The Daily Pearl
On Wisdom
A pearl kept from the brand’s mornings: a verse to hold, a prayer to say and a word to carry.
“She is more precious than rubies: and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her.”
Proverbs 3 : 15
A Prayer for This Morning
Lord, I have desired many things this year and called few of them by their true names. Give me wisdom, which you have priced above rubies and promised to those who ask. Teach me to want what is worth wanting.
Affirmation
I desire wisdom above the things that glitter, and I ask for it without shame.
The Reflection
Proverbs prices wisdom against the jewel market deliberately: more precious than rubies, beyond comparison with anything thou canst desire. It is an audacious claim to make to people who desire a great deal. The book is not embarrassed by desire; it simply insists we are chronically underambitious, spending treasure-level longing on trinket-level goods.
Wisdom, like the pearl, is found by seekers and formed in the dark. It rarely arrives as a flash; it accretes, verdict by verdict, over years of asking better questions. The woman who reads slowly, listens before pricing, and lets Scripture argue with her assumptions is running the merchant's business: patiently trading everything lesser for the one thing worth the whole estate.
In Her Company
St Hildegard of Bingen
Abbess, composer, healer and doctor of the Church: a mind of astonishing breadth held together by a single devotion.
Hildegard of Bingen (1098 to 1179) was a Benedictine abbess of the Rhineland: visionary, composer, physician, naturalist and counsellor to bishops and emperors. Her theological work Scivias, her music and her writings on healing survive in remarkable breadth. She was canonised and declared a Doctor of the Church in 2012.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
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