When everything familiar has been sheared away -- either because we have physically separated ourselves from our "home", or because our inner exploration has taken us beyond our old self -- we are presented with a great opportunity for spiritual growth. At such time, we are likely to examine our lives more deeply than we ever have before and be asked to trust far beyond our understanding. T.S. Eliot knew this place very well and expressed it eloquently in his poem, "East Coker":
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;
wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing;
there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all
in the waiting.
~ from THE FEMININE FACE OF GOD by Sherry Anderson and Patricia Hopkins
Wisdom is a living stream, not an icon preserved in a museum. Only when we find the spring of wisdom in our own life can it flow to future generations.
Cultivating our wisdom is one of our most important tasks. If we don't spend enough time alone listening to the counsel of our hearts, then we will never become wise. If we don't spend enough time in the presence of others who try to walk a path of heart, we will never become wise. If we do not cultivate, through prayer or meditation or spiritual practice, a stronger heart that can fly and endure, then we'll never become wise.
There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, Mother of all, "Natura naturans."
Holy wisdom embraces and enables our knowledge, judgment, insight, even as it draws us beyond them. We are given words when we have nothing to say. We are kept silent when we ache to run off at the mouth. We reach out when we would otherwise pull back, cut off, turn away. Our own wisdom is rooted in God's gift of wisdom to us. The soil it grows in is our daily lives, including our relationships with God, ourselves, and others. Only by trusting what little we know, by pushing the edges of our own wisdom, will wisdom grow.
~ Jean M. Blomquist in "Weavings" - July/August 1997
Wisdom is not found on a computer chip. It pulses within our heart, in the flow of being, through the precision of stars keeping their courses. Wisdom is not the possession of any one person or group but is found when we realize our relationship to everything that is.
There is a goodness, a WISDOM that arises, sometimes gracefully, sometimes gently, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes fiercely, but it will arise to save us if we let it, and it arises from WITHIN us, like the force that drives us into a great blossoming like a pear tree, into flowering, into fragrance, fruit, and song, into the wild wind dancing, sun shimmering, into the aliveness of it all, into that part of ourselves that can never be defiled, defeated, or destroyed, but that comes back to life, time and time again, that lives — always — that does not die. Into the Divine.
The wiser one is, the quieter one is, for the truly wise one knows, "I know nothing except that I must listen and through listening learn to speak and act. "
