Invitation to Wisdom
For the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time.
חָ֭כְמוֹת (khokmoth), the feminine noun, Wisdom. Lady Wisdom. I suppose if there is a patroness of this site, wisdom&culture, it is indeed Lady Wisdom.
Lady Wisdom is an ‘echte vrouw’, as they say in Dutch. She builds her own massive house, she slaughters her own meat, she spreads a mighty fine feast… she’s got the goods. She extends her festival invitation to people who are ‘simple’, פֶ֭תִי (peti), which is a point that tends to strike one as either rather odd or pretty obvious, so it’s worth thinking about this. Though there is a negative connotation, of being naïve, there is also a sense in which this makes a person ‘open-minded’. The invitation is likely to be heeded by someone who truly hungers for wisdom, not someone already satisfied with how full of wisdom he or she already is. Perhaps someone who does not know quite what to do next says ‘why not’, as opposed to thinking of oneself as so busy and important, and will wander in, much to their boon.
Indeed an essential condition of one willing to imbibe in Wisdom is humility. A concept that has had a very helpful role in my own thinking is the philosopher, William Desmond’s, notion of ‘porosity’. We can think of ourselves as having pores that are open and willing to accept the Wisdom as it pours forth. This, as opposed to our pores being clogged, not allowing anything in. Especially in a culture where so many sounds and images compete for our attention, we can easily become saturated and clogged, so inundated by sources of stimulus, each one louder and more in your face than the next. It is of fundamental importance that we try to unclog our pores and keep them clean so as to remain sensitive and attentive to what is truly worthwhile, learning how to sift through and discern what is truly edifying and what is kitsch.
Primarily our culture rewards and encourages a kind of hyperactivity. This can come from the drive to succeed, the prodding from a superior demanding more productivity, but also as a reaction to our boredom, or oversaturation. Perhaps if we stop for a moment or slow down, we don’t like the thoughts that creep in, so we avoid our concerns by doing pretty much anything other than be left to our thoughts. We might expend a lot of mental and emotional energy putting up quite a front externally, which says we have our lives in order, while the interior is not really a place we want to venture. We might not want to go into our own seven column palace because we fear we will find things desolate or in disarray. Definitely not a classy Lady Wisdom feast. And we can spend an alarming amount of time actively avoiding ourselves. The very last person we might want to be stuck talking to might be us.
The word ‘passive’ seems to have, almost always, a negative connotation. But there is a sense in which passivity is elemental and even more primary than activity. We receive life, as a gift. We are fed before we can feed ourselves. We hear and learn language before we can speak. Sometimes the dominance of activity that comes later can cancel out the proper functioning of our passivity, closing us off to many of the most essential elements of life.
The poet, Ted Hughes, in a letter to his son, Nicholas, who at the time was 24, describes with tragic beauty the inner self, who remains within us as a child, who becomes recessed as our armoured, adult, active self takes prominence.
Usually, that child is a wretchedly isolated undeveloped little being. It’s been protected by the efficient armour, it’s never participated in life, it’s never been exposed to living and to managing the person’s affairs, it’s never been given responsibility for taking the brunt. And it’s never properly lived. That’s how it is in almost everybody. And that little creature is sitting there, behind the armour, peering through the slits. And in its own self, it is still unprotected, incapable, inexperienced. Every single person is vulnerable to unexpected defeat in this inmost emotional self. At every moment, behind the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person’s childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging above the brim. And in fact, that child is the only real thing in them. It’s their humanity, their real individuality, the one that can’t understand why it was born and that knows it will have to die, in no matter how crowded a place, quite on its own. That’s the carrier of all the living qualities. It’s the centre of all the possible magic and revelation. What doesn’t come out of that creature isn’t worth having, or it’s worth having only as a tool — for that creature to use and turn to account and make meaningful. So there it is. And the sense of itself, in that little being, at its core, is what it always was. But since that artificial secondary self took over the control of life around the age of eight, and relegated the real, vulnerable, supersensitive, suffering self back into its nursery, it has lacked training, this inner prisoner. And so, wherever life takes it by surprise, and suddenly the artificial self of adaptations proves inadequate, and fails to ward off the invasion of raw experience, that inner self is thrown into the front line — unprepared, with all its childhood terrors round its ears. And yet that’s the moment it wants. That’s where it comes alive — even if only to be overwhelmed and bewildered and hurt.
I can’t quite put my finger on why, but for some reason, it is in this light that I like to look on the piece of scripture here, of Jesus’s statements about the people having to eat his flesh. Especially in John’s gospel we tend to look at Jesus as in control of everything, knowing everything, almost not really human. And yet here Jesus seems to be in one of those situations where the more he says, the more he tries to explain, he’s really just making things worse. I’m sure we can think of times when we’ve been in that kind of situation. On the one hand, it seems like he is doing this on purpose. Why? The people are getting pretty upset by what he’s saying and he seemingly exacerbates it. If it isn’t bad enough that they express their confusion: ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’ John even has Jesus switch from the verb φάγητε (phagete), ‘shall have eaten’, to τρώγων (trogon), a coarse verb meaning ‘chewing’, or ‘gnawing’. That’s pretty visceral, to say the least.
‘Whoever gnaws on my flesh and drinks deeply of my blood
has eternal life,
and I will raise him on the last day.’
…
‘Whoever chews my flesh and drinks deeply of my blood
abides in me and I in him.’
Though it is possible to see these dramatic statements as authoritative, I can’t help but have a sense that Jesus is expressing radical intimacy and vulnerability. It is as though he is laying himself bare, rending himself, as he describes this shocking act. He wants people to feel deeply how radically kenotic and how total is his giving of himself without remainder. And perhaps if we remain mentally in the adult armour with our guard up, we will not take up this invitation to have the Wisdom of the Father abide within us.