day 12: for wisdom

In a vast untouched area like ours, you can hear what you need to hear. You can see for your own good. Messages come through your touch. You are soaked, submerged, immersed; full to the brim with beauty. Each visit can be a final answer, but the next visit brings you something else. It never ends. It becomes an endless process: you and nature have become one and you borrow its infinitude. You then have to go back again and again, because each time you outgrow, in some way, the self you were before.

You struggle for the words to make nature finite, to capture her, to take her with you, and you are defeated, which is right.

…The essence of the land, as it has been since the beginning of time -its evolution- still needs to be translated for human understanding. Descriptions, impacts, impressions come from the human side; but what is nature’s view of us humans? What would the message be if a tree spoke to us, or an animal, or an insect? What would come from “out there” ? Would “the other” in nature reach into “the other” in ourselves? If only it would.

So many thoughts, and for whom? The world is drowned by thoughts, most of them watered-down to satisfy too many people. But there is the need to capture the real stuff of this coast, no matter how difficult and personal and elusive a task it is. My notes need no justification; they are a thing in themselves, just as the coast is. Besides, one needs to have a say in one’s old age.

As I walked along the beach later that day, a motor fishing boat paralleled along the shore, with its powerful, encroaching, self-assured engine noises. It was barely outside the breakers.

To shut it out of my consciousness I carefully noted in detail what was around me. So that was it. Even though often redundant, my notes were also my protection.

Jane Hollister Wheelwright, ‘The Alegría Canyon’

What is the fruit of study?’ asks one ancient catechism. ‘To perceive the eternal Word of God reflected in every plant and insect, every bird and animal, and every man and woman.’

Ray Simpson with Brent Lyons-Lee, St Aidan’s Way of Mission (47)

About fifteen years ago I was introduced to Richard Rohr’s work on the centuries-old system of thought called the Enneagram.  More than a personality-profile system, its conflation of centuries-old philosophy and spirituality from all the Abrahamic religions brought me a rich way of understanding some of my recurring behaviours which have brought pain to myself and others. Eventually, it helped me embrace myself as a creative.

Around the same time, my beloved journeywoman Pippa began work on a Masters dissertation, and then a PhD on ‘wisdom’, as it related to the theological formation teaching received by those undergoing training to be priested in the Church of England.  As we discussed what some of the ‘wisdom’ passages from Proverbs or Sirach might mean, we arrived at a shorthand definition: that wisdom was actually ‘doing wisdom’.  Rather than arcane head knowledge or even mysterious heart transformation, wisdom in the Bible is clearly embodied.  Wisdom is a kinetic experience.  Wisdom is only known in the doing of it.

Wisdom, the received understanding of the mystery of God which necessitates a change in the believer’s life, is received in the writings and teachings of those who have followed the Perennial Way down the millennia.  Yet wisdom-by-doing (see Brother David’s words below) cannot be learnt by mere reading and learning.  As the above catechism makes plain, wisdom is also received through what Shakespeare’s ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, /Sermons in stones, and good in everything’ (As You Like It II.i). 

I long to meet Wisdom herself in these ways.  My eyes are open.  My hands are willing.  And so this is how I start a painting: a received wisdom – a word, a poem, a prayer – inscribed beneath everything, unseen but informing everything that follows, indissoluble from the whole.  It feels immense, and yet not enough, a puny statement in the face of the world’s needs, in the face of my own needs.  Yet it is a sign of trust and a commitment to hope, that the God-Who-Comes breaking into the messy matter of being human, might become co-Creator in this one small act of daring, of offering.  All I have to offer is my vulnerable truth in this moment.

The word “blessing” comes from the same linguistic root as “blood.” Blessing is the bloodstream of the universe. It needs to be kept circulating. By living our personal life to the full, we tap into the life of nature as a whole, and so into mystery, the silent source of all blessing. Through paying full attention to our physical life throughout its seasons, we become aware of taking part in the great web of life and its unfolding, the unveiling of mystery as a story, a word. Through participating in the networks that enrich our life, we experience the continuous circulation of natural and cultural energy, which is the very circulation of blessing through the universe, and, deeply understood, the flow of mystery as Word, through understanding-by-doing, into silence. And just as all ecological cycles are sustained by the energy of the sun, so the source of all blessing in our personal life is ultimately our dynamic relationship with mystery as the great You at our innermost center of silence.

Brother David Steindl-Rast, You are Here (39-40)

unsettled. (iPhone image)