May 2006 (Vol. XIX, No. 5)

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.

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. "

We were created for You by yourself,
and towards You our face is set.
We acknowledge You,
our maker and creator;
we adore your wisdom and pray
that it may order all our life.
We adore your goodness and mercy, and
beg them ever to sustain and help us.

Pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart,
and in our sleep, against our will, comes wisdom through the
awful grace of God.

In the immense field of divine compassion, countless small life fields are interwoven with each other. When human hearts deepen through some form of contemplation, there emerges in them an intuition of human oneness prior to all separation ... a "communion of saints.  "In each religion's communal story, there is a way of handing on from generation to generation this transforming perception of universal solidarity in the Mystery. We do not learn such wisdom on our own. We receive this wisdom from someone else.

True wisdom emerges silently.