

Rostov was a truthful young man; he would not have intentionally told a lie. He began with the intention of telling everything precisely as it had happened, but imperceptibly, unconsciously, and inevitably he passed into falsehood….To tell the truth is a very difficult thing; and young people are rarely capable of it. His listeners expected to hear how he had been all on fire with excitement, had forgotten himself, had flown like a tempest on the enemy’s square, had cut his way into it, hewing men down right and left, how a sabre had been thrust into his flesh, how he had fallen unconscious, and so on. And [so] he described all that.

Of course, as Tolstoy well-understood, we lie to others in part because they lie to us—through flattery. Scripture warns us constantly against the dangers of the flatterer, warnings we would do well to heed in our hyper-networked age. Flattery, though, takes many forms. The young men here may think they are invulnerable to it, but it’s just not just people on Instagram telling you how beautiful you are. Flattery happens whenever people tell you what you want to hear, rather than what you need to hear. When someone makes a political meme that gets you to smile and nod, “Yes, those people are idiots,” you’re the victim of flattery. When someone posts something calculated to get you to indulge in cathartic rage, rather than rational thought, you’re the victim of flattery. Whenever someone retweets your dumb hot-take because it reinforces their own, you’re the victim of flattery. Beware of anyone who flatters you by confirming what you already think rather than challenging your assumptions, by preaching to the choir while pretending to be a courageous prophet.

Look instead for the voices in your life that unsettle you and make you feel a bit uncomfortable, and force yourself to spend some time around them. You don’t have to live in that space—especially in such a mixed-up world, we do need people who will confirm our sense of reality if we’re not going to go insane—but don’t cut yourself off from genuinely contrarian voices.

Of course, flattery only names one side of the problem: distorting the truth in a positive direction. For many of your generation, the problem is the opposite. Our society is facing an epidemic of despair, especially among the youth, of people succumbing to the lie that they are worthless and unlovable, that their lives are pointless and meaningless. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is certainly digital media’s turbocharging of the sidelong glance—we are all tempted to look with envy on others who seem to be having a better life than us, and with social media, that can feel like literally everybody. Some of those in despair though are the victims of outright bullying and abuse. Scripture warns us that if we are faithful, we should expect trials and opposition, but it is easy to be overwhelmed at just how withering that opposition can be in the age of the internet.

A simple word of advice, then: never believe what idiots say about you, whether it be praise and flattery you don’t deserve, or slander and abuse you don’t deserve. Don’t live by their lies.

Following the path of wisdom then means finding truly truthful voices—people committed above all to searching out and speaking the truth, as they understand it. Note that it isn’t essential that they understand it correctly. I would much rather spend time with someone whom I disagree with about what is true, but who is relentlessly committed to trying to get to the truth and articulating their views with integrity, than I would spend time with a chronic liar who seems or claims to agree with all my positions.

So this is my challenge to you, as you go out into the world and take off the training wheels. Pay attention and learn to identify these increasingly rare truth-tellers, and invite them into your life as friends, mentors, or at least sparring partners. You are in gravest danger when you are all on your own—alone with your self-deceptions—or with the crowd, subconsciously conforming yourself to their expectations, values, and delusions. You must find a few good friends—most of them at the same stage of life as yourself, but also a couple of older mentors, and perhaps a couple of younger mentees, whom you can seek to bless in the way you yourself have been blessed.

For it is not enough to pay close attention to the world, if you are only ever looking at one side of it. You will never attain to wisdom if you do not find a few fellow pilgrims who are equally committed to giving truthful, patient, attention to the world, and who will see elements that you are sure to miss.

Of course, even the best of friends may fail you, or lead you astray. You are accountable to God, and not to them. Following his voice means being prepared to walk a lonely path at times, one that our friends may fail to understand. So if you find yourself blessed with wise friends who can aid your own search for wisdom, do not take them for granted or make an idol of them, but thank God daily for such a blessing. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “Therefore, let him who until now has had the privilege of living a common Christian life with other Christians praise God’s grace from the bottom of his heart. Let him thank God on his knees and declare: It is grace, nothing but grace, that we are allowed to live in community with Christian brethren.”

Each of you have received this grace. Each of you should pray for a continuation of this grace as you go on from this place and seek to plug in to new Christian communities. But resist the temptation to coast, or to outsource to the community the job of living faithfully for you. Pray for wisdom, pursue it, and cultivate the habits of attention, truthfulness, and gratitude each day. As Solomon says,

“Blessed is the one who finds wisdom,
    and the one who gets understanding,
She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her;
    those who hold her fast are called blessed.”