It was Henry David Thoreau
who wrote in Walden: “Shall I not
have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould
myself?”[1] “Where shall wisdom be found?” asks the
author of the book of Job, “Where is the place of understanding?”[2]
Where shall wisdom be found? It is a question, in spiritual hunger, we continue to ask today some 2500 years after the book of Job was written. Sometimes we ask that question as parents and grandparents: what's the right way to discipline or teach our children? How can we pass our cherished values onto them? How much freedom do we give them? How much do we insist they live by "our rules?" I remember, as a teenager, wondering what I should be asking God for in prayer. The only thing I had in front of me was the Scripture passage where Solomon prayed for Wisdom. Over and over, I prayed for this.
Where shall wisdom be
found? We ask this as a nation at a time
when we have ended some form of the longest running war in U.S. history. Who are we together as a nation? What sort of character and values are needed
to lead a country as diverse and complex as ours, in a world that is even more
diverse and complex? Does personal
virtue trump public values? How do we
know what virtues and values are most important? Where shall wisdom be found?
We ask it of our religious
leaders and of our faith. Where are the
texts or teachers that embody the wisdom that can lead me to inner peace, a
fuller understanding of the divine, a knowledge of how to live well and
rightly, with deep meaning and substance?
Where shall wisdom be found?
The beautiful poem read from
Job, chapter 28, is in keeping with other parts of the book of Job where
creation itself is full of awe and mystery and wonder that may pave the way to
wisdom. We must necessarily look for
wisdom in the processes and path of creation.
But it is God alone who knows the weight and measure of wisdom.
The equally beautiful but
ancient poem from Proverbs 8-9, probably borrowed to write the Gospel of John,
chapter 1, gives a slightly different answer.
Wisdom, personified as a Woman, speaks in the first person, as a Divine
being in her own right, almost as a goddess.
She tells us that she was with God from the beginning. She was a “master worker” right there with
God at creation when there were still no depths and before the mountains and
fields of the earth were formed.
In Job, if we could take a
long view, see the expansiveness of creation and the process and plan of it, even
if it is unknowable, we might gain wisdom.
In Proverbs, it is almost as if Wisdom infuses the entire creation. She dwells in creation including, it seems,
within human beings. In these passages
is a complementarianism that suggests wisdom is found infused in all of
creation and also in the broad and expansive view of creation’s
plan and process.
To step back, like all
Wisdom Literature, Proverbs is trying to say that there is a deeper wisdom than
conventionally thought—unseen at times, opaque at others, that wisdom found is
often through discerning the enigmatic. What is certain nn the book of Proverbs, is
that wisdom is all about character. It’s
about being virtuous. By being virtuous,
we align ourselves with the structure and the processes of creation. When we are righteous, we support the pillars
of Wisdom’s home. When we are foolish,
we chip away at the true structure of the cosmos. Proverbs is a call to virtue that supports
the created order.[3] And more than anything else, wisdom in
Proverbs is a social virtue, what the prophets and laws call justice and
righteousness or social justice. To be
wise then is to be a person whose character, whose inner being is marked by
this social virtue, a concern for others in our wider community, the most
needy—the poor, the orphan, the widow, the immigrant or stranger.
For Proverbs, this sort of
wisdom, this sort of social virtue is the most valuable and desirable thing in
the world. It’s much more valuable than
anything else we might desire—whether money or good grades, a beautiful or
handsome life partner, a good job or any other kind of success. Securing wisdom is the key to a good,
meaningful, and fulfilling life. For
Proverbs this sort of wisdom, with its emphasis on social virtue, is what we
should pass on to our children, demand of our leaders, and ponder and explain
and act on in our faith communities.
Why is this? I think it’s because the Bible knows, like
the traditional wisdom of many indigenous or aboriginal cultures, that we are
all connected—we are fundamentally social beings—we need each other, even
though we may not like that idea. One of
the pillars of social justice is knowing all of creation is interwoven. When we act contrary to that knowledge, wisdom’s
pillars begin to crack, the threads of its garments begin to fray.
Even more fundamentally, we
can remember that when we are all born and for the first many years of our
life, we are radically dependent on other people, our mother, or other
caregivers. And for many of us, we will
be radically dependent on others at the end of our lives.
This corresponds with what I
think Job is trying to see, that maybe we might see out in this great expanse
of Tower Hill today. There are created
processes happening all around us that we not only experience in awe and wonder
but also seek to know the whole of in wisdom and understanding.
Forest ecologist, Suzanne
Simard, has recognized that aboriginal or indigenous scientists led the way
long ago in recognizing interconnection and interdependence. Western scientists had wrapped all of their
research up in the belief of “survival of the fittest” and that the “law of the
jungle” was competition as one form of life nudged out another to maintain
their own life. Over many years, this
understanding or wisdom of natural law was what undergirded the economic system
of capitalism. Competition sharpens
us. Makes us better. But as we see how capitalism is the engine
for climate change, this rationale is failing us. And its wisdom is faulty. Its house is not only collapsing; its
processes and patterns are destroying our home.
In ground-breaking work,
Simard has learned that in the life of trees, a great deal of parenting and eldering takes
place, a mode of mutuality and reciprocity that should also impart wisdom about
how human ecosystems must flourish. “Simard
calls the mature hub trees in a forest ‘mother trees’— parenting; eldering in a
mode of mutuality and reciprocity; modeling what we also know to be true of
genuinely flourishing human ecosystems.”[4] Simard says,
The most powerful parts of [human]
social systems can be the elder that has aged and is guiding younger people or
guiding their culture. And yet, they can be almost invisible in the hierarchy
of our social system. In forests, the same thing; the belowground world is a
perfect example of that. These bacteria, the fungi, the archaea, they’re the
ones that are cycling the carbon, decomposing things, cycling nitrogen,
filtering water, building soil, soil structure.[5]
What she and other forest researchers have found is that every tree is
connected to every other tree in a forest and that “mother trees” siphon off
carbon and nitrogen to support the life of trees that are just beginning to lay
out their root system and do not have the ability to provide nourishment for
themselves. The mother trees send out
warning signals, aid through sickness and disease, provide nutrients, and pass
wisdom on. In fact, chemicals that are
being transmitted in the forest have now been found to reflect a process
similar to human neurotransmitters. And
wouldn’t you know, much of this research, done around fungus as transmitters,
had been done years earlier by an indigenous scientist of the Skokomish Nation
and largely ignored. It was the Heiltsuk
nation of British Columbia who had long talked about the interplay of salmon
and trees in their ancient wisdom. Now,
Simard says, science confirms that salmon nitrogen has been found in the forest
surrounding the great salmon runs—inside the trees and plants and insects.
Simard realized that
this wisdom impacted her life when she was found with breast cancer. Rather than try to go it alone, keep her
suffering to herself, she created a large network of family, friends, and
community, which surrounded, supported, and healed her.
Where is wisdom
found? It is found in the social virtue
of social justice which tells us that we are all woven into a single garment of
interconnection, a web of life that can look chaotic at times, not unlike a great
murmuration of starlings, but beautiful in the way we bend and twist
together.
Wisdom spreads her table
for all of creation to find nourishment and shape and form together. Where is wisdom to be found? In those processes of the created order that
tell us, sometimes way beyond our ability to understand, that we cannot go it
alone to know God’s intent or the fullness of joy God seeks for us.
Job lives his life as a man of private virtue believing that as long as
he follows the commandments, he and his own should be protected--even if the rest
of the world goes to heck in a handbasket.
The wisdom God relates to Job is that pain and suffering are a part of
life that do not come about because of some personal sin. God’s speech to Job begins with, “Where were
you when I laid the foundation of the earth, when waters burst forth from the
womb?”[6] Suffering happens to God in the labor pains
of giving birth to the created order. People
do not always get what they deserve. God
is not about retributive justice—doling out reward and punishment based on our
individual behavior. The righteous are
not so easily rewarded. The unjust do
not receive punishment for their evil ways. Suffering is not always the result of wrong
action but can be because something new is about to be born. The labor pains do not signal sin but the
necessary strain and struggle to midwife something new.
We have to move out of
systems that are all about competition to something that recognizes our shared
life together. If we continue with an
economic system that is about beating each other up, competing to win, and
destroying what we think are weaklings, we are not doing the “mothering” of
Lady Wisdom and what she prepares for us at her table.
Proverbs teaches that if
we live a life of social virtue, seeking wisdom like silver, like a hidden
treasure, we will find it. Deep meaning
awaits us. So, as a congregation, let us
find ways to reach as mother trees to care and nurture for those who do not
have the deepest of root systems so that all may go well in the forest, all may
go well by the lake, all may go well in our community. In doing so, people in Southwest Michigan may
indeed turn and say, “At that place, at the corner of Glenlord and Washington,
I think wisdom is not only sought in necessary strain and struggle . . . wisdom is not only sought, but it is
found.” Amen.
[1] Henry David Thoreau, Walden,
(Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press, 1904), p. 121.
[2] Thanks to Dr. Timothy
Sandoval and the infrastructure he gave to this message.
[3] Timothy J. Sandoval, The
Discourse of Wealth and Poverty in the Book of Proverbs (Boston: Brill, 2006), p. 164.
[4] “Interview with Suzanne
Simard, Forests are wired for wisdom,” OnBeing, September 9, 2021, https://onbeing.org/programs/suzanne-simard-forests-are-wired-for-wisdom/#transcript.
[5] Ibid
[6] Job 40:4, 8-9
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