By way of conclusion, I offer a blank verse meditation on Proverbs 7–8, exploring the call of Wisdom as the vocation of the theologian to pursue the life of mind and soul, head, heart and will in union. Its fashioning drew on personal experience and a sense of vocation to church as well as academy, but it is not autobiographical as such. It was composed during a period of convalescence in Scotland, a fact which explains the landscape evoked. I had taken with me John Betjeman, Summoned by Bells, to provide a model for versification, the King James Version of the Bible, which influenced but did not determine the language, and Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, to which, along with other literary and patristic material, allusion is made.

The poem has a patristic flavour: besides adopting the early Christian reading of Proverbs, which identified Wisdom with the Word incarnate in Christ, it works with a highly symbolic set of motifs. It exploits the ambiguities of the word ‘conception’, and the ambivalences arising from the feminine gender of Sophia (Wisdom) and psyche (soul). Analogies and symbols alike are meant to be stretched and shattered by transcendence and otherness, and remain possible only because religious language is necessarily allusive and poetic, while the Wisdom of God is imaged in human life, especially the life and suffering of Jesus.