She "delights in mankind," builds a house, prepares her meat and mixes her wine, sends out her maids and calls from the "highest point of the city:"
Come, eat my food and drink the wine I have mixed...
For through me your days will be many,
and years added to your life.
Folly is also portrayed as a woman who sits at the door of her house and cries out: Let all who are simple come in here! she says to those who lack judgment. Stolen water is sweet; food eaten in secret is delicious! But little do they know that the dead are there, that her guests are in the depths of the grave.
In the parable of the Wedding Banquet, Jesus portrays the king as setting the table and preparing a feast and sending out his servants to "those who had been invited," but they refused to come. So he sends his servants to the street corners to invite "anyone you find,...both good and bad." The only requirement for those who attend is that they allow themselves to be clothed with the "wedding garments" provided by the king himself. Those who attend in their own clothes are thrown out into the darkness.
"But these are good clothes," I can just hear the thrown-out ones saying; "I got them from L.L.Bean/ Macy's/Goldman Sacs," little realizing how many of the dead have been buried in similar garments.
The Book of Sirach (found only in Catholic Bibles) is a study in the kind of food provided by Wisdom; if it is true that we are what we eat, then what we have eaten all our lives will become incarnate---made flesh in our bodies. I love that the Book of Genesis portrays sin as "eating" from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil----that is, taking into our flesh, making incarnate in our own bodies---the fruit of experience.
Wisdom, on the other hand, is a "tree of life to those who find her." In cultivating her, you labor but little, and soon you will eat of her fruits (Sirach 6:20). And those who eat of her fruits will wear "gladness and a festive crown;" they will be clothed from on high with "knowledge and full understanding." For the Lord ... has poured her forth upon all his works, upon every living thing according to his bound; he has lavished her upon his friends (Sirach 1:8-9).
St. Seraphim said that everything we do in the spiritual life, whether prayer, fasting, good works, etc---all have the same aim and only that---to be clothed from above with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Wisdom and Truth. That sort of cuts through all recommended religious practice to the core of the spiritual life; we will all have different paths to obtaining wisdom, but to be clothed with wisdom, to eat from her table, is at the end to enjoy a feast and to be clothed with joy.
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