A Meditation
Lord, may the fruit of our minds be to the praise of Your glory.
When I think, I think in words and pictures. The words and the pictures must be connected, because sometimes the pictures have something to do with the words or the words have something to do with the pictures. But I’m not sure what the connection is, or even what it could be. I can do something with the words where they follow one another and I feel like I’ve made a point. But I don’t really know what it is to make a point.
Where do the words and pictures come from? I don’t know. Since my thought is constituted by them, they must be in some sense prior to my thought. But then do I have control over my thoughts? And is there a right way to use the words and pictures? Sometimes, I think, I find out that I’ve been using them wrong. But do I have any way of knowing when I’m not using them right? Sometimes I think I have clear thoughts about something, but later I find out that I was confused because I wasn’t using the right words or pictures.
Conceptual confusion shrouds thought; its dissolution is the chief aim of philosophy. The task is exceedingly difficult. “We feel,” says Wittgenstein, “as if we had to repair a torn spider’s web with our fingers.” 
And in the most important sense, our clarity or lack thereof is beyond our control. The moments of understanding, when we see through a little of the darkness, come to us sporadic and unexpected. We do not arrive at insight as we arrive at the top of a mountain, by planning a route and following it with determination; it is much more like climbing into a boat and casting ourselves out onto the sea, hoping the currents will carry us to some beautiful island, or at least a quaint atoll. Certainly there are important seafaring techniques without which we have no hope of survival. But even the most skilled sailor has no guarantee that he will ever arrive anywhere, nor even that he will see home again. Thinking is dangerous.
A thinker, then, is a restless man. For what other kind of man would climb willingly into a boat and push off from shore? He is not content with his country; he must see the world. He must find the unknown and possess it. He is an explorer in the old fifteenth-century sense. Will he find the Fountain of Youth?
But what is a Christian thinker? He is restless like a child; he wants to go play in the creek. The creek is beautiful, therefore he seeks it out. But the field is beautiful also (perhaps more beautiful!), and he will soon leave the creek to play in the field. A Christian thinker delights that God has made the ocean on which he floats. He delights to be carried here, he delights to be carried there. A Christian thinker’s thinking is a kind of psalm, a kind of worship, a kind of prayer. A Christian thinker thinks to the praise of God’s glory, and the fruit of his mind is a sweet fruit indeed.
Lord, may the fruit of our minds be to the praise of Your glory.
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