Monday, November 22, 2004

study

reading Richard Foster's book : Celebration of Discipline : has made me think about a number of things. One of them is the discipline of studying. I have decided that - as part of my Rule of Life - I am going to set aside some time regularly to study. I have also decided that this should not be study for a talk I have to do or anything like that but study for the sake of study, or rather, study for the sake of spiritual formation. I am going to make a list of things I would like to know more about and then just study them to enlarge my understanding. I happen to live in one of the best cities in the world for studying, with one of the best libraries in the world. There's a picture of a bit of it below. It's called the Bodleian library and I have a Reader's Card. I would be a fool not to use it.

a bit of the bod

2 comments:

Naomi said...

thinking about this for myself I realise that I really like the feeling of 'knowing stuff' and 'being right' which is often how I put the fruits of my studies to use - a rather scary conclusion to come to!

My question is, as we think about this, how do we study God's love? 'cos surely that's the basis of God's kingdom...

I think it is in the books, as well as in life, but it's getting the right channels in place for the knowledge to be poured into (perhaps that's why we can't pursue study without the other disciplines putting in an appearance in our lives), so it can flow out into the right places (in our life and other people's), rather than just making us 'fat' on knowledge for it's own sake....

That may have been a bit of an incomprehensible stream of consciousness... oh well!!

Matt said...

it may have been an incomprehensible stream of consciousness but i enjoyed it all the same. so....what you're saying is that without the other disciplines in place the 'study' has nowhere to 'flow' and it just becomes self serving. i like that. but how would me studying the life of C.S. Lewis, say, or the history of Oxford, or bees, affect me in the ways that you talk about?