new church life: september / october 2013
of holiness shining through them.
A state of reverence is a joyful state to be in. It is one of the virtues, and
blessings, of the New Church.
(WEO)
holy ignorance
Any time a question comes up these days, out come the iPhones and – through
the magic of Google – instant information. No one need feel ignorant in the
age of the Internet.
But information is not intelligence, and intelligence is not wisdom.
Information, however, is essential in life. Knowledge makes us educated
and useful. But knowledge alone does not define us.
Our culture prizes people who are intelligent – the Trivial Pursuit expert,
the Jeopardy! champion, the straight-A student, the revered professor, people
at the top of their professions.
We respect, reward and value smart people. But we love those who are
wise.
Wisdom has to do with our spiritual lives and is infinitely more important
– and lasting – than worldly knowledge.
Even a person not well educated can be wise, for wisdom is fundamentally
knowing the difference between good and evil – and living by what is good.
One of the distinctive goals of New Church education is the development
of spiritual conscience, which is the beginning of wisdom. Swedenborg writes:
Few if any know how we are led to true wisdom. Understanding is not wisdom but
leads to wisdom, since to understand what is true and good is not to be true and
good. To be wise is to be so. Wisdom is exclusively a question of the way we live, of
actually being wise. Wisdom, or in other words, life, is what secular and religious
knowledge introduces us into. We each have two sides: intellect and will. The will
is the first part; the intellect comes second. The kind of life we have after death
depends on our volitional side, not our intellectual side. (Secrets of Heaven 1555)
So, intellect is what we know and wisdom is what we do with what we
know – as long as we are choosing good. True wisdom is recognizing and
valuing what is beneficial to eternal life in heaven.
At some point we come to realize that all we know is but a drop in the ocean
to all that we don’t know. In the spiritual world, that is magnified enormously.
Angels go on learning to eternity, delighting especially in what they learn from
studying the Word.
So there is a blissful humility in accepting how little we actually know
and how much we have yet to learn. The Writ [