"In Search of Wisdom"

The Hebrew bible tells us a lot about the life of King Solomon, from his turbulent rise to power to his addled old age, when he angered God by dallying with foreign women and alien rituals. Chosen to succeed King David to the throne, Solomon violently eliminated his rivals, one of which was his own half-brother. Only twenty years old, he knew he had a lot to learn about power. So he prayed for wisdom.

According to the biblical narrative, God was pleased to grant him what he wished, and more. “Behold, I give you a wise and discerning mind,” God declared. “I give you also what you have not asked, both riches and honor, so that no other king shall compare with you, all your days.”

Solomon had barely established himself when the incident that made him famous for his wisdom actually took place. Two women had given birth to children at the same time. One child died. One mother accused the other of switching the babies; each mother contended that the living baby was her own. Solomon suggested that the way to settle the dispute was to cut the living baby in half.

This cunning move ferreted out the truth. The real mother was the one who begged the king not to harm the child and relinquished her baby to the other woman. This is how Solomon restored the child back to the rightful mother. “And all Israel heard of the judgment,” the narrative concludes, “and they stood in awe of the king, because they perceived that the wisdom of God was in him, to render justice.”

The story of Solomon gives us a sense of how people of the ancient world viewed wisdom. Wisdom was not part of human nature or a capacity to develop. Wisdom belonged to God, who conferred it, as God pleased, on those who prayed for it. God endowed Solomon with wisdom, which he used as power for the good of the people. Other ancient traditions had different views of God, but understood wisdom in a similar way: coming from a source outside human nature. The Greeks believed that wisdom resided in abstract ideals, along with beauty, goodness and love. The pursuit of wisdom involved training the mind to grasp these abstract ideals and to practice them in life. Such activities belonged to the domain of the philosopher, who found happiness in the contemplation of universal truths.

The Native American legend from the Ojibway people, that I told earlier, taught that wisdom and the healing arts come from the Great Spirit. The first revelation appeared in a dream, where an otter beckoned the people to follow. The search for the otter led the people, after many adventures, back to their own lake at home. There the otter demonstrated the four directions and the need for balance and harmony with the earth. Once the people understood that, they were ready to receive the wisdom the Great Spirit had to give them.

That was then. Today we are different. Our modern scientific perspective has displaced traditional beliefs. Metaphysical realities – whether they are the Hebrew God, Platonic ideals, or the medicine of the Great Spirit – are artifacts of a time when wisdom was a combination of belief and knowledge, and received as revelation.

Today we make a distinction between what we believe and what we know, separating religious insight from scientific fact. So the traditional understanding of wisdom seems outdated. We no longer agree with the idea that we obtain wisdom all at once, from an outside source. But in other ways, the concept of wisdom has not changed.

Wisdom today – just as in the time of Solomon – may refer to our capacity to act for the good of others. Wisdom may also have something to do with our happiness, as the Greek philosophers claimed. And the search for wisdom, as the Ojibway story demonstrated, may not need to take us far from home.

One of the popular assumptions about wisdom today is that it takes time and life experience, not God-given revelation, to acquire it. George Vaillant, a psychiatrist and expert on human development, has spent his career in research on aging. Now close to retirement himself, he has followed longitudinal studies of individuals spanning nearly entire lifetimes.

He has observed that aging is a developmental process, in which people grow from a focus on themselves into an ever-widening sense of identification with others. You have to be selfish in order to separate from your family, leave home, and make something of yourself, Vaillant says. Eventually you evolve into a person who is able to care for others, and finds satisfaction in relational bonds and responsibilities. Then in the later years of life, family demands recede. In their place comes concern for the future of humanity and the fate of the earth.

According to this view, the ever-widening sense of identification that occurs as people age also gives them wisdom, culled from years of individual growth. It also resonates with the Native American idea that wisdom is an awareness of the larger whole of space and time. But not everyone agrees that wisdom is an expansive state of mind attained in old age.

The poet Sara Teasdale suggests that age yields wisdom only if we practice acceptance of our limitations. She writes,

When I have ceased to beat my wings
Against the faultiness of things,
And learned that compromises wait
Behind each partly opened gate,
When I can look life in the eyes,
Grown, calm and very coldly wise,
Life will have given me the truth,
And taken in exchange my youth.

Teasdale’s wisdom is a transaction carried out in the scarce economy of passing years and diminishing capacities.

Evelyn Waugh is even less sentimental than Teasdale. “Our wisdom,” he wrote, “we prefer to think, is all of our own gathering, while, if the truth be told, it is, most of all, the last coin of a legacy that dwindles with time.” Wisdom is what is left after our other powers have failed us.

Neither writer offers an image of wisdom as the power to do good in the world, or as the source of happiness. Rather, wisdom is a consolation for inevitable decline, and not much of a consolation at that. Some people even lose what wisdom they have. Solomon fell apart in his old age, angering God and jeopardizing his whole kingdom by taking up with foreign women and turning away from his religion.

Growing old can make us wiser if we are fortunate enough to feel well, to stay on track with our development, and to remain involved in the world. We all know people who have grown in wisdom as they have aged; many of them are sitting in this sanctuary. But wisdom is not the exclusive property of the old.

Solomon was wiser than he knew, realizing at the age of twenty that he did not know enough to be king. The wisdom God gave him was the power he needed to rule. But as the story about the baby and the two mothers depicted, Solomon didn’t know the truth on his own. His shocking proposal that he cut the baby in half was calculated to make everyone so upset that the truth would reveal itself.

Solomon’s wisdom was his ability to tolerate ambiguity, to know what he did not know, and to figure out how to learn the truth. In that sense, wisdom has not changed much, from ancient times to today. A wise person finds clarity in the midst of confusion and renders justice out of chaos. The wisdom of Solomon relied as much on honesty and fairness, humility and concern for others, as it did on what God gave him.

If the search for wisdom brings happiness, as the Greeks believed, it is because the pursuit of something we value makes us better people. Wise people don’t wait until they are old to seek wisdom. They understand that happiness comes from their alignment with positive values. Caring about justice and the wellbeing of others; learning to love and keep commitments; growing in our connection to each other through community: these are the paths that lead to happiness and to wisdom.

Wisdom is also the ability to take what we learn and experience in life and to use it. It is the integration of diverse influences, some of them ambiguous and contradictory, into a wider sense of meaning and purpose. The Native American story gives us a nice image of how everything – dreams, animals, the four directions, the Great Spirit – all converge and have something to do with how people gain wisdom and power. Nothing is wasted or lost along the way.

The ancient traditions still have a lot to teach us about the meaning of wisdom. We may not believe that wisdom comes to us from some source outside ourselves, as the ancient people did, but its value is just as great when it comes from within. Wisdom is our capacity to use power to render justice, to bring happiness, and to restore harmony and balance As we enter the season of celebration that the wisdom traditions have given us, may we use their spirit to grow as wise people, in this day and time, before it is too late.
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References used to prepare this sermon include "Wisdom: its nature, origins and development," edited by Robert J. Sternberg (Cambridge University Press, 1990); the George Vaillant research was presented by him at a workshop at the UUA General Assembly, Boston, 2003.