Dear Friends in Christ, I was talking with a friend recently who was complaining that his data bank was so full, he was starting to forget things. Sometimes we call it a senior moment. I call it a middler moment. The truth is - even children have difficulty remembering. Dr. Davis Chappell
I consider myself a life-time student and I have a hunger for knowledge. With our technology it is possible to get access to just about anything we care to know. Knowledge is important. But knowledge is not necessarily the same as wisdom. Knowledge is about information. Wisdom involves reflection and application. Knowledge enables us to construct, create and build. Wisdom enables us to know what to build, and when. Margaret Bendroth has written a book called The Spiritual Practice of Remembering. In it she talks about our inattention to tradition. "At its heart," she says, "a religious tradition is a long conversation." Jaroslav Pelikan writes, "we will never understand our faith by progressively sloughing off more and more of our tradition, as though insight would be purest and deepest when it has finally freed itself of the dead past." A creative, insightful conversation builds on what has been said before, exploring nuances and suggesting different interpretations but never assuming that the people who began it have nothing more to say and can safely be ignored. The living don't own the conversation any more than those in the past, nor those yet to come.