There is one question I am asking people I meet, “what is wise right now?” I am on the hunt for wisdom. Often people are surprised by this question. It seems strange to ask for wisdom, or assume that the person across from me is wise. But I have discovered that wisdom is more valuable than anything else in these hard days; wisdom is what may be most needed in our community right now, and I believe it can be found.
Wisdom is different than information. As a boy we had to run downstairs to our dusty encyclopedia to look for information or I could call up my grandmother for her best recipes. Today, however, we have Siri, Alexa, or Google always ready to convert inches to centimetres, or tell us the capital of Azerbaijan. We can search in a moment to discover how old turtles can be, or if the weather will change in Vancouver on Tuesday. We feel this sense that we know a lot, because there is a lot we can find out about. Still, for all this information there is one thing we cannot easily find in a search bar, and that’s wisdom.
Wisdom might be described as the application of all this knowledge to the real stuff of life so that a good outcome might be found for as many people as possible. It is a form of judging and weighing the nuances and complexities of the moment, and out of a depth of character and experience, act on it with goodness and love. Wisdom, in this sense, is found as humans interact with the broken and painful stuff of this world, and seek to heal it using the stuff of their own lives. It is something we find by asking.
I am certainly not alone in saying the cultural pressures of this season seem, for many of us, unprecedented. The pandemic and economic pressures, combined with social struggles, political ideologies, and personal sorrows have compounded into a kind of pervasive morass. It is in these challenging times that ‘ten-steps to fix this or that’ simply do not seem to resolve much. Our disappointment may be pointing to a solution that can only be found through wisdom.
The book of Proverbs calls wisdom many things: it is like gold, it is peace-loving, it guards, it is humble, it secures, and it is like a woman who rescues us. All of these metaphors point to the value of wisdom as a light on a dark path past our fear and out of our anxieties. It is, in this sense, perhaps the most important and valuable thing a person can possess.
Our neighbourhoods do not always need more information, but they could use more wisdom. It needs the calm, low-anxiety, and listening presence of people who are able to ask, “what is wise right now?” This is not weak or un-interested in the very real pressures of the moment, rather wisdom seeks to lower the volume of fear and anger so that the quieter voice of wisdom can emerge and speak to the challenges in front of us. Marcel Proust wrote that, “we don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.” If we hope to navigate our city, province, or country through the complexity of this season, we would do well to prepare to engage the journey of wisdom together. I do not know the way forward in dealing with the most challenging issues facing our community, but I believe that together we can be the people who, out of a depth of character, grace, and peace, can attend to our neighbourhoods wisely and discover a way forward.
What is wise right now? Just by asking this question, we take the first step.
