Willard Wednesdays

The Divine Conspiracy: Chapter 1 Entering the Eternal Kind of Life Now (pp.1-10)

We have a problem, Houston.  We are flying upside down and don't know it.  According to Willard, in the world of secular humanism...

"There is now no recognized moral knowledge upon which projects of fostering moral development could be based."

In the opening of this chapter, Willard writes about a young college student who was taking philosophy courses with classmates who were getting high grades but were treating her so crudely that she decided to leave the university.  In her exit interview, she asked, "I've been taking all these philosophy courses, and we talk about what's true, what's important, what's good... What's the point of knowing good if you don't keep trying to become a good person?"  

Willard goes on to write, "The problem here is less one of connecting character to intellect than one of connecting intellectual to moral and spiritual realities. The trouble is precisely that character is connected with the intellect.  The trouble is what is and is not in the intellect."  


The Divine Conspiracy is a book that recognizes the power of ideas and how our thinking shapes our acting.  

I never took Willard's words below with much seriousness the first few times I read this book...but now, in the midst of this 2016 presidential campaign, I believe this to be more serious and true than ever:

"What is truly profound is thought to be stupid and trivial, or worse, boring, while what is actually stupid and trivial is thought to be profound.  That is what it means to fly upside down.

"In fact, the popular sayings attract only because people are haunted by the idea from the intellectual heights that life is, in reality, absurd.  Thus the only acceptable relief is to be cute or clever.  In homes and on public buildings of the past, words of serious and unselfconscious exhortation, invocation, and blessing were hung or carved in stone and wood.  But that world has passed. Now the law is 'Be cute or die.'  The only sincerity bearable is clever insincerity. 

"And yet we have to act.  The rocket of our life is off the pad.  Action is forever.  We are becoming who we will be- forever.  Absurdity and cuteness are fine to chuckle over and perhaps to muse upon.  But they are no place to live.  They provide no shelter or direction for being human."  

Is there not something more true, more real, more good that we are invited into?  Oh, yes indeedy, friends.  Don't close the book now.