Weeds Among the Wheat

"This may be a surprising choice. This is a book for religious people, in the Christian tradition, about discernment – which Thomas Green usefully defines as “where prayer and action meet”. Discernment is, for example, a young man or woman believing they have a religious vocation and wondering if this feeling is real. To question “is this feeling real?” is a heresy in a world which worships feelings, where feelings are the very touchstone of reality. Yet questioning them is a tradition that goes back to Plato. The analogy of Plato’s cave already tells us that we can’t trust our perceptions – that we have to accept the possibility that the world we see is in reality shadows, and that there might be another reality that requires prudence to think about. Weeds Among the Wheat – and you don’t have to be religious to appreciate this book – is saying that to make a life-changing decision you have to be extremely thoughtful about where the promptings of the heart come from, and that feelings have to be tested in community with people who are wise and experienced, and know how the heart can deceive us. Decision-making studies are filled with the ways in which we deceive ourselves. Green says that not deciding is just as imprudent as impetuously deciding. He wants us to sift through the deceptions and see if we can feel our way towards the truth. If you transpose his religious mode into a more secular mode, you find a model for prudence. The double meaning is that the weeds of ignorance, deception, self-deception and habit can choke out the nourishing grains of wheat, but on the other hand amidst all these weeds there is healthy, valuable wheat that needs to be strengthened and brought to life. In other words, there is a truth of action that can be figured out. But it’s not going to be figured out by simply saying: This is what’s in my heart, therefore I know it’s right. Let me run through some points. Number one: Prudence does not mean cunning, trickery and knavery. Number two: Imprudence destroys lives. When I look at bad marriages, people often tell me they knew they were making a mistake when they were walking down the aisle. When I ask why they didn’t stop it, they say they had paid for it and everyone was invited and sitting in the church. So they make a lifelong commitment and raise three children in a context that they already know is a terrible mistake. Lives are destroyed because careers are chosen imprudently, or investments are made imprudently. It goes on and on. The current housing bubble is a crisis of imprudence. Without prudence lives are ruined. Number three: Prudence requires going beyond the promptings of the heart. What one feels is evidence only of what one feels. Those feelings may be valid and useful, and they’re always worth paying attention to, but they’re not the end of the story. To be prudent means to go through a process – with a wise adviser or friend, and not someone who is just reciting the party line of current attitudes – and to be thoughtful, careful, patient and test everything. Test everything you think you know that may not be true. It’s not the things we don’t know that hurt us, it’s the things we think we know that are wrong."