On my recent vacation in Austria, I took a tour of the old salt mine outside of Salzburg. To get into the mine, you go the same way the miners used to go. You get on a little train which is really just a rail on wheels, so you straddle it, hold on tight to the person in front of you, and take a ride downhill. After a while, you get off and start walking through small, dark tunnels. Then comes the fun part: you slide down a slide. Like the train, the slide is nothing more than a rail that you straddle. Nothing to hold onto, and just a dark tunnel stretching downward in front of you, so you can’t see where you are going. They have you slide two at a time so you can hold onto each other. I held onto my daughter and we went sliding into the darkness, whooping and hollering.
If we’re honest with ourselves, we have to admit that all of life feels like that sometimes: sliding a little too fast in dark, nothing to hold onto, not sure where we’re going. I sometimes hear people quote the book of Jeremiah: I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Jeremiah 29:11. And yet, if it’s true that God knows God’s plans for us, nevertheless it’s one of the challenges of life to figure out what they are, what direction we should be going in, and not to feel like we are sliding into an unknown darkness.
And unlike sliding on a slide, life is not something you ride on a predetermined course. Life is unpredictable and surprising, takes unexpected twists, and presents lots of decisions we have to make – what job to take, what relationship to enter into, what place to live, what is God’s will for us. If we are Christian people, part of our faith is that the best way to live is in accordance with God’s will – this is the truest path to fulfillment and spiritual growth, even if it leads us to make sacrifices on behalf of others. To begin to understand God’s will is the Christian definition of wisdom.
There’s a lot in scriptures about wisdom today: Psalm, Ephesians, story of Solomon. Solomon is famous for being wise enough to understand that true wisdom is necessary to govern God’s people, and true wisdom comes only from God. And Ephesians says that wisdom is knowing God’s will, and living any other way is foolishness; and it counsels us to cultivate wisdom through worship, being filled with the Spirit, singing and praying in community.
So our scriptures today tell us some important things about life. Living wisely is a matter of being attuned to God’s will through our personal prayer life and relationship with God (how Solomon was in touch with God). And it is also a matter of living and worshipping in community (Ephesians).
So if we are living a human existence, trying our best to see in the darkness and make the best decisions for our lives, we need to understand how to incorporate these two dimensions of wisdom: individual wisdom, cultivated in personal relationship with God; and community wisdom, gained by sharing worship with a group of Christians who cultivate wisdom together.
The first thing to understand in thinking about wisdom is that wisdom is not the same thing as knowledge. We’ve all known people with huge stores of knowledge who didn’t know how to function in the world, and we’ve all known very wise people who didn’t have much education. Wisdom is not a matter of storing up facts– wisdom is a matter of relationship. A truly wise person knows how to read other people and knows how to manage relationships. And in Christian terms, ultimately we believe that true wisdom comes when we are in close enough relationship with God to hear God’s voice and understand God’s will for us and others around us.
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”, says today’s Psalm. I once had to write an entire 3-page essay on that verse on a final exam in seminary– what does it mean that the fear of the Lord is beginning of wisdom. So I have lots of useful knowledge about this. First, scripture is not recommending that we quake in our boots at the thought of God – it is not telling us to be afraid of the Lord in the usual sense. When Israel talked about “fear of the Lord,” it meant something like “awe.” It meant standing in the presence of the Lord, recognizing “there is something here that is mysterious and unexplainable and infinitely powerful, and it is not the same as me – it is something I have no name for other than God.” And the beginning of wisdom, the very root of all true understanding of the world, flows out of that knowledge that I am ultimately not in control, that I am not the one who has wisdom, and that true wisdom flows out of my relationship with the source of all wisdom – God.
These days, we have lots of technology that makes it easy to stay in touch with each other. But we don’t have a lot of knowledge about staying in touch with God – staying in touch with our old best frend from 5th grade who now lives in Shanghai is a lot easier. The way that Christians stay in touch with God is through prayer, and prayer is a matter of both speaking and listening, cultivating times of quiet.
One truth of the Christian life is that we are in a relationship with a God who is always more ready to communicate with us than we are to listen, says Christian writer Roy Oswald. This God is also willing to offer us direction and perspective if and when we are ready to surrender our own ideas and be ready to receive God’s. But, he says, a lot of our difficulty in discerning God’s will comes from the fact that God will rarely overwhelm us with a message so clear and blatant that our freedom to choose is eliminated – which is why we sometimes feel like we’re sliding into darkness, with nothing to hold onto and no idea of where we’ll end up.
God does speak to us in many ways, through Scripture, tradition, community, relationships, and events and experiences. But we have to be ready to listen for God’s voice, and we have to seek out a very important gift: the gift of discernment. Discernment is gift that allows us to distinguish between our voice and God’s voice. In any conversation, we always hear our own voice loudest, because we spend most of our time thinking up what we’re going to say next instead of listening, and because it comes to our ears from inside our own head, making it sometimes difficult for us to hear anything else. In the same way, when we try to pray, it is easy to hear only our own voice and not the voice of the God who is always trying to speak to us. As humans, Oswald says, it is very easy to think we have a “word from the Lord,” when in fact the word comes from our desire, our hubris, our dark side, or the shadow side of other people and community. And when we listen to our own voice rather than God’s, we can often find ourselves choosing the easiest path, the path of most immediate benefit, but not necessarily the path of spiritual growth, and not necessarily God’s path for the world.
That is why prayer must become a lifelong habit for us, not simply something to resort to in times of trouble – we must tune our ears to hear God’s voice and not our own. We are well-trained in our Western Christian tradition to pray in words – we know how to talk so that God will listen. The harder task is to listen so that God will talk, opening ourselves to the presence of God, perhaps putting a prayer or a problem before God, and then quieting ourselves to listen for God’s direction. There are ancient Christian spiritual techniques to help us do this, many of which are outlined in the “Prayer and Spirituality” section of our website, so you have a chance to try different methods and see which is the best for you. The main thing is to set aside some quiet time for God each day and begin to cultivate a habit of relationship with God so we recognize God’s voice. This is how we begin to cultivate personal wisdom.
At its foundation, scriptures tell us that wisdom flows out of worship. Ephesians tells us today that wisdom comes from being filled with God’s Spirit, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. And Jesus tells us that true nourishment comes from the soul food he gives us in the sacrament of his body and blood, the act we do in community that makes his own sacrifice present and real for us. This worship is at the core of who we are as Christians and it is the way that Christ transforms us into his own likeness. And through our worship, God pours into us his wisdom and his life, and empowers us to transform the world.
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