March 2008

It was Socrates who said essentially ‘the more I know the more I know I don’t know’ and he was very clever. When I was very young, between about the ages of 6-11 years, I hadn’t read any Socrates but I considered myself to be wise. I remember looking at people and thinking, I know what you are thinking because I have wisdom (I considered it a kind of super power!). Looking back it seems both a strange and a rather arrogant thing to have been thinking at that age, but then after all, I WAS that age! Nowadays I hope such wisdom as I have is mine from learning it the hard way, and see it much more as a gift from the Lord . God alone is truly wise but God’s wisdom is, as the book of Proverbs says, more precious than rubies ie highly desirable, so I figure we ought to ask God for it.

Recently I’ve been reading Christian Wisdom - Desiring God and Learning in Love by David Ford and it has been sparking off thoughts on the subject in various directions. In order to give myself some reminder of what I’ve been studying and maybe open some conversation I’m going to blog regularly for a while on aspects of the book. It will be interesting to see whether I can sum up any of it in a way which does it any justice.

After many months of inactivity I have returned to my voxblog looking to do something fresh. One of the delights of Christianity is we get used to being able to start again. So a name change seemed in order.

Why ‘Do not forsake me, o my darling’? A number of reasons - I was noodling around with puns and variations on my name and I remembered Shakespeare’s sonnet 18, perhaps because it is howling a gale here and denuding the trees of branches:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

My surname is Budd and I hope/believe in God’s eyes I am his darling (’loveable or endearing person’ COD). Then I imagined God saying to me, “Don’t forsake me”, along with Jesus’ cry of dereliction in the other direction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34) and I thought about the wrestling of faith in the face of trials and such.

Finally, and rather frivolously, Do not forsake me O my Darling is not only a good song from the classic western, High Noon, it also is the title of an episode of The Prisoner (a series I’ve been fond of for many years). Strangely though, it is not the cowboy episode which was called Living in Harmony, and which followed it in the series. Enough for now.