Fragments for Friday

Source: uncutmountainsupply.com

 Dear Parish Faithful,

The Book of Proverbs is one of the three OT books prescribed for Great Lent. The genre is Wisdom literature. In the opening chapters, we read repeatedly of a father exhorting his son to listen to his counsel, for life experience
and a desire to acquire wisdom are characteristics that the father would like to impart to his son, so that he would not make those types of mistakes that youth are so prone to. Here is one of many examples:

My son, be attentive to my wisdom,
incline your ear to my understanding;that you may keep discretion,and your lips may guard knowledge.

Prov. 5:1-2

My immediate purpose in turning to Proverbs is to provide a short introduction to the paragraph below. It was sent to me by Spencer Settles, in reaction to Wednesday's Midmorning Meditation that centered around a passage from Theology of the Body by Jean Claude Larchet. And that passage, if you recall, was an excellent summary of the Church's understanding of what it means to created "in the image andaccording to the likeness of God." As a Proverbs father, Spencer chose to speak to his older son, John, about this passage. (John, by the way, is 8 1/2 yrs. old!). The conversation helped Spencer come to a fuller understanding of that teaching, and the meaning of amartia (sin) and how it undermines that human vocation of attaining the likeness of God. 

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John and I just had a conversation yesterday about striving after the “likeness.” We were talking about sin and I was trying to help him see that sin is not so much about rule breaking (though it manifests that way, particularly as a child), but is ultimately about departing from our course toward Christlikeness. We talked about how, in the analogy of an arrow “missing the mark” (what I’ve been told “hamartia” harkens to), we are not the archer, whose arrows either hits the mark or don’t, over and over again. But rather we are the arrow, either on a trajectory toward the target or deviating from it over the course of our lives. He and I both tend to be moralists, focusing on each of our actions and whether or not they were a “bullseye,” but I’m learning to think about my whole life as an arrow’s journey home. Maybe at various points it twists and yaws, upset by some crosswind or another, but these are mere moments in an overall trajectory toward the likeness of Christ. 

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A father-son conversation right out of the Book of Proverbs!