Seat of wisdom

IT’S a title applied to Mary, the mother of God because

she is the mother of Christ. She also is our mother, because Christ

himself gave her to us through St. John. “Behold your mother,” Christ

told the youthful apostle just before dying on the cross.

            Mary is the seat of wisdom simply for being the mother of

Christ himself, who is wisdom himself, who has all the truth in its

immediate and ultimate dimensions. Christ is the very personification

of all the truth and love that there is in the whole world.

            And Mary was not the mother of Christ in name alone. She

did not only conceive him in her womb, and give birth to him. She took

care of him, and knowing who he really was, continued to identify

herself with him. Her ‘fiat,’ her willingness to obey God’s will, was

a continuing affair all the way to the cross and all throughout her

lifetime.

We cannot overemphasize the strategic role of Mary in our search for

truth and ultimately for wisdom which is “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, wisdom 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 disposition, 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)

Mary, by always pondering the things she observed in Christ and

completely identifying herself with her son, earned that title of Seat

of Wisdom.