Sunday 1 November 2009 ( All Saints Day): Hollowell Mattins and Guilsborough Evensong:

" Help us O Lord to become masters of ourselves that we may become the servants of others. Take our lips and speak through them,  our minds and think through them and take our hearts and set them on fire. "

When I looked up the reading for this Sunday in the Lectionary, I found unusually that one was from the Apocrypha, from the Wisdom of Solomon, a stirring passage that begins " But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them.... They that put their trust in him shall understand the truth; and such as be faithful in love shall abide with him; for grace and mercy is to his saints, and he has care for his elect "  It's a theme reflected in the the reading from the Book of Revelations and I imagine that is why the two are set down together for to-day.
"Grace & mercy is to his saints"  .  On All Saints Day, therefore, with that reading in mind,  it seemed appropriate to think a little both about wisdom and saints.
One of my favourite readings from the Old Testament is that story from the first Book of Kings about Solomon's dream, and his reply when God asks him what he wants " "Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart" i.e. wisdom   God likes that, and gives him as a reward  what the King James Version calls "a  wise and understanding heart" 
I thought of that when, as a young Civil Servant  my first boss told me that good judgement was more important that good morals. I tried nonetheless to cultivate both attributes, without, I'm afraid,  ever quite achieving either. 
To-day's reading from the Apocrypha, however, led me a read some more of the Wisdom of Solomon and find out something about it.  Besides getting good judgement, Solomon got plenty of wives, concubines and riches as well.  So with his reply, one could argue that Solomon could have his cake and eat it
Call me a cynic, but despite Solomon's example, I rather doubt that many of us,  given the opportunity, would make the same choice today   
Wisdom, is out of fashion.  The very word has joined a number of others that are frequent in works of literature but are seldom used in everyday life.   How many of us can recall ever having heard a philosopher, politician or indeed anyone described as "wise".    The most common terms of approval of our leaders or other so called celebrities are  -  `clever'  ` astute' `shrewd, `high powered'.  The skills of our leaders lie in reading the opinion polls or hearing what focus groups have to say and spinning their view to the media . And the image they want to project is of someone vigorous, forceful, youthful, dynamic, but not wise.  Professors, such as Professor Nutt who is in the papers to-day,  are appointed for their specialist knowledge of, say, the effects of cannabis, university chancellors ( and certainly the heads of Oxbridge Colleges)  are appointed for their abilities as administrators and fundraisers, rather than as the elders of the people.   
Sadly, even philosophers, who from the etymology of the word ( love of wisdom) might be expected to give some meaning to the word, are no longer particularly wise. .  Some are accused of incoherent gibberish whilst others have narrowed their focus to a point where the ordinary man or woman cannot understand  still less appreciate what they are on about, for example,a question such as  does this pulpit exist?  As for morals, well Bertrand Russell and A J Ayer were undoubtedly highly intelligent, but judging from their private life could not be called wise by any standards.
So what can we learn from the Wisdom of Solomon?   Certainly not how to have one's cake and eat it.  It wasn't written by Solomon in any case. His authorship, scholars now agree, was apparently a commonly used literary convention.  It is addressed to the Jews in the first century before Christ and is a critique  -  or that is how I read it  -  of a sceptical hedonistic society in Alexandria, like that we find in the developed world to-day.  It is in fact, I've learned,  a link between the Old and New Testaments.  The description it gives of Wisdom  could be that of the Holy Spirit  "For she (note the feminine gender) is the breath of the power of God, and a pure influence flowing from the glory of the Almighty......the unspotted mirror of the power of God......entering into holy souls she maketh them friends of God and the prophets." 
The author interestingly has a good word to say for virginity and praises eunuchs and pushes childlessness  This is a pretty radical change from the accepted wisdom in much of the Bible that fertility was a sign of God's blessing and sterility a sign of disapproval. 
The Wisdom of Solomon's attack on the permissive society of its time does explain in part why in our own, often agnostic, age, wisdom has gone out of fashion.  To the author God is the source of wisdom and it is vain to  believe that we on our own can reach a true understanding of who we are and what we are doing here on earth, " For what man is he that can know the counsel of God? Or who can think what the will of the Lord is?  For the thoughts of mortal men are miserable and our devices are but uncertain. For the earthly tabernacle weigheth down the mind that museth upon many things."   So to be wise you have to be virtuous
The good news is that even if you don't prosper materially in this life, you can given you get wisdom  find your reward in the next  -  a very Christian sentiment.  Interestingly the writer also warns against wanting those traditional signs, as the Jews believed, of divine approbation, namely,  wealth and longevity i.e. what God gave to Solomon.
To the modern ear, a lot of the Wisdom of Solomon is pretty bleak stuff,sounding rather like  the outpourings of a disgruntled old man, a kind of Biblical Victor Meldrew  
But what he wants to do is to persuade his readers that they will benefit from wisdom because it fosters temperance and prudence, justice and strength of will. These are the four cardinal virtues  Temperance : self control, moderation restraint;  Justice: proper moderation between self interest and the rights and needs of others; Prudence: the ability to judge between courses of action and find what is the appropriate at a given moment;  Fortitude:  forebearance, endurance and ability to confront fear and uncertainty  or intimidation   
The four points of the Maltese cross, used by the Order of St. John. 
Wisdom, based on these virtues, in short  is its own reward.  
Which brings me, finally, to saints. There are of course hundred if not thousands of them, whose lives and in many cases their violent deaths we commemorate to-day  Thye are a very varied group ranging from apostles and evangelists to nurses, Lord Chancellors of England and young girls who saw visions or led armies.  And they hover at times uneasily between myth and reality . Take for example three that I found on the Internet
 St Apollonia, for example,  was a deaconess who fell victim to the persecutions of Christians in Alexandria. As Christians fled the city, Apollonia was seized by a mob. They beat her and knocked all her teeth out. They then lit a huge fire to burn her if she did not renounce Christianity . Begging for time as though she would comply with their demands, instead she jumped into the flames herself and died without renouncing her faith. She is the patroness of dentists,
St Dymphna was a virgin daughter of a pagan king. She secretly baptized into Christianity she had to fend off her father when her mother died and he went off his head and wanted to marry her. He determined to marry her, but the girl fled from him in horror, accompanied by a trusted priest. They sought sanctuary elsewhere but were found by her father's men. The priest was promptly killed, and her father once again proposed to her. She refusedto marry him, and he himself struck off her head. Dympha is the patroness of incest victims and the mentally disturbed.
St Margaret of Antioch was reported to the authorities as a Christian by her father  In prison she met the devil in the form of a dragon, who proceeded to swallow her whole. The cross she carried however, irritated the dragon's belly and she was able to tear her way out using the cross and emerge whole.  After Several failed attempts to execute her by drowning and fire, all of which failed, leading many who witnessed her tortures were converted, she was finally beheaded. She is often depicted emerging from the dragon's belly, cross in hand. Appropriately, she is the patroness of childbirth.
Saints then, even those created in our own life time ( and Pope John Paul II created more than most of his predecessors put together) are for me at least a quite difficult concept.   But what I like to think is that, exotic or not, legendary or not,  they were all people to whom God's wisdom had been imparted or was said to have been . And to that extent we at our humble level need to revere.  They were people whose lives can speak to each of us and from whom we can learn some wisdom based on those four cardinal virtues.   As the poet Longfellow put it 
  "Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time
So with Saints as role models we should as the writer of the Wisdom of Solomon says, pursue those virtues 
150 years of so after that book was written the teachings of Jesus pointed the way, avoiding materialism, seeking virtue, justice etc and through virtue he showed how  we receive wisdom,  and through prayer and Bible reading draw closer to God and discern his purpose for each of us.   
We as Christians are not alone wanting to find a direction and meaning in our lives beyond our own wills.  So do a lot of other people who are not Christians, of course and that is probably the biggest problem that our society faces to-day.   For as G K Chesterton once wrote when we cease to believe in God, we do not believe in nothing, we believe in anything,  fame wealth, power, drugs, alcohol, sex. 
I recommend then, a look at the Wisdom of Solomon.  
Finally still in the context of  "what is it all about"  I'd like to read you the last paragraph of an American novel, the Bridge of San Luis Rey that does indicate for us one purpose of life on earth that personally I find attractive., namely the creation of love.  For as our lesson today says  " such as are faithful in love shall abide in God"

