Recovering wisdom

I’M afraid it’s increasingly looking and sounding like it’s just as a word. Wisdom is now confined and restricted to the world of vocabulary, to be used—molested and prostituted, would be the better terms—only when some formal occasion calls for it, which is obviously few and far between.

This is the tragedy of our times. Many of us don’t know anymore what it’s all about, much less, what it involves and requires. Worse, we don’t seem to mind. What’s supposed to be an object of intense desire is now practically dead and extinct in our minds and hearts.

Firstly, because we already are floating on a vast, almost shoreless ocean of data and information. We just take our pick, and we can already sound sensible enough to survive and make do with whatever situation there is.

Besides, the others don’t know any better. All play the same game. The prevailing mindset is that we just need to contend ourselves with opinions and views.

As much as possible, we should refrain from making categorical declarations of right and wrong, of good and evil. Our understanding of freedom now appears detached from its relation to truth. It has become purely subjective. This is the ethos now, what is in, what is politically correct.

What can still contribute and complicate the matter is that with all the problems and pressures we are facing these days, we seem to be forced to be simply practical in our reactions and behavior. We are always tempted to leave the high-sounding wisdom behind.

Wisdom is seen as something abstract not concrete, remote not immediate, idealistic not realistic. At best, only a few gifted and privileged individuals can worry about it. It’s not meant for all.

There can be many other factors. But what’s clear is that we should realize we need to recover this gift and virtue if we are to remain first of all human and then ultimately as children of God.

Our human condition needs wisdom. It is what connects us to the ultimate and complete truths that we can and ought to know. And not only to know, but also to love, to delight, because these truths are supposed to make us happy or to respond to the deepest yearning of our heart and soul.

For Christian believers, wisdom is understood as a “gift which perfects the virtue of charity by enabling us to discern God and divine things in their ultimate principles, and by giving us a relish for them.”

In the Book of Revelation, it is the light that abides in a person, such that “night shall be no more, and they shall not need the light of the lamp, nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God shall enlighten them.” (22,5)

Wisdom can be had by anyone, anytime, anywhere. Everything can be made use of to find, develop and exercise wisdom. The poet and the farmer, with God’s grace received with the proper dispositon, can have it. They can arrive at the same truth even if pursued through different ways.

Our predicament is that our natural tendency for truth, and everything that truth stands for—joy, peace, beauty, harmony, etc.—is almost always abducted and frustrated by an endless number of causes and factors.

We tend to get stuck at a certain point, or at a certain level. We don’t want to go on, since we tend to be held captive perhaps by comfort, laziness, ignorance, lack of faith, pride, greed, attachments to worldly things, anger and the unruly movements of our passions, etc.

In short, we use our powerful faculties not to seek and love God, who is the ultimate and constant truth for all of us, but to seek and love ourselves.

And so we fall into the predicament spelled out in the Letter of St. James: “Who is wise and instructed among you? Let him by his good behavior show his work in the meekness of wisdom.

“But if you have bitter jealousy and contentions in your hearts, do not glory and be liars against the truth. This is not the wisdom that descends from above. It is earthly, sensual, devilish. For where there is envy and contentiousness, there is instability and every wicked deed.

“But the wisdom that is from above is first of all chaste, then peaceable, moderate, docile, in harmony with good things, full of mercy and good fruits, without judging, without dissimulation.” (3,13-18)