The Time to Learn Wisdom

 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th century Swiss philosopher, wrote, "Youth is the time to learn wisdom. Age is the time to practice it."

If this was an ideal world, I would agree with his sentiment. But it's not... in my experience, it is a rare "youth" who learns wisdom. I certainly didn't. Many mystics, including Richard Rohr, suggests that our lives are divided into two parts. The first, which probably lasts into our forties, unless we are lucky, is the First Half, during which we grow up, establish our place in society and take on the values and norms of that society.

The Second Half, when we are in our forties and onwards, is when we come to wisdom and realise that there is more to life than security and survival, getting on and getting ahead. For me, it started in my early forties, when I first read the slim Quaker booklet, Advices and Queries, which is full of challenges and questions as to how to live a good and wise life. It has inspired me ever since.

But it was doing the Worship Studies Course and then ministry training, when I was in mid forties and very early fifties which really broke me wide open and helped me to understand that I was still very much in the First Half of life and needed to unlearn so much in order to make space for true wisdom.

Since then, I have striven to become whole, to integrate all the parts of my life into one and to recognise the truth in the words of American writer, James Truslow Adams, "There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behooves any of us to find fault with the rest of us."

Honesty on the Path to Wisdom

 Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom." 

When I was first introduced to the Enneagram, and discovered that I am a Three, I was pointed in the direction of a wonderful book by Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert, Discovering the Enneagram: An Ancient Tool for a New Spiritual Journey, I found the chapter on Type Threes to be agonising reading - there was so much uncomfortable truth in it - truth I had been avoiding for years. 

Each Enneagram type has a particular virtue and a particular vice. To my horror, I learned that the vice of a Three is Deceit, which really upset me, as I had always prided myself on my honesty. But in the years since then, I have come to understand that the person I was at the time (2010) was deceiving not only herself, by refusing to look at her flaws, but also the world, by presenting only her best side, so as to win all that so-necessary (to Threes) praise and approval. Openness and vulnerability were complete no-nos. It has taken years of shadow work and prayer to begin to get through this, and to learn that actually, love is not dependent on what we do. True love is always, always unconditional, and is given to us for who we are, "warts and all". The warts in my case being fear of failure to achieve my goals, fear of losing face, being an approval junkie and not coping well with criticism. 

I did not get over this last until I joined Northampton Writing Circle, where we compose a story each month, and then read it aloud and receive the group's comments. When I first joined, I hated my work being criticised in any shape or form, but over the years, I have come to welcome, even be grateful, for constructive critisim. And that is huge - at least for me. But without this change of heart, I am sure I would never have finished my novel, never found a publisher.

I have come to understand and accept that all human beings come from God, and are worthy of love, just the way they are. We are each "unique, precious, children of God", to quote the Quakers. And that the only way forward is to have compassion for all human beings, for all living beings, which includes compassion for myself.

  

 

Learning from Experience

 The Chinese philosopher and sage known to the West as Confucius wrote, "Experience is like a lantern facing backwards; it only illuminates the part of the way that we have already passed."

And that is true, so far as it goes. But I have an issue with his inclusion of the word "only" - because each one of us is the sum of our past experiences. The lessons they can teach us are so important, and can influence how we behave in the part of our lives that is to come. And we are able to apply what we have learned in our present and future lives, if we choose. There's a wonderful passage in Neil Gaiman's book, Neverwhere, in which the hero, Richard, has just entered the world of London Below, and is befriended by a girl called Anaesthesia. He has no understanding of how London Below works, and she has to look after him. At one point, they hide from some strangers, and when they have passed, Richard asks her, "What makes you think that they wouldn't have been pleased to see us?" 

Gaiman comments, "She looked at him rather sadly, like a mother trying to explain to an infant that, yes, this flame was hot too. All flames were hot. Trust her, please."

It is easier for us to learn from our experiences if we have someone wiser or more knowledgeable than we are to explain how the world works. Often this is a parent, but it may be a teacher or a minister or manager or other kind of mentor. Without such people, I think our lives would be more difficult, and we would be more prone to repeat our mistakes, rather than learning from them.

So for example, if we have been treated with kindness, we will be more likely to treat others that way. But if we have been treated badly, hurt, abused, oppressed, our experiences may have taught us that the world is an angry, dangerous place, and that others cannot be trusted. It takes a good deal of work and/or a wise mentor to hold and guide us through the process, to overcome the impact of negative experiences and move on; to learn to trust again.

A wonderful example of this was what happened in South Africa at the end of apartheid. Archbiship Desmond Tutu writes about this in God Has A Dream. "One of the things we learned in South Africa is that there is no true security from the barrel of a gun.... There is no peace without justice, and safety only comes when desperation ends. Inevitably it is when people sit down and talk that desperation ends. Negotiations happen not between friends; negotiations happen between enemies. And a surprising thing does seems to take place... enemies begin to find that they can actually become friends, or at least collaborators for the common good. ... Of course, you must have leaders who are willing to take risks and not just seeking to satisfy the often extreme feelings of their constituencies. They have to lead by leading and be ready to compromise, to accommodate, and not to be intransigent, not to assert that they have a bottom line."

Good things happened because people like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu himself learned from their past experiences that there had to be a better way of living, one which could rise above what their people had suffered, and work towards peace and reconciliation.

So let us shine that lantern on our past experiences and discern what we can learn from them, so that we can become happier, wiser, more compassionate people.

Living Twice

The first century CE Roman poet, Martial, wrote, "Those who live in such a way that they can look back on their past lives with pleasure, live twice."

I love the photo that the Harenberg Kalender people have chosen to accompany this quotation, a beautiful barn owl sitting on a fence near some poppies - wisdom and remembrance combined.

But I do wonder whether any of us can truly look back on every aspect of our past lives with unalloyed pleasure... because life is never perfect, unsullied bliss. It is messy and complicated, with highs and lows, joys and sorrows, bad decisions as well as good ones. So I think that looking back with inevitably be with a mixture of pleasure and regret.

Part of growing older (and I'm 60 now) is coming to terms with our lives up to this time. If we are wise, it should be a time of self-examination, in which we learn to look with clear eyes at what we have done, how we have loved, what has gone right and what has gone wrong, and become reconciled with what we regret, learn from both those experiences and from what has nourished us, and move on with a new serenity.

I'm currently doing a course with the Charter for Compassion Education Institute, called Growing Whole, Not Old.  This week's lesson included a beautiful poem called Becoming an Elder by Cathy Carmody, which has shown me a new way of looking at my life:

Leaving behind my journey of struggling and racing through

the white water of many rivers, I become the river,

creating my own unique way.

Leaving behind my self-imposed role as a tree upon

which others have leaned, I now become the wind,

with the greedom to blow whenever and wherever I choose.

Leaving behind the boxes I've created in my life, 

crammed with roles, responsibilities, rules and fears,

I become the wild and unpredictable space

within which flowers sprout and grow.

Leaving behind the years of yearning for others

to see me as somebody,

I soften into becoming my future,

with permission from SELF to

continually unfold as I choose, without concern

for how others may see me.

Leaving behind years of telling and teaching,

I become instead a mirror

into which others can peer and

view reflections of themselves to consider.

Leaving behind the urge to provide answers for others,

I become - in the silence of this forest retreaat

- the question.

Leaving behind the rigor of my intellect,

I become a single candle in the 

darkness, offering myself as a beacon for others

to create their own path. I become an elder.

Learning vs Experience

"If you want to know something, ask an experienced person, not a scholar." This nugget of Chinese wisdom is something I have learned down the years.

In the first half of my life, I was a great believer in learning from books. And it served me well, for quite a long time. I finished school, got my degree in Librarianship, got married and settled down to live the rest of my life.

As time passed, I began to realise that there are so many things that you simply cannot learn from books, from staying in your head. So many things that can only be learned, or dealt with, overcome,  by hard-won experience, by living from a place of love and risk. Love. Vulnerability. Death. Generosity. None of these can be taught. They have to be experienced.

Book-learning is good, in that it gives you a theoretical grounding in whatever it is you are trying to learn, but it is not until you try to put that theory into practice that the learning "goes in". It is no accident that William Blake put Innocence and Experience at opposite poles. Until we have experienced something, all the book learning in the world will not help us. We will remain in a state of innocence (by which I mean unknowing) until our self-confident edges have been knocked off by some life experience.

Take counselling as an example. As part of my ministerial studies, I did a certificate in counselling skills. I read the recommended texts and thought I knew how to do it. But it was not until I and my fellow students started practising on each other, working in triads (one "counsellor", one "client", one observer) that I began to understand how the theory I had read about really worked. And the same thing happened in the three years of my spiritual direction training. The wise tutors at the London Centre for Spiritual Direction had it spot on - we spent the first half of each session on the topic of the week, and the second half on putting what we had learned into practice by "doing" spiritual direction on each other. Without all the practice I had undergone, I would not have had the confidence to hang out my spiritual director shingle.

And sometimes, I have read a book about a particular spiritual topic (Richard Rohr's Falling Upward comes to mind) and could not understand it at all, until I underwent life experiences which helped the meaning of the words fall into place in my heart.

Where the book learning can help, I think, is that the wisdom shared in books can support us through whatever experience we are having, so that we come out the other end wiser and stronger, kinder and more compassionate than we were before.

Patience and Wisdom

This week's quotation was very timely for me. "Geduld ist die Gefährtin der Weisheit." by Aurelius Augustinus. Which being translated, means, "Patience is the companion of wisdom."

And I had little patience with the Google translation, which said that "Gefährtin" meant "danger". Then realised I had forgotten to put the umlaut over the "a". First lesson.

I think that what the author means is that if we try to rush ahead with anything, without taking the time to do the groundwork first, it will usually fail.

Fall flat on its face.

Ideas can inspire us, and we want to implement them straight away, but unless we take the time to bring other people with us, it is very possible that we will end up at the end of a very narrow branch, with someone sawing it off near the trunk.

In my own context, which is Unitarian ministry, this is especially important to remember. It often happens that a minister (or lay leader or committee member) has a wonderful new idea, then rushes off to make it happen, or to lay it before the committee, only to be met by lukewarm reactions, if not negative ones.

Unitarian ministry must be collaborative. The leaders in our movement must learn the patience to consult other people, to explain new concepts with patience, in order to help those other people feel his or her own enthusiasm for the project, whatever it is. This applies not only to BIG IDEAS, like removing the pews from a chapel, but also to small ideas, like moving the chalice from one place to another.

Change is difficult for most people. They are naturally resistant to change... very, very few people embrace it wholeheartedly, at least not at first hearing. So patience is needed to do the groundwork first, to explain the reasoning behind any new proposal, and to allow people time to mull the new idea over in their minds, so that they can ask questions about it. Leaders also need to be open to adapting new ideas, because someone has pointed out a flaw in our reasoning. This takes patience too, and also humility.

It is better to get people used to a new idea, by drip, dripping it slowly, rather than flooding their minds with it. Patience is the companion of wisdom.

Knowledge vs Wisdom

For many young people (and some not-so-young) May and June are the most stressful months of the year. It is the time of year when all their accumulated knowledge, gained by hard work in classroom or lecture theatre or library, is tested. And on the results of those exams, their entire futures often depend.

It seems so unfair that our academic year is structured to end in the Summer, although I understand why it does: in former times, children had to be available during the Summer months to help with the Harvest.

But it is so hard to have to be indoors, either revising, or in an exam, when outside the sky is blue, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, and there are so many fun things they would rather be doing. I can remember sitting my O and A levels in a sweltering, airless gym, wishing I could be anywhere else.

Looking back across the many years since then, I wonder at how little of the knowledge and facts I crammed into my brain in those days has come in useful in later life (except in pub quizzes!). Admittedly, I am eternally grateful to Mr. Griffith-Jones, the English teacher who passed on his love of good literature, but otherwise, not much else has had any lasting meaning for me, or influence on me.

It makes me wonder whether we are teaching our children the right things in school. I think that perhaps there is too much emphasis on gaining knowledge, on the accumulation of facts, and not enough on learning the important lessons of life, through gaining wisdom.

Perhaps wisdom cannot be learned through study, but only through the experiences of our lives. Wisdom is more about being awake, about paying attention to what is going on around us. Wisdom is more a way of living in the world; of responding to it, following the best that we know. it is about working out what we believe is right and good and true, and then trying to live wholeheartedly, with all of ourselves, as Brene Brown would say.

There are many great teachers of wisdom around, if we could only learn to wake up and pay attention to them. We may learn wisdom by reading the words of wise men and women, or by listening to the worship leader in church or chapel on a Sunday; but I think that a surer route is through our own life experiences.

There is nothing to beat actually experiencing something to teach us the wisdom it holds. For example, a child can be told repeatedly that fire burns, but it is only when she sticks her finger in the candle flame that she learns.

The opportunities to gain wisdom are all around us - in the wonders of Creation, in our interactions with one another, and in the things we see, hear, smell, touch, and taste.

Let us resolve to be awake and pay attention.