‘How does one acquire wisdom?’

This, according to our reading in Proverbs, is perhaps the wrong question to start.

Looking around, we are surrounded with the idea that wisdom, like wealth, is a matter of acquisition. Whether or not we actually believe it, we are bombarded with the message: that the one who has the most knowledge, whose head is filled with information and life with experiences, is the wisest among us. Consistent with the impulse of capital, wisdom is yet another commodity. You can sell it. You can buy it. But above all, you can have it. You can become wise by scoring up all the right points, by doing the right things, by gathering the right experiences. 

The promise implicit is that, by the end of it all, that you may be untouchable by the humdrum woes of life.

Certainly, it is not a bad thing to desire wisdom. There is something right about our longing for wisdom. As our reading from Proverbs also suggests, there is something even primordial about it. In all varied forms, from practical wisdom to spiritual wisdom, our passion for wisdom is as old as time. 

Our Proverbs counsel challenges us to reconsider whether our image of wisdom, as one of our heart’s deepest desires, is true. Consequently, it pushes us to examine whether the nature of our pursuit, our will-to-wisdom, is true. This call to reflection, I believe, is especially important now. For in times of deliberate chaos, gleeful violence, and blatant displays of the un-thinkable, what appears to be a noble longing for wisdom can rather be a mask for our need to control the world. Where the world feels unexplainable and inexplicable, sages are sought after at great lengths – and with that, so do sophists and charlatans arise, charging premiums for their promises. Vigilance is important – and we can begin our watch first of our innermost motivations.

What our reading from Proverbs reveals is that wisdom is not something. Wisdom is no thing at all. In the words of the ancient poet, Wisdom is shown to us personified – as someone. Someone present before the existence of form, before even the form of existence itself. Wisdom precedes our being and lies beyond any thinkable container. It cannot be sold, traded, or hoarded. 

Thomas Merton, Catholic mystic, came to know Wisdom in this way. In 1963 he wrote, in the form of a prayer at dawn (at the Hour of Lauds), the following (excerpted):

“There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden wholeness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura naturans. There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly, saluting me with indescribable humility. This is at once my own being, my own nature, and the Gift of my Creator’s Thought and Art within me, speaking as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister, Wisdom. I am awakened, I am born again at the voice of this my Sister, sent to me from the depths of the divine fecundity.”

Experiencing Wisdom as a sister, as a mystery, as an integral part of our own nature refutes at the outset that Wisdom can be owned. Neither can Wisdom be wooed by the hoarding of thing after thing – even experience after experience. One connects with Wisdom in honest relationship, in pure form: by regarding each other as a sacred gift, held in mysterious reciprocity.

Pursuing Wisdom is a relational play that is soured by capitalist impulse. For the sake of our sister, we have to unlearn the ways in which we think of wisdom as a commodity. We even ought to unthink wisdom as a skill, or even as a fact of character – that is, we must also unlearn the ways we commodify ourselves as a ‘product’ that can be upgraded.

At the end of this piece, I encourage you to do, well, nothing. Of the time one may spend reading 200 words, take it and simply sit. Allow silence to grow and, within that silence, be open. When you are open, Wisdom will visit, and you will know.

Take a breath in, let a breath out. Quiet your heart. 

Take a breath in, let a breath out. Settle your mind. 

Take a breath in, let a breath out. Sink into Wisdom’s embrace.