July 27, 10:30am (Sare Gordy)
...And in a sense, the wisdom to accept the whole situation, whether the whole situation is beautiful and hopeful, or ugly and a product of suffering, and something that produces suffering. To be able to truly see it. Wisdom is important.
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I would like to say to you a few words today about wisdom
In the early reading we heard Solomon having a dream. And god came to Solomon and said, ‘what should I give you? Ask me what I should give you.’ And Solomon paints this elaborate picture. Maybe you’ve noticed that he goes on for a while, and part of the picture is setting the scene.
He says to God, ‘God, you have exalted my father. My father was the greatest king ever, and you’ve got this great multitude of people that I am supposed to govern. Give me wisdom so that I can govern.’ And he sets this elaborate scene, and God is impressed that Solomon didn’t ask to be wealthy, he didn’t ask to be powerful, he didn’t ask to have dominion over the area and the lands about him. He simply asked to have wisdom to rule the people he’d been given to rule.
This is not the only place in our holy scriptures where we hear about wisdom. We hear about it in the psalms, we hear about it in the different parables. It’s clear to us in our own faith tradition that wisdom is important. And it’s clear to us from our own lives that wisdom is important, something gained by experience – not to be confused with cynicism, or looking through the world thru jaded lenses, but that way of being that encompasses understanding and insight, a way of being that is non judgmental – which is strange when you think about Solomon, because Solomon literally stood in judgment over the people, but it was his very wisdom, his non-judgmentalism that enabled him to be able to be, as we might put it, non partisan, to be able to remove his own ego from the equation, to be able to have the insight to see and discern what was real and what was true, and not just a simple truth from one person’s perspective, ‘I’ve been wronged, give me justice’, but the greater, more profound truth, ‘here’s the whole situation, here are all the different angles’ the wisdom to see and understand this. And in a sense, the wisdom to accept the whole situation, whether the whole situation is beautiful and hopeful, or ugly and a product of suffering, and something that produces suffering. To be able to truly see it. Wisdom is important.
So, I would like to share with you a very short story about growing wise.
I have a friend, whom I’ll call Kathy (that’s not her name) who is a young woman, living in New York City, she has a job, she has friends, she has a social life, she has hobbies. She is an artist, so she works as an office manager, and she just lives her life, trying to be a good person – not particularly religious, morals are not the main focus of her day, but to just be a good person.
Kathy was recently in a very interesting situation – going out on a second date with a man, to all intents and purposes a nice young man who turned out to be not so nice. And as she was getting on the train to Brooklyn to go to Manhattan for their dinner date, the entire time, the whole train ride, and even before then when she was getting ready, even before, a feeling of dread started to fill her. She reports that it started right here. And it slowly encompassed her entire being. She said that she would have to say, ‘okay, now I have to go take a shower, now I have to go do my hair’ that she would have to block out each step, because as she went on the dread just got more and more profound.
By the time Katy got to the restaurant, every step she had to say, ‘I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this, I’m not going to go back to the train.’ And she couldn’t explain the dread, she couldn’t explain the feeling. He was, for all she could see on the surface, a nice young man. She got to the restaurant, took a quick look around and couldn’t see him. She went back outside, and because it is the modern age, she sent him a quick text message on her cell phone saying that she had arrived, but couldn’t find him, and that she was going to go take a walk. And she said that if she didn’t hear from him soon, she was just going to assume they got their wires crossed and she would head back home. Well she didn’t just go for a little walk, she went directly back to the train, and in the 15 minute walk to the train she hadn’t heard from him a t all. Now she got back on the train and went back to Brooklyn. When she got back home, the moment she emerged from the metro station, came back into cell phone range, she got a text message back from him that was surprising in its violence and anger. It was surprising in its level of vitriol – and she hadn’t anticipated it, not that she knew the man particularly well, but that if you will, somehow she knew in a way that was beyond knowing, not to go there, not to do that, and she finally listened to herself, after taking a quick peek in the restaurant, and leaving. It turns out he was in the bar.
Now, the story is what it is. And she came to me full of guilt and remorse over what she’d done. She’d stood up a young man on a date. And all the voices in her head have said: you have done a very bad thing. You have broken a date, you have broken a social contract, you were in the wrong, and even though he was harsh, he had every right to take it out on your hide.
I would see it a different way. I would see it that the wisdom that is growing in all of us, and is surely growing in this friend of mine, that all the way along had said: perhaps this is not a good idea. Perhaps you should not be doing this, we should not be doing this. And that it produced a feeling that grew and grew and grew and grew until she finally did exit out of the situation, though not quite as gracefully as if she’d done it earlier, I would say that wisdom says to that situation: thank you for listening. The voices in our head that say ‘oh, you’re supposed to act this way, you’re supposed to just buck up and deal, and you’re supposed to.. you should you should you should you should…’ that those voices are not… though they are compelling and very strong… they are not necessarily wise. And that wisdom can be counter-intuitive, in that way, though perhaps in being counter cultural and counter to what seems normal to us it is the most intuitive and it is the most healthy the most just the most right. And wisdom says to me in this situation, and says to her: next time, you will notice sooner. Next time you will know what to look for. Next time you will hear my voice calling, sooner.
Now, it may be that I don’t need to say how to grow wisdom. It may be that I don’t need to tell you how to do this because you’re already in the midst of growing a garden full of wisdom even right now. After all, all of our lives have been full of experience and wonder and joy and sorrow, all experiences that can produce wisdom. But on the off chance that this wisdom work is still a work in progress for you, as it is with me, I’ll give you this:
I’ve got three easy steps for growing wisdom in your life – they’re not original to me, I got them from another spiritual master (Eckhart Tolle), but I think they’re very helpful.
So, step number one: Desire. A desire to be wise. Or, if you don’t want to put it in those terms, a desire not to be like your mother. Frequently we put it in those terms. A desire not be as silly as you were a year ago when you did that thing you now regret. A desire to have a better relationship with someone in your life. It’s that desire that comes from the experience that was unpleasant, a desire to avoid that experience and that unpleasantness again.
Step two is observation. This can be different that simply experiencing your life. Observation means letting go of the opinion you have about what you do, your ego. Observation means the ability to take a momentary step back from your actions and your state of being even as you’re engaging in them, to just look at yourself without judgment. And that look might reveal – wow, I am really angry right now, without judging that anger, without thinking, oh, I shouldn’t be angry right now, it’s not their fault, or it’s not nice to be angry. Well, in that moment, I am angry. You are angry. The anger exists whether or not I think it should. That step back may reveal resentment. That step back may reveal in a tiny little throwaway comment, how sad you are, how fearful you are. It’s that stepping back and being able to see yourself, maybe as god sees us – with compassion and love, and truth. That’s step two.
And step three is maybe the simplest, and the most difficult as well – simple and easy not being the same thing. Step three is Acceptance. To simply accept what exists. Accept what is going on. And by acceptance I don’t mean being satisfied with what is, or being satisfied with what exists, because what is may not be pleasant, and you might want to change it. And that’s fine. But to accept is to not be in denial. To accept is a certain kind of freedom, because it takes so much energy to avoid or to deny or to fight. Accepting sets us free. And so in these three simple steps, desire, number one, a desire to be wise, an observing of ourselves, and an accepting of what is going on around us, when we do those things in any given moment, at any point in our lives, even right now, something really interesting happens.
A transformation occurs and it occurs completely spontaneously, without any extra effort on our part at all, besides, desiring, observing, and accepting. That moment is simply transformed into something that is a little bit more peaceful, a little bit more profound, and those moments are like miracle gro to that wisdom plant that is growing in all of us.
And it is the wisdom plant, not just one plant but a whole garden, not just a whole garden, but fields upon fields that will take us, as individuals, and as communities in the world, it will take us from a place where war, poverty, injustice, hatred and violence are a largely unquestioned part of our existence … and that will be transformed to a reality of peacefulness, respect, compassion, justice, equality and neighborliness… Love.
