The Honeycomb

For Friday, August 10, 2007
Proverbs 24:13-14

My son, eat honey, for it is good,
and the drippings of the honeycomb
are sweet to your taste.
Know that wisdom is such to your soul;
if you find it, there will be a future,
and your hope will not be cut off.

We tend to contrast wisdom with pleasure. The wise man avoids pleasures so that he might pursue righteousness or keep his head to make good decisions. But wisdom lies really in choosing true pleasure. Wisdom itself is pleasure, and the wise man will not part from it, not so much out of self-discipline and denial, but because he has tasted the honey and likes it.

He reads the "classics" and writings that typically take effort to comprehend fully not so much to improve his mind but because they engage his mind. What we regard as an effort to be "above the rest" is simply his ability to delight in what we will not make the effort to understand. Our tendency is to go with whatever immediately catches our attention. That is why the mass media uses constantly changing images. It knows that we will press the remote quickly to another channel the moment we are bored. And we are bored when we have to use mental energy to grasp what we are seeing or hearing or reading.

Like the child who develops a fuller taste for foods as he grows up, so we could do the same if we would develop our minds. What may seem to be tedious at the beginning, becomes a pleasure that tastes like honey.