The Considering Mind

and the tools needed for it

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin.

Matthew 6:28

Allan Bloom believed philosophy was the only honest life. In The Closing of the American Mind, he argued that real thinking strips away every comfortable illusion. No afterlife. No divine plan. Just the world as it is, lit by attention, and a man brave enough to stare at it. Bloom called this happiness without hope. Actuality without consolation.

I read Bloom in Dr. Weir’s classroom at Hardin-Simmons. I was twenty, maybe twenty-one, already a ruminator by nature. Already circling my own motives at 2 a.m. like a man pacing an empty parking lot. Dr. Weir didn’t care about my tendencies. He wanted structure. He’d tell us to bring in magazine ads, opinion columns, newspaper editorials. Then he’d have us take them apart. Name the fallacy. Identify the assumption. He wasn’t interested in what we believed. He wanted to know if we could defend it.

It wasn’t glamorous. It was homework.

But the rumination I’d always carried, that restless loop of questioning, started to find edges. Dr. Weir didn’t give me new questions. He gave me a way to hold the ones I already had.

Bloom would’ve said that’s the beginning of philosophy. The moment you trade your inherited convictions for examined ones. He’d say the whole point is to keep going, past God, past comfort, past everything warm, until you’re standing in the cold clear air of reason and nothing else.

I didn’t keep going that way.

I got sharper in Dr. Weir’s class. I learned to spot bad arguments, including my own. But the sharpening didn’t kill my faith. Over the span of 40 years, it led me deeper into it. Not the faith I’d inherited from pews and revivals and altar calls. A faith I had to earn with my own thinking. The critical tools didn’t dissolve the mystery. They cleared away the clutter so I could actually see it. Mind you, I explored every knook and cranny of all that clutter in the process, and even when I felt that I’d wandered away, I was still there. Sharpening. Testing. Exploring.

Fr. A. G. Sertillanges was a Dominican who wrote one book that matters to me, The Intellectual Life. In it he says: “The order of the mind must correspond to the order of things.”

That sentence stopped me the first time I read it. Bloom said reason frees you from everything, including God. Sertillanges said reason only works when it’s aimed at what’s real. And what’s real, all the way down, is divine.

I think about Dr. Weir’s classroom now. The fluorescent lights. The stale coffee. The stack of newspaper clippings we’d bring in like offerings. He didn’t know what he was building in me. He thought he was teaching critical thinking. He was. But he was also teaching me to consider.

Consider. Not glance at. Consider.

When Christ said to consider the lilies, he wasn’t telling us to relax. He was telling us to think. Look at them. Really look. They don’t strive. They don’t perform. They grow because growing is what they were made for. That’s not a greeting card. That’s a philosophical claim about the nature of being.

Dr. Weir gave me the tools to take that claim seriously.

A reader wrote to me yesterday and inferred that my labyrinth mind isn’t a burden. She’s right. The wandering was never wasted. Every loop, every 2 a.m. question I can’t put down. Those are roots going deeper.

Bloom said thinking leads you to a place where hope is gone and only actuality remains. I’ve been to that place. I didn’t stay. Because actuality, the real thing, the order of things Sertillanges wrote about, it isn’t austere. It isn’t cold. It’s a carpenter from Nazareth telling you to look at flowers and stop being afraid.

Some teacher gives you the tools. Some teacher you didn’t choose and couldn’t have planned for. You carry what they built in you out of their classroom and into the rest of your life. You don’t even know it’s happening until decades later, when you’re writing devotionals at a desk and you realize the man who taught you to dismantle an advertisement also taught you to read Scripture.

Dr. Weir taught me to think.

Christ taught me what thinking is for.