23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

I’m sure we’ve all seen memes of people walking down the street while texting and then bumping into a street lamp. Some people get away with minor injuries – a small bump on the head and the indignity of looking foolish to all those who observed the mishap. But there are also those who manage to seriously injure themselves by falling into rivers and walking into oncoming traffic while glued to their devices. I think that this is a good metaphor for what happens to us as people when we rely solely on our rational faculties to guide the choices and decisions we make, without having recourse to the Wisdom of God. We bumble and stumble our way through life, often doing considerable damage to ourselves.

Today’s first reading, taken from the book of Wisdom, is put in the mouth of Solomon. The reading is an extract of Solomon’s prayer to the Lord Adonai requesting the gift of wisdom. This prayer extolls the inscrutable ways of God: “Which person indeed can know the intentions of God? Who can divine the will of the Lord?” The Hebrew biblical tradition has always had a healthy respect for the mysterious transcendence of God and God’s ways. In the book of the prophet Isaiah the Lord Adonai tells us that “my ways are not your ways, my thoughts are not your thoughts.” And yet despite this healthy respect for the inscrutable ways of God, we as Christians claim to live our lives according to the will of God. If God’s will is so inscrutable, how do we go about finding it? Further on in today’s first reading we are given an answer: “As for your intention, who could have learnt it, had you not granted Wisdom and sent your holy spirit from above?” We come to know God’s intentions through the gift of Wisdom that is granted through the Holy Spirit.

What is this gift of Wisdom and how do we go about acquiring it? The first thing to note is that our reading today stakes out a clear difference between earthly intelligence and spiritual wisdom. The author notes that “it is hard enough for us to work out what is on earth, laborious to know what lies within our reach; who then can discover what is in the heavens?” The difference between intelligence and wisdom is therefore not simply one of degree, but rather one of kind. I’m sure we have all known people who we might count as being highly intelligent, but not very wise. This is not to imply, though, that wisdom is a form of common sense. Common sense dictates that we should always walk in the street with our wits about us so as to avoid crashing into lamp posts. Wisdom is far more than just common sense. Common sense would dictate that we take the shortest easiest route to walk home. Wisdom might lead us via the harder more dangerous route because this is where the promise of fullness of life from God is best fulfilled.

The author highlights the reason why our rational faculties and intuition are not sufficient to lead us to God’s intentions. This is because “a perishable body presses down the soul.” In other words, our rational mind can’t lead us to God’s will because it is too coloured by the experience of its own mortality, too enmeshed in it’s own fleshy experience. Now the author of Wisdom has often been accused of having been seduced by the Platonic dualism that was prevalent in the city of Alexandria in the 1st century BC, the approximate temporal and spatial locations of the book of Wisdom’s composition. Very crudely put, this dualism postulated a sharp divide between the physical and the spiritual realms, where the physical was evil and condemned to corruption while the spiritual represented the ultimate good that would endure. Consequently the body was considered as a prison from which the soul needed to strive to free itself. There have been times when the Christian spiritual tradition has also been seduced by this philosophy and many saints have begun their spiritual journeys with intense ascetic practices to rid themselves of all attachments to the earthly realm in order to be able to live solely for the spiritual realm. St. Ignatius could be counted among this number as well. Like St. Ignatius, most of these saints came to realize that such extreme mortification is actually counter productive in the journey towards holiness. They come instead to a healthy appreciation for the joys and pleasures of this world, an appreciation that is nevertheless tempered by the realization that such joys only find their true meaning when placed in the context of our journey into God’s eternity.

Far from pushing us towards an unhealthy dualism, our first reading today is alerting us to the fact that we can only know the true value of our earthly existence when considered in the light of our heavenly destiny. If our earthly intelligence is “weighed down by a perishing soul,” is it the grace of Wisdom that enables us to look up to the heavens and contemplate the glory God has prepared for us and then look back down to earth and see earthly things with fresh eyes of wonder. We come to an appreciation of how God might look upon our world and our lives when we put heaven and earth in their rightful places . Only the grace of Wisdom can enable us to discern how the divine intertwines with the earthly. This heavenly insight does not usually come to us in a bolt of spiritual ecstasy. Rather it comes about as a slow infusion into our beings through the Holy Spirit much as a tea bag slowly infuses hot water.

As Catholics, we believe that we receive the Holy Spirit in a special way through the sacrament of Confirmation. However, I think that most of us would be forced to concede that receiving the sacrament of Confirmation did not give us a hotline to heaven. It wasn’t as if the Holy Spirit descended on us and revealed to us in one fell swoop all God’s intentions and plans for our life. So if the gift of Wisdom does not come in one powerful shot on the day of our Confirmation, how do we receive it? I think that the gift of Wisdom which is the art of discerning the will of God is something like a muscle in our body. The more we strive to discern the will of God, the better we get at it. In discerning the will of God and attempting to arrive at a vision of reality that is an amalgam of the earthly and the heavenly, we have one great help – the Word of God, enfleshed in the person of Jesus Christ and proclaimed in Sacred Scripture. This month we celebrate the month of the Word of God. God’s Word is the light by which we learn to set the earthly and the divine in their rightful places. Wisdom is the art of understanding how to apply insights gained from Revelation in Sacred Scripture to our daily lives. Learning this art is not a random process of trial and error, but rather a Spirit-led adventure.

Questions for reflection

1. How do I let the Word of God influence my own sense of what is rational?
2. How does the transience of my earthly sojourn affect the decisions I make?
3. Who are the truly wise people I have come to admire and want to emulate? What is it about them that I find attractive?