What the Structure of Ancient Wisdom Teaches Us | Mary Page Wilson-Lyons

When I was a graduate student in theology, I had planned to spend my second year studying different religious traditions and, as I envisioned it, engage in inter-religious dialogue and understanding. Hugs all around. So, I spent that year helping to facilitate my university's inter-religious council, which was a group that met weekly to discuss various topics from our range of different religious perspectives, from Islam to Baha'i to Unitarian Universalism, and, well, I was really good at it. I was open and understanding, I managed conflict well, and from my own Protestant Christian perspective, I listened and I shared patiently and respectfully, until one day. Until the day that one of my Mormon colleagues began to describe in-depth parts of his beliefs in the Bible, and I lost it. Words just spilled out of me. Are you kidding me? How can you believe that? I was a total jerk. Afterwards, I was horrified at myself. I'm spilling out. This is actually a really interesting story to share in public, because I'm not that person. Or, at least, I didn't think I was. I didn't think that I was the kind of person who would pit her truth against someone else's as though only one makes sense. There were no cops. I acted like a fool in response to difference. I grabbed at a seemingly opposing ideology to simplify blame and to deflect the sometimes dangerous complexities of my own. In utter embarrassment of my folly, I turned to the ancient prescription for foolishness. Wisdom. Now, wisdom traditions can be found as far back as the earliest recorded writings. Wisdom pops up in virtually all belief systems and cultures. It's part of who we are and who we wish to be. We need wisdom because it helps us address our most complex, nebulous, and difficult questions of our everyday human experience. After my public display of foolishness, I reached for the wisdom tradition I was most familiar with, the books of Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes in the Jewish Tanakh, or the Christian Old Testament. What struck me about these writings, what still strikes me, isn't even necessarily what they say. What I actually find more meaningful is how they think, how they're structured. So let me explain what I mean. These three writings, all coming between about 1,000 and 200 BCE, all in part deal with the common question of why do we suffer? Proverbs' explanation goes a little like this. Good things happen to good people. Bad things happen to bad people. Job goes a little differently. Bad things happen to good people and we don't always get to know why. And then there's Ecclesiastes. And I like to imagine that the writer of Ecclesiastes is that guy, the creepy one, sitting at the end of the bar. No offense to that guy. But he just sits there and he takes the formulas of Proverbs and Job and he pours his glass of whiskey all over them and then sets them on fire with a candle. Because for Ecclesiastes, the very question of why we suffer is a ridiculous and vain question. Why are we even asking? And so these three writings all offer very different and even directly contradictory answers to one of humanity's deepest questions. And yet in both the Jewish and the Christian tradition, they are all structured together and called wisdom. They're all called holy. They are all as contradictory as they may be considered necessary truth in those traditions. There are even direct rhetorical contradictions in the collections themselves. So for example, in Proverbs, at one point it says, do not answer fools according to their fathers. And then the very next line says, answer fools according to their fathers. And this form isn't unique to ancient Israelite wisdom, I'm sure. The Diamond Sutra in holy Buddhist wisdom writing states this. One must become a bodhisattva. Next line, there is no such thing as a bodhisattva. So which one is it? What are we supposed to do? Well maybe wisdom is telling us that the answer is both. That the answer actually lies within the contradiction. Lately I've been thinking about how this structure of wisdom, of contradictory truths, compares to our contemporary political conversations that tend to construct rigid binaries of us and them, and of right and wrong. Conversations that even promote fear so that we praise one group and demonize another. Think about political pendants, or better yet, the Facebook community. And the media craves this rhetoric. It's fun to watch and easy to understand. We crave it. It makes us feel good about ourselves and a little icky about other people. And it gets people elected. But too often it seems that those shiny soundbites distract us from the nuance and complexity of substantive truth. So what would happen if we let the structure and rhetoric of ancient wisdom teach us how to talk and listen to each other in a radically different way now? Wisdom taught me in my foolishness to not choose between, but rather to listen into conflicting ideas. Because within them are truths. You'll be glad to know that my Mormon friend and I later that same year got to visit one of his holy sites together. He's still Mormon. I'm still not. Because the truth in the structure of wisdom isn't agreement. It's compassion and understanding of the other. You see, the structure of wisdom teaches us that we need varied and even conflicting answers to our deepest questions and problems. Because one answer can never be enough. It teaches us that the human experience is incredibly complex and thus requires conversation among many perspectives rather than my own. And finally, it teaches us that two conflicting truths can be said together in the same breath and not pivot against one another in a way where we must accept one and fear the other. Until the next time that political talk or that Facebook post or any encounter with difference tries to capture our minds into black or white categories, the structure of wisdom challenges us to restructure our thoughts and our words. To reject either or. And be compassionate with all. And that kind of conversation could change the world. Thank you.