Reflection by Rev Dr Nikolai Blaskow on 5th February 2023.

The Way of Wisdom

Testing Assumptions: Is this what we really think?

1. What is wisdom? Jill Bolte Taylor a brain researcher writes of her experience of having a stroke: The absence of experience is bliss. It was peaceful and beautiful there. I was with God … I could see that my spirit was huge. I couldn’t see how I would be able to squeeze myself back into this tiny little body. All details of my life and language were gone. Language is a kind of code, and things were no longer reduced to coding. I was looking at the big picture and I could see how things were related. Everything is in motion connected in a dance of grace. The brain is what imposes boundaries, and boundaries convey a perception of separation, but that’s a delusion. Everything is one.
2. From Taylor’s account we could conclude that anything less than the big picture is not wisdom, because when we view things from any other perspective we are beset by boundaries and separation. For wisdom country is a different country from knowledge. Because knowledge is bound by language when it enters the land of wisdom, its codes simply break down because there everything is in motion – everything dances to the tune of I AM – where personhood itself becomes fluid – becoming who and where and how your ‘I AM’, my ‘I AM’ shall be.
3. The Book of Proverbs likens wisdom to a maturity that is infinite, a series of insights which have no end.
4. Joel McKerrow the performance poet associates wisdom with the kind of understanding which draws its inspiration from a wildness which lies outside the structures and strictures of the suffocating worlds of oppressive social, political and economic systems.

As the tamed horse
still hears the call of her wild brothers
and as the farmed goose flaps hopeful wings
as his sisters fly overhead,
so too, perhaps,
the wild ones amongst us
are our only hope in calling us back
to our true nature.
Wild ones
who have not been turned to stone
by the far-reaching grasp of the empire
and its programme of consumer sedation,
the killing of imagination.
Where, my friends,
have the wild ones gone?

5. Attributed to the French poet Guillame Apollinaire, we have the metaphor of a flight of the imagination which defies, overcomes, transcends the fear of life & its complex issues – here wisdom is all about learning to fly above life and see it in perspective

‘Come to the edge,’
He said. They said,
‘we are afraid.’
‘Come to the edge,’
He said. They came.
He pushed them, and
they flew.

6. St Paul names wisdom a mystery waiting to be revealed: a mystery which

‘… no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
  nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him’

7. In essence St Paul is saying that wisdom is Spirit, with a code-language all on its own, a language which pure mathematicians speak, far above the world of the mechanics of mere calculation:

  ¹⁰ these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. ¹¹ For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God. ¹³ And we speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual.

8. St Matthew offers us words of Jesus in another context which counsel caution – this is not the kind of wisdom which simply falls in our lap. It must be actively nurtured and actively defended. Here he uses the metaphor of the health of the eye:

 ²² ‘The eye is the lamp [light] of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; ²³ but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!

9. So wisdom has now becomes the health of the eye. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche suggests that to see with the eyes of wisdom, we must learn to think with the mind of the artist, the mind of the philosopher, the mind of the saint. If we think in those mindsets, Nietzsche suggests, we will see with the eyes of wisdom. By means of them we will learn to undergo the challenges of life, to overcome them and to become something better than we were before.
10. Let us now turn to another source and see how the kind of wisdom talked about here is itself a powerful means, not just to test our assumptions about what we think, but also to help us become better people than we were before.
11. This morning I am going to use Mary Oliver’s Poem The Way of the World to bring together all that we have discovered this morning.

The Way of the World

The chickens ate all the crickets.

The foxes ate all the chickens.

This morning a friend hauled his

boat to shore and gave me the most

wonderous fish. In its silver scales

it seemed dressed for a wedding.

The gills were pulsing, just above

where shoulders would be, if it had

had shoulders. The eyes were still

looking around, I don’t know what

they were thinking.

The chickens ate all the crickets.

The foxes ate all the chickens.

I ate the fish.

12. Let’s first adopt the emotional intelligence of the ARTIST/POET in an endeavour to understand the poem, to stand under its complexity. Then the rational intelligence of the PHILOSOPHER (lover of wisdom) to make sense/meaning of it, and finally the spiritual intelligence of the SAINT to lay before us the bare bones of it’s the simplicity of what the poem is trying to say.
13. Our analysis will be succinct.
14. First, when we stand under the emotional challenges of the poem with the understanding of the ARTIST/POET we find ourselves bearing the full weight of ‘the way of the world’ to discover its violence, it contradictions, its beauty, its terrors. The power-driven amoral dynamics of the ‘the way’ disarm us, distress us in the opening and closing lines of the poem. The central metaphor of the poem, the ‘most wonderous fish, in its silver scales’ as ‘dressed for a wedding’ is then overshadowed by the visceral physicality of the fish’s demise, which let’s be honest, repels us: suddenly human culture and beliefs come face to face with the rawness of the ways of the world, ‘the gills were pulsing, just above where the shoulders would be, if it had shoulders.’ What makes the demise more emotionally confronting is that it was a friend who offered it to her as a gift, and that she who received it as an offering, plated it and ate it, so one feels becoming a ‘reluctant’ piece in the food-chain.
15. Second when we put on the PHILOSOPHER/THINKER hat, we ask hard questions of the poem to make sense, meaning of its challenge. And mostly the question which arises is a stark one: what kind of a way is this of the world, how can it possibly sit easy with the pretensions of our culture? How do we make meaning where superficially all meaning seems to be excluded? Where the palate takes precedence over aesthetic beauty and the life of the ‘wonderous fish.’
16. Finally, with the SAINT/CHILD hat on we see through the eyes of the child, say, in Hans Christian Anderson’s tale of The Emperor’s New Clothes… and makes the townspeople laugh at the stark nakedness of the Emperor. Here let the monk William Brodrick have his say, who sees with the eyes of the saint:

Once you’ve heard a child cry out to heaven for help,
and go unanswered,
nothing’s ever the same again.
Nothing.
Even God changes.

But there is a healing hand at work
that cannot be deflected from its purpose.
I just can’t make sense of it, other than to cry.
Those tears are part of what it is to be a monk.

Out there, in the world, it can be very cold.
It seems to be about luck, good and bad,
and the distribution is absurd.

We have to be candles, burning between hope and despair,
faith and doubt, life and death,
all the opposites.

17. And the last word on wisdom comes from Jesus’s invitation this morning recorded in St Matthew’s Gospel. It is an everyday wisdom we can practise. 

^28-30 “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.”                        

                                                  Matthew 11.28-30 (The Message paraphrase)

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight. For by me your days will be multiplied, and years will be added to your life. If you are wise, you are wise for yourself; if you scoff, you alone will bear it. Proverbs 9.