I have had a tremendous amount of frustration interpreting Henry Suso’s Wisdom’s Watch upon the Hours. The cause of this difficulty is somewhat perplexing. Suso does not write in a particularly difficult style, nor is the subject matter to abstract to grasp. Instead, my difficulties spring from two separate, but related, issues. The first is the lack of any definitive conclusion to the discussions of book one. After roughly one hundred and sixty pages of dialogue between Wisdom and the Disciple, Suso fails to provide an answer to the question of what exactly the reader is expected to do with regards to the meditations that precede the rather abrupt end of the book. The text seems maddeningly incomplete. This is not helped by the second issue, the disjunction between the tones and apparent purposes of books one and two. Where book one was a mystical examination of Christ’s Passion, the relation of Christ as Wisdom to the soul, and a few other subjects that he touches on briefly, such as the nature of heaven and hell, book two concerns itself with far more practical matters, to the point of laying out the specific prayers one should say at specific times of day. Moreover, the second book barely touches upon the Passion, which was the core of the first two thirds of Wisdom’s Watch. Despite these differences, Suso obviously intended for the two books to compliment each other. Therefore, I suggest that we read the first book through the second book, in order to gain insight into the overall purpose and meaning behind Suso’s text.
The topic of the first book of Wisdom’s Watch is fairly easy to discern. In fact, Suso himself tells us: “The subject matter of this first book is Christ’s most precious Passion, which itself mov...
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... The whole purpose of Wisdom’s Watch, therefore, is preparatory. The exercises, the contemplation of the Passion, the imitation of Christ enjoined within can only serve to prepare you as best as possible for the visitation of God, which Suso imagines is more likely to occur during the Eucharist. However, only God can determine if and when the union of soul and Wisdom might occur. As Wisdom tells the disciple: For more often, when the spirit in seeking for me becomes anxious, seeking he does not find; but when he will least expect it, he will have his beloved present to him.”9 Wisdom’s Watch concluded with an entreaty by the disciple to take mercy on him and grant him the union that he has so arduously worked for and so fervently desires, and in the end the message of the text is that this is the most we can do.
Works Cited
Suso, Henry Wisdom's Watch Upon the Hours
Revelations of Divine Love is a 14th century masterpiece written by Julian of Norwich. This book is an account of St. Julian’s sixteen different mystical revelations in which she had encountered at a time of great suffering and illness. St. Julian focussed on the many “mysteries of Christianity.” Through her many revelations she encountered God’s vast love, the existence of evil, God’s heart for creation, the father and mother-heart of God, and the need to obey her Father in Heaven. Amongst these revelations the most powerful was the revelation of God’s love and character. Revelations of Divine Love is a wonderful source of revelation to connect a reader to the Father.
While reflecting on all of the lessons learned during the first semester of seminary, I have come to the conclusion that the whole time has been an exercise in lectio divina. Never before have I read as many scholarly texts, spent so many hours meditating, praying, and pondering the words placed before me than in the past 3 months. Alas, II Kings 2 is the most challenging text with which I have had to grapple thus far. The idea of a prophet cursing children in the name of the Lord and then those same children, forty-two of them, being mauled by a she-bear required deep and intense prayer. Furthermore, after spending a considerable amount of time praying through II Kings, the text consumed my thoughts as I attempted to find God in the massacre of these precious, albeit mischievous, little ones. So the most beneficial aspect of lectio divina concerning 2 Kings is the reading component.
Repeated throughout the Gospel of Thomas is the saying “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” This line is repeated in sayings 8, 21, 24, 63, 65, and 96. The repetition of this issues a sense that only a select ...
In the Flannery O’Connor’s great book, “Wise blood”, Hazel motes, the main character of the literature, is a hero struggling against his prophetic vocation, yet turning out to be a Christian martyr at the end of his long and futile ordeals. The development of the literature centers around the protagonist’s struggle to run away from Jesus, who poses Jesus as “something awful,” and his final return to him. Hazel’s movement throughout the literature, therefore, may be seen as a journey: a modern man’s progress from rebellion against God, to penance, and to return to him through the painful recognition of his sinful and fallen nature. The shrill thesis of the literature is stressed by its circular journey pattern of escape from and return to God.
...uly get me to and through the right path. Wisdom can be helped with knowledge but also experiences and I take these experiences I learn and go through within in my faith and everyday life outside of church, like school or home. Finally, This concept is very compatible with my faith because the book discusses, “touching The Living Christ in each person we meet”, and also that I must learn from my experiences and take that knowledge and use it to make sure that I am going on the right path and that I am staying on the right path.
Before we can introduce this theme, we must first discuss, what is wisdom literature? We must also discuss, what is wisdom? Wisdom can be defined as “the ability to cope”, “the art of steering”, “one who achieves expertise”, or “the quest for self understanding and for mastery of the world”. These definitions, among many others, describe the word “wisdom”, yet it cannot be placed into one single defining category. Rather, wisdom has no single definition, but can be considered a search that will never end. Wisdom is a lifelong search, one that can be constantly improved, augmented, and changed. In a theological sense, wisdom can be considered to be the fear of the lord, receiving instruction from him, human experience, and mysteries of creation. One who pursues wisdom in this sense must hear wisdom obediently and pray to receive wisdom.
...ersion of a saint’s story is read, the reader will learn something different and take something different from each one.
... its mysteries. References to time and transience fill these verses. Intervening with the many allusions to nature we see constant movement and change; “since there is no more to taste… Father we pick our last / fruits of the temporal.” But this time the approach is less seeking, more slow and uncommitted, reflecting the calmness and control acquired by experience.
Theme in “Defender of the Faith” can be interpreted in many varying ways, some of which are life-long lessons and others to the relation between faith and the individual.
“What is a man/If his chief good and market of his time/ Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more./ Sure He that made us with such large discourse,/Looking before and after, gave us not/ That capability and godlike reason/ To fust in us unused. Now whether it be. Bestial oblivion or some craven scruple/ Of thinking too precisely on th’ event” (4.4 35-43).
One of the more surprising features of the Christian faith is that it produced at its very beginning a substantial body of writings. That this should be the case is by no means a necessity: not all religious movements produce writings. Furthermore, that these writings should be collected into one book and thus become a sacred corpus, and that this sacred corpus should continue to influence the life of believers and to determine the content and the practices of the faith two thousand years later is also remarkable.
W. Andrew Hoffecker. Building a Christian World View, vol. 1: God, man, and Knowledge. Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., Phillipsburg, New Jersey : 1986. William S. Babcock. The Ethics of St. Augustine: JRE Studies in Religion, no. 3.
Saint Augustine’s book Confessions talks about how increasing your knowledge through reading leads you through a “conversion” in which you begin to recall things and their relevance through memory. Socrates stresses the concept of increasing knowledge as a way to grow. Socrates also was the one who wanted to have a “field day” teaching Saint Augustine. Saint Augustine uses his life to display to us the way one’s quest for God should be like. He believed that one must begin their journey by first reading about God through books such as the Bible. Once one believes in God, they will have gone through a conversion in which their memory allows them to remember their readings on God and apply them in their lives. We will be analyzing the relationship between reading, conversion and memory and how they relate to the quest of God using Saint Augustine’s life as an example to follow.
Kerr, H. (1990). Readings in christian thought (2nd ed.). H. T. Kerr (Ed.). Nashville: Abingdon Press.
We will often see “wrong work” in an overly obsessive focus on textual studies for often these texts are examined and followed to the letter with the hope and desire that they will lead to paradise. This is often done in place of the person making their own quest. In fact the person who decides to make their own quest is