In the view of the Roman philosopher Seneca, the great end in life is the achievement of wisdom. As anyone who has ever been fooled, or simply foolish, knows, this is more difficult to achieve than we may imagine. Who hasn’t been impulsive, making a hasty choice prematurely – such as a marriage, or a new car, or a house, perhaps? Who hasn’t suffered at the hands of someone who was more cunning and clever in the moment? Who hasn’t embraced an idea that they later discovered to be false? Sometimes embarrassingly so. Who hasn’t overlooked shortcomings in others – or themselves? Who hasn’t allowed someone else to live inside their heads rent free, as we like to say? I’m guilty on every count – except marriage, just to be clear.
As the 19th-century Scottish physician, poet, and satirical novelist Tobias Smollett quipped, “Some folks are wise, and some are otherwise.” Truth be told, most of us are “otherwise” more often than we care to admit, but that doesn’t mean that we are incapable of cultivating wisdom over the course of our live, even if doing so is difficult and the achievement rare. When the 19th-century Unitarians emphasized the pursuit of what they called self-culture, they were really pointing towards the cultivation of personal wisdom – and they believed that it was a possibility for everyone, the desired end of the spiritual quest – not success, not salvation as their neighbours understood it, but wisdom. In this, they echoed Seneca when he declared, “They who have attained wisdom have reached, not the furthermost, but the most important goal.”
The wise person takes time to reflect on their thoughts and actions without becoming obsessed with them, balances socializing with solitude, chooses both their sources of information and their friends prudently, and prepares to endure both successes and adversities with grace. In short, Seneca held that a person who is truly wise is able to live in the present, enjoying what the present moment has to offer, without fixating unnecessarily on the past or depending on an imagined future.
If Seneca was mistaken about wisdom at all, it was that he assumed that wisdom and happiness go hand in hand, that perfect wisdom and perfect happiness are identical, and that wisdom makes life easier for us. Ha! Wisdom does not promise that we will be happier than others; it does promise that we may be more fulfilled in our unhappiness. While wisdom may lead to a degree of contentment, it seems to me that it correlates with heartbreak as much as happiness, and that the path of wisdom can be arduous rather than easy. In this regard, Seneca allowed his own social status to cloud his estimate of the fruits of wisdom. I’ve known too many wise, working class souls whose lives were marked by unhappiness and hardship to believe that wisdom necessarily leads to good fortune, although it may well have mitigated their difficulties and suffering. There are wise people who dwell on the streets, living lives of quiet desperation – individuals whose wisdom helps them make it through the day, but does not necessarily give them much happiness.
Even so, while Seneca’s claim may not be strictly accurate, or universally true, I think that Krista Tippett echoes his assertion, albeit more temperately, when she says: “I’ve yet to meet a wise person who doesn’t know how to find some joy even in the midst of what is hard, and to smile and laugh easily, including at oneself.” In doing so, the wise person declines to let immediate circumstances have a total say over their mood, robbing them of whatever slender joys and delights they possess. Indeed, wisdom helps them to understand that immediate circumstances may be fleeting, and that deeper joys and deeper possibilities may yet await them.
Many speak of the wisdom of Solomon, including many people who have never read a word about him, but entertain vague Sunday school memories about him being wiser than most. He was the original philosopher king, at least the oldest found in literature, although he has rivals in China and other places. And when people mention his name, they typically mean the judgement of Solomon, which is recorded in the First Book of Kings, not the biblical Book of Wisdom associated with him.
You know the story, I’m sure. There are two mothers living in the same house, and when one of their infant sons dies, both mothers claim the remaining boy as her own, one accusing the other of having swapped the two boys. In order to resolve the dispute, King Solomon orders that the living child be divided in two, giving each mother one half. One mother accepts the decision, declaring that if she couldn’t have the boy, neither would, while the other mother protests, saying, “Give the baby to her, just don’t kill him.” At this point, Solomon declares the second woman to be the boy’s true mother, granting her custody. Similar stories appear in the folktales of many cultures, so it’s almost certain that this story is an old folktale that came to be woven into the Bible and attributed to Solomon, but this served to preserve the tale and secure the king’s reputation as an exceeding wise ruler. And that may be a reasonable assessment, but it overlooks the wisdom of the mother, who, grasping the enormity of the consequences, intervened to prevent a second tragedy. Is she not as wise as Solomon? Would the king not have appeared to be a fool – and a reckless one at that – if both women had said, “Sure. Let’s get this over with.” Obviously not.
Clearly, Solomon possessed keen psychological insight, a genuine quality of wisdom, but the success of this tactic depended upon an equally wise mother, whose wisdom was shown by her compassion, whether or not she knew the boy to be hers. As Kathleen McTigue says, “we must remember that the truest wisdom comes laced through with compassion, as we come to know how alike we are – each of us doing our best to find the path ahead and to keep walking with our fragile, broken hearts. And all of us in deep need of each other’s kindness.”
As it happens, the Bible personifies Wisdom in the form of a woman, especially in the Book of Proverbs, and both the Hebrew and Greek words for wisdom are feminine, which is reflected in the use of female pronouns – something that must drive religious fundamentalists crazy. Long before the idea of the Trinity was invented to explain away the contradictions of the Bible regarding God, Wisdom – Sophia in Greek – personified God’s presence and was clearly a vestige of earlier female deities who were believed to exist before the Hebrews adopted radical monotheism. Today, wisdom is commonly defined as “the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment,” but millennia ago, Wisdom was seen as a manifestation of the divine, and it was natural to identify Wisdom’s creative and harmonizing qualities as feminine.
It would be a mistake to confuse knowledge with wisdom; although they may be related, they are not the same. I’m sure you’ve all heard the old saw, “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.” I have witnessed many knowledgeable people – great intellectuals with brilliant minds – who have ultimately shown themselves to be fools of one kind or another. Far too many leaders in the field of information technology fall into this category, I’m afraid. Or overspecialized academics who are unable to connect their esoteric and often idiosyncratic studies with useful purposes. Of course, some theoretical physicists were able to create bombs, which was arguably a special kind of folly, so not every practical application is necessarily a wise one. It’s possible to absorb vast amounts of knowledge without having the capacity to arrange it usefully and distill it through the lens of experience. Trivial Pursuit and chess are different games. Data and discernment don’t always mix easily. A command of sports statistics is unlikely to make you better at playing baseball. If the accumulation of knowledge titillates the intellect, we don’t yet arrive at wisdom until we get past our dopamine high and turn our knowledge into insights and behaviours with practical application.
If knowledge is the rock on which we build, then experience is the organic matter that, when blended with the sand, creates the soil in which we live. We test what we know – or think we know – through lived experience, where we often learn as much from our foibles and mistakes as we do from our successes. I’ve learned a lot over the years because I have made a robust number of mistakes in life – some almost legendary, but most simply mistakes of an everyday variety. In that sense, wisdom is often a byproduct of folly. So sometimes we should be gentle with the fools we know because they may be working on their own personal wisdom project. The more mistakes we make in life, we more wisdom that may result – that is, if we’re paying attention and learning from our mistakes rather than ignoring them or covering them over. Of course, we can learn from others’ mistakes as well, which is generally more pleasant, if we’re curious and engaged with our companions – and not too given to gossip and airs of superiority. The popularity of Mr. Bean as a character is partly related to how much entertainment value we receive from others’ foibles. And when it’s harmless, that’s not a problem; but when it’s hurtful, it may be. Learning for the experiences of others works best when approached with a healthy sense of humility. “Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much,” declared the poet William Cowper; "Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.”
Without experience, it’s possible to be smart without being wise. My father, who was eminently wise, in my view (although I do sometimes wonder in my mother surpassed him), used to observe that young people were mistakenly called mature when they were simply sophisticated, a thought that was echoed by Stephen Colbert when, speaking at a commencement, he suggested that those who appear young and wise are more likely just cynical. Neither were seeking to be critical of youth, but were rather pointing to the importance of experience in the development of maturity and, ultimately, genuine wisdom. We don’t expect people to become wise simply from readings textbooks or watching the right documentaries. They need to experience something of life to be able to put that kind of learning to use.
One of the things I love about this congregation – about being a Unitarian Universalist and having engaged with dozens upon dozens of congregations across the continent and having participated in seemingly endless denominational activities – is the number of wise people I came to know. At its best, a congregation is a school for wisdom, as surely as the gardens of the philosophers were such schools. Now I can’t possibly ame all of the wise people I have encountered during my lifetime as a Unitarian Universalist, but there are a few that I had in mind while preparing this sermon.
One of them was Marg Redston. She was president of this congregation when I finally made the decision to join. She was calm and composed about everything she encountered. And it’s not like there was a shortage of calamities in the life of the congregation while she was its president. There were several, but she remained poised and graceful whenever she dealt with them. She was a model of the kind of emotional maturity found in the wise.
Or Ruth Pierce, with whom I went on a pilgrimage to Transylvania, who had the wisdom to decide, when we reached the foot of the mountain beneath Castle Déva, that she was walking up the path around the mountain. While others decided to take the funicular up the side, I joined her as did one other Manitoba Unitarian. And we made our way up, all the way around the mountain before reaching the castle where Francis Dávid was martyred in 1579. Now, I have to tell you, if I had seen the sign that said, “Vipers Beware,” on the way up and I had thought about it, I may have taken the funicular (as an evidence of my own wisdom) but instead we made the pilgrimage up the mountain. And Ruth had a colleague here in the church, Harold Robson, with whom she once formed the “Ruth Harold Committee” when there were problems in the church and wise elders were needed to address them.
Or I think of my friend Don McKinnon, whom I loved deeply – my Grade One school principal who became my best friend in midlife, and who was eminently wise about things based on his own lifetime of experience as an educator. But the wisdom I encountered was not just here in Winnipeg. Over in Thunder Bay was Beverly Lehman, who was active in the Canadian Unitarian Council and the Western Canada District. She showed me how to be loving to everyone, even when it was difficult. She had a patience and a nurturing quality that was the first among people I’ve known. Or Stan Calder, a member of the Unitarian Church of Edmonton, who promoted a consciousness of the experiences of LGBTQ+ people, and who led programming to bring the wisdom of his own experience to bear in every congregation in this region. And finally, John and Drusilla Cummins, a ministerial couple down in Minneapolis, Minnesota, who were my guides and mentors, who had lived through it all – through our theological changes and the different emphases of social justice, through all the changes in worship and music in our congregations, but who decided to stick with it because they could see the thread that led from where we were to where we might be. In the view of the Roman philosopher Seneca, the great end in life is the achievement of wisdom. As anyone who has ever been fooled, or simply foolish, knows, this is more difficult to achieve than we may imagine. Who hasn’t been impulsive, making a hasty choice prematurely – such as a marriage, or a new car, or a house, perhaps? Who hasn’t suffered at the hands of someone who was more cunning and clever in the moment? Who hasn’t embraced an idea that they later discovered to be false? Sometimes embarrassingly so. Who hasn’t overlooked shortcomings in others – or themselves? Who hasn’t allowed someone else to live inside their heads rent free, as we like to say? I’m guilty on every count – except marriage, just to be clear.
As the 19th-century Scottish physician, poet, and satirical novelist Tobias Smollett quipped, “Some folks are wise, and some are otherwise.” Truth be told, most of us are “otherwise” more often than we care to admit, but that doesn’t mean that we are incapable of cultivating wisdom over the course of our live, even if doing so is difficult and the achievement rare. When the 19th-century Unitarians emphasized the pursuit of what they called self-culture, they were really pointing towards the cultivation of personal wisdom – and they believed that it was a possibility for everyone, the desired end of the spiritual quest – not success, not salvation as their neighbours understood it, but wisdom. In this, they echoed Seneca when he declared, “They who have attained wisdom have reached, not the furthermost, but the most important goal.”
“No one is ever wise by chance,” he maintained. Wisdom is something that is nurtured, which demands effort on our part, and comes to us as the fruits of a lifetime of study, reflection, and discernment. Wisdom, if we achieve it, is a state in which we are both self-aware and aware of the world as it is – able to acknowledge our own imperfections while embracing all that we can learn from others, including those with whom we may, at first, disagree. That can be hard – moving in the direction of a position or idea we once dismissed, but have since come to recognize its merits.
The wise person takes time to reflect on their thoughts and actions without becoming obsessed with them, balances socializing with solitude, chooses both their sources of information and their friends prudently, and prepares to endure both successes and adversities with grace. In short, Seneca held that a person who is truly wise is able to live in the present, enjoying what the present moment has to offer, without fixating unnecessarily on the past or depending on an imagined future.
If Seneca was mistaken about wisdom at all, it was that he assumed that wisdom and happiness go hand in hand, that perfect wisdom and perfect happiness are identical, and that wisdom makes life easier for us. Ha! Wisdom does not promise that we will be happier than others; it does promise that we may be more fulfilled in our unhappiness. While wisdom may lead to a degree of contentment, it seems to me that it correlates with heartbreak as much as happiness, and that the path of wisdom can be arduous rather than easy. In this regard, Seneca allowed his own social status to cloud his estimate of the fruits of wisdom. I’ve known too many wise, working class souls whose lives were marked by unhappiness and hardship to believe that wisdom necessarily leads to good fortune, although it may well have mitigated their difficulties and suffering. There are wise people who dwell on the streets, living lives of quiet desperation – individuals whose wisdom helps them make it through the day, but does not necessarily give them much happiness.
Even so, while Seneca’s claim may not be strictly accurate, or universally true, I think that Krista Tippett echoes his assertion, albeit more temperately, when she says: “I’ve yet to meet a wise person who doesn’t know how to find some joy even in the midst of what is hard, and to smile and laugh easily, including at oneself.” In doing so, the wise person declines to let immediate circumstances have a total say over their mood, robbing them of whatever slender joys and delights they possess. Indeed, wisdom helps them to understand that immediate circumstances may be fleeting, and that deeper joys and deeper possibilities may yet await them.
Many speak of the wisdom of Solomon, including many people who have never read a word about him, but entertain vague Sunday school memories about him being wiser than most. He was the original philosopher king, at least the oldest found in literature, although he has rivals in China and other places. And when people mention his name, they typically mean the judgement of Solomon, which is recorded in the First Book of Kings, not the biblical Book of Wisdom associated with him.
You know the story, I’m sure. There are two mothers living in the same house, and when one of their infant sons dies, both mothers claim the remaining boy as her own, one accusing the other of having swapped the two boys. In order to resolve the dispute, King Solomon orders that the living child be divided in two, giving each mother one half. One mother accepts the decision, declaring that if she couldn’t have the boy, neither would, while the other mother protests, saying, “Give the baby to her, just don’t kill him.” At this point, Solomon declares the second woman to be the boy’s true mother, granting her custody. Similar stories appear in the folktales of many cultures, so it’s almost certain that this story is an old folktale that came to be woven into the Bible and attributed to Solomon, but this served to preserve the tale and secure the king’s reputation as an exceeding wise ruler. And that may be a reasonable assessment, but it overlooks the wisdom of the mother, who, grasping the enormity of the consequences, intervened to prevent a second tragedy. Is she not as wise as Solomon? Would the king not have appeared to be a fool – and a reckless one at that – if both women had said, “Sure. Let’s get this over with.” Obviously not.
Clearly, Solomon possessed keen psychological insight, a genuine quality of wisdom, but the success of this tactic depended upon an equally wise mother, whose wisdom was shown by her compassion, whether or not she knew the boy to be hers. As Kathleen McTigue says, “we must remember that the truest wisdom comes laced through with compassion, as we come to know how alike we are – each of us doing our best to find the path ahead and to keep walking with our fragile, broken hearts. And all of us in deep need of each other’s kindness.”
As it happens, the Bible personifies Wisdom in the form of a woman, especially in the Book of Proverbs, and both the Hebrew and Greek words for wisdom are feminine, which is reflected in the use of female pronouns – something that must drive religious fundamentalists crazy. Long before the idea of the Trinity was invented to explain away the contradictions of the Bible regarding God, Wisdom – Sophia in Greek – personified God’s presence and was clearly a vestige of earlier female deities who were believed to exist before the Hebrews adopted radical monotheism. Today, wisdom is commonly defined as “the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment,” but millennia ago, Wisdom was seen as a manifestation of the divine, and it was natural to identify Wisdom’s creative and harmonizing qualities as feminine.
It would be a mistake to confuse knowledge with wisdom; although they may be related, they are not the same. I’m sure you’ve all heard the old saw, “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.” I have witnessed many knowledgeable people – great intellectuals with brilliant minds – who have ultimately shown themselves to be fools of one kind or another. Far too many leaders in the field of information technology fall into this category, I’m afraid. Or overspecialized academics who are unable to connect their esoteric and often idiosyncratic studies with useful purposes. Of course, some theoretical physicists were able to create bombs, which was arguably a special kind of folly, so not every practical application is necessarily a wise one. It’s possible to absorb vast amounts of knowledge without having the capacity to arrange it usefully and distill it through the lens of experience. Trivial Pursuit and chess are different games. Data and discernment don’t always mix easily. A command of sports statistics is unlikely to make you better at playing baseball. If the accumulation of knowledge titillates the intellect, we don’t yet arrive at wisdom until we get past our dopamine high and turn our knowledge into insights and behaviours with practical application.
If knowledge is the rock on which we build, then experience is the organic matter that, when blended with the sand, creates the soil in which we live. We test what we know – or think we know – through lived experience, where we often learn as much from our foibles and mistakes as we do from our successes. I’ve learned a lot over the years because I have made a robust number of mistakes in life – some almost legendary, but most simply mistakes of an everyday variety. In that sense, wisdom is often a byproduct of folly. So sometimes we should be gentle with the fools we know because they may be working on their own personal wisdom project. The more mistakes we make in life, we more wisdom that may result – that is, if we’re paying attention and learning from our mistakes rather than ignoring them or covering them over. Of course, we can learn from others’ mistakes as well, which is generally more pleasant, if we’re curious and engaged with our companions – and not too given to gossip and airs of superiority. The popularity of Mr. Bean as a character is partly related to how much entertainment value we receive from others’ foibles. And when it’s harmless, that’s not a problem; but when it’s hurtful, it may be. Learning for the experiences of others works best when approached with a healthy sense of humility. “Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much,” declared the poet William Cowper; "Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.”
Without experience, it’s possible to be smart without being wise. My father, who was eminently wise, in my view (although I do sometimes wonder in my mother surpassed him), used to observe that young people were mistakenly called mature when they were simply sophisticated, a thought that was echoed by Stephen Colbert when, speaking at a commencement, he suggested that those who appear young and wise are more likely just cynical. Neither were seeking to be critical of youth, but were rather pointing to the importance of experience in the development of maturity and, ultimately, genuine wisdom. We don’t expect people to become wise simply from readings textbooks or watching the right documentaries. They need to experience something of life to be able to put that kind of learning to use.
One of the things I love about this congregation – about being a Unitarian Universalist and having engaged with dozens upon dozens of congregations across the continent and having participated in seemingly endless denominational activities – is the number of wise people I came to know. At its best, a congregation is a school for wisdom, as surely as the gardens of the philosophers were such schools. Now I can’t possibly name all of the wise people I have encountered during my lifetime as a Unitarian Universalist, but there are a few that I had in mind while preparing this sermon.
[The vignettes of the individuals named have been omitted here, but the full version of this sermon, including these vignettes. is available to members and friends of the congregation upon request.]
All of these people were wise, and they’re just the tip of the iceberg. One of the things that characterized all of them was a quality of emotional maturity.
Emotional maturity that may be the most important ingredient of all. Wisdom arguably has as much or more to do with what we call emotional intelligence than intellectual intelligence. It involves a quality of intuition and insight that escapes many people until they’ve reached the point in their lives where they begin to let go of of their personal preferences, all of their personal hubris, and learn to accept the world as it is, while nudging it lovingly, ever so gently, in the direction of what it could be.
As it turns out, true wisdom might be compared to a fine whiskey – its quality arises from distillation and blend. In the case of wisdom, it is distilled knowledge blended with life experience. Or, as Alice Bailey put it: “Knowledge differentiates whilst wisdom blends.”
Knowledge lets us know about tomatoes; wisdom reminds us how to make a good fruit salad. And so there’s a practical element: wisdom involves taking what we know, and what we have experienced, and turning it into something useful. That’s why the wise are never ideologically pure; it’s why we never agree with the wise, each and every time. They are using the best of their whole selves, grounded in emotional maturity, so that their wisdom and their insight may be valuable in the world. Just as wisdom blends together “experience, knowledge, and good judgment,” the formula also includes compassion, intuition, and emotional intelligence.
When all is said and done, I agree with Seneca that the fullest span of life is defined not by its length but by its quality. The fullest span of life is living until we possess wisdom, and then to carry on long enough that we pay back nature more than we have received as good citizens, good friends, and good stewards of the things around us. It is then – when the sum of our days is judged by its weight rather than its width – that our lives may be said to be complete.
“To finish the moment,” asserted Ralph Waldo Emerson, “to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.” of these people were wise, and they’re just the tip of the iceberg. One of the things that characterized all of them was a quality of emotional maturity.
Emotional maturity that may be the most important ingredient of all. Wisdom arguably has as much or more to do with what we call emotional intelligence than intellectual intelligence. It involves a quality of intuition and insight that escapes many people until they’ve reached the point in their lives where they begin to let go of of their personal preferences, all of their personal hubris, and learn to accept the world as it is, while nudging it lovingly, ever so gently, in the direction of what it could be.
As it turns out, true wisdom might be compared to a fine whiskey – its quality arises from distillation and blend. In the case of wisdom, it is distilled knowledge blended with life experience. Or, as Alice Bailey put it: “Knowledge differentiates whilst wisdom blends.”
Knowledge lets us know about tomatoes; wisdom reminds us how to make a good fruit salad. And so there’s a practical element: wisdom involves taking what we know, and what we have experienced, and turning it into something useful. That’s why the wise are never ideologically pure; it’s why we never agree with the wise, each and every time. They are using the best of their whole selves, grounded in emotional maturity, so that their wisdom and their insight may be valuable in the world. Just as wisdom blends together “experience, knowledge, and good judgment,” the formula also includes compassion, intuition, and emotional intelligence.
When all is said and done, I agree with Seneca that the fullest span of life is defined not by its length but by its quality. The fullest span of life is living until we possess wisdom, and then to carry on long enough that we pay back nature more than we have received as good citizens, good friends, and good stewards of the things around us. It is then – when the sum of our days is judged by its weight rather than its width – that our lives may be said to be complete.
“To finish the moment,” asserted Ralph Waldo Emerson, “to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.”
A sermon delivered at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Winnipeg.
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