Where Can Wisdom Be Found?
Is it possible for ordinary people like you and me to be wise?
I’m ten years old, it’s 6.30 on a winter morning, and despite the wood fire burning, my ankles are freezing as I sit with Mum and my two sisters at the kitchen table, listening to Dad read from the Book of Proverbs, which he does on an annual basis.
This morning he’s up to a verse which always intrigues me, Proverbs 9:10, which declares:
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom
and the knowledge of the holy is understanding.
The three main words confuse my young mind: wisdom; knowledge; understanding.
‘What’s the difference between knowledge, understanding, and wisdom?’ I quickly ask Dad before he moves onto the next verse, somehow sensing their level of importance and putting them in order from least to greatest.
Dad doesn’t talk much, preferring to use God’s words when conversing with us. He frowns, sniffs, tightens his lips. His eyes move from side to side as if seeking inspiration from the cold green and white faux-marble laminated tabletop.
‘Knowledge is facts, information. Like knowing the parts of a car engine. This is a spark plug. That is a piston.’ He points to these objects, as if we’re looking under the light blue Austin A40’s bonnet in the garage. ‘Understanding is knowing how to use those facts and information to accomplish things. So, if the car breaks down, you know how to make it work again by fixing the spark plug or the piston, because you understand how an engine works. Wisdom is – is – .’ He stops and thinks a bit more. ‘Wisdom is when you let God’s Holy Spirit inspire you.’
He moves on to the next verse while I wonder what God had to do with fixing the car and what the Holy Spirit would inspire Dad to do, that he wouldn’t otherwise do, next time it breaks down.
Even today, many decades later, I sit at my white laminated desk and muse on these three words: knowledge, understanding, wisdom.
I accept that knowledge is information, and that understanding is seeing how information can be applied to a situation for a successful result, but the question of what wisdom is still teases me. Dad’s definition implied I must get something – God’s (somewhat nebulous) Holy Spirit – before I can have wisdom. However, I must confess that although in the past I’ve spent hours and hours on my knees and read and re-read the Bible, this essence has never whooshed into my being and lit a tongue of flame above my head.
Does this mean I cannot be wise? Is wisdom inaccessible to me? Do I need to join a church? Be re-baptised? Bow my head and beseech an invisible being to give me a bit of an invisible substance so I can negotiate the ups and downs of life with pizzazz?
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that wisdom doesn’t come from me having something (like the Holy Spirit). Wisdom comes – becomes available – to me when I let my accumulated knowledge and understanding drop away so that I have no thoughts, and I am totally, utterly present.
It works whether your head is under the bonnet of a broken car, or you’re sitting with someone in need of direction or compassion.
My confusion as a child about how wisdom could be an important element when fixing a car has gone. Although I’m unable to recall the details, I read once about a skilled mechanic who, when faced with what seemed an unsolvable mechanical problem, would just stand still and stare at the motor parts, eyes glazed, his mind empty. His full attention would open a doorway, and suddenly, with a whoosh, a solution would pop into his head. This is what Dad, in his state of religious fervour, would call the workings of the Holy Spirit, and what I call letting go of all that is known so that one can know what seems, humanly, to be unknowable.
On page 51 of Buddha’s Little Instruction Book, Jack Kornfield quoted The Buddha:
We do not need more knowledge but more wisdom.
Wisdom comes from our own attention.
Is it possible for ordinary people like you and me to be wise?
Where Can Wisdom Be Found?
Wisdom dwells in the empty space before thoughts come.
It is accessible when we pay full attention to the moment we are in.
Wisdom arises in the moment, in the space without thought, considering and embracing all things.
This is the deepest meaning of the Holy Spirit. I don’t need to beg for it or become passionately religious in order to access it. Holy Spirit is Here. Present. Presence. Always.
It makes what is humanly unknowable, known.
In a future blog I’ll discuss the beginning of the Proverb: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It doesn’t mean what it seems to mean!
