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Good morning.

Here in Edinburgh, we’re just saying goodbye to our Festivals for another year. Along with all the fun and entertainment, our month of artistic events of every kind you can imagine (and a few more besides!) is a chance to have our horizons expanded. If you like, it’s a time to grow in wisdom as much as anything else.

For one 20th century Christian writer, wisdom was at the heart of his understanding of God and the world. Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk who died in 1968, wrote a beautiful prose poem in praise of divine wisdom. Hagia Sophia, which I’ll be exploring during this week’s programmes, draws us into the depths of holy wisdom in order to see that it is nothing less than the gift of life itself. Here are its opening words:

There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all.

We tend to think of wisdom as a mental quality, something like good judgement or deep insight, but Merton goes further and sees wisdom as the very life-pulse of all things, the very principle of life itself.  He uses the phrase, natura naturans – nature just doing what nature does, living things simply being alive. And if this principle is in all living things, then all living things possess a fundamental unity.  We are one.  

Holy Wisdom, invisible source of all life,

Inspire us today with gratitude for the gift of life itself,

And help us to rejoice in simply being alive.

Lead us to see this life in all things,

Delighting in the variety of its forms,

Discerning the unity of everything.

Keep us today in the spirit of wisdom.

Amen.