Charleston: Wisdom

Charleston: Wisdom

“I think spiritual wisdom is not the measure of how much we know, but how much we have learned. Knowledge can become static, a museum of dogmas, a warehouse of opinions. We discover wisdom over and over again when what we think we know meets what we have never encountered before.”    Steven Charleston Daily Facebook Page

There is a chasm between intellect and wisdom. My husband, Robert, a prolific reader of history, shared with me a story by the journalist, David Halberstam. Halberstam, the author of the 1972 book, The Best and the Brightest, about the origins of the Vietnam War, detailed in his book Lyndon’s Johnson first visits to JFK’s cabinet meetings with among others, the brilliant McNamara and Kennedy’s advisor, Ted Sorensen. Others assembled were also the brightest minds in the country. Johnson went back to his old friend, Sam Rayburn, the longest running Speaker of the House in our country, just overcome with a feeling of awe and perhaps inadequacy. Rayburn reminded Johnson that there is a difference between wisdom and knowledge or intellect.  Rayburn is quoted as saying, “They may be just as intelligent as you say. But I’d feel a helluva lot better if just one of them had ever run for sheriff.”

Knowledge or intellect is learning, investigating, researching, and studying facts and data. Wisdom is knowledge with experience, discerning which facts are true, how the knowledge can best be applied to your life.

Knowledge is knowing where babies come from. Wisdom is knowing how to care for them. Knowledge is doing the distance between here and New York City. Wisdom is knowing what to pack for the trip.

We belong to the information age.  There is no lack of information and data. All of us on this spiritual journey are gathering information about a multitude of spiritual tools, spiritual knowledge, to use to guide and help ourselves and others.

Wisdom will be digesting what we learn, taking it inside, and seeing what is truly the right meal for us as well as for those who come for spiritual direction at different times in our lives and theirs. A major tool in discerning wisdom is listening with the heart to the spiritual friends who visit with us and listening actively to hear how our experience and the present world and nature around us intersects with our lives and theirs.

Joanna  joannaseibert.com

Taylor, Burton, Wilderness

Taylor, Burton: Wilderness

Guest writer: Larry Burton

"Popular religion focuses so hard on spiritual success that most of us do not know the first thing about the spiritual fruits of failure. When we fall ill, lose our jobs, wreck our marriages, or alienate our children, most of us are left alone to pick up the pieces. Even those of us who are ministered to by brave friends can find it hard to shake the shame of getting lost in our lives. And yet if someone asked us to pinpoint the times in our lives that changed us for the better, a lot of those times would be wilderness times."
~Barbara Brown Taylor,  An Altar in the World

After all these years, one would think that my skin would have gotten thicker.  Lord knows I’ve been enough battles.  But the sad fact is that I am just as prone to having my feelings hurt, to feeling ashamed, and to wanting to hide as anyone else.  Often I was not actually responsible for what happened, but there were (and are) times when I contributed or even caused my own suffering.  Given that people in my profession (priest and professor) are supposed to be models of spiritual maturity and self-control, you can imagine what a failure I have often felt myself to be.  And it is just here, amid not-quite-despair, that I have found the fertile soil of spiritual growth.

Of course, this is not something that has happened all by itself.  I most definitely have not pulled myself up by my spiritual bootstraps.  It is all about grace.  I am convinced that healing is always about relationship, and the love and acceptance of my family and closest friends has enlarged my vision and opened my heart.  The patience of my spiritual director is unwavering. 

Barbara Brown Taylor, the wise teacher, preacher, and writer, says, “Even those of us who are ministered to by brave friends can find it hard to shake the shame of getting lost in our lives.”  And yet it is exactly that ministering that offers light, that lifts the weight, that offers hope.

Spiritual growth is not something that happens in a vacuum.  We can’t somehow make it on our own. 

I am the designated leader of a group of spiritual friends who meet once a week.  I say “designated” because we are all equal.  I call us together and offer a blessing at the end.  Other than that, we are all on a spiritual journey which we share with these whom we trust.  Recently, I shared that I was working on the difference between vulnerability and powerlessness.  I am coming to understand that when I feel powerless—like so many folks who have experienced major losses or betrayals—I become angry and resentful.  I know some people who blame God in times like these and who drop out of the faith journey altogether.  The revelation—and it can only be called that—is that when I choose to live consciously vulnerable, vulnerable because my trust in in God revealed in Jesus Christ, then that sense of powerlessness seems to evaporate, and the anger is gone.  In sharing this with our group, trusted companions, something shifted, and it was like walking out of the wilderness and into a new openness.

We all have wilderness times.  Perhaps it is through conscious vulnerability among trusted companions, that those times become not just bearable, but holy growth.

Larry Burton

Joanna  joannaseibert.com

Owensby: Changing our perspective

Owensby: Changing our perspective

“A gestalt shift is a visual switch of perspective. While looking at an unchanging image we see first one thing and then another. For instance, in the picture below you can see a duck. Or a rabbit..” Jake Owensby, Looking for God in Messy Places, https://jakeowensby.com, March 3, 2018.

In his weekly blog, Looking for God in Messy Places,  the fourth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Western Louisiana, talks about how we make on interpretation of what we are seeing before we see it. He challenges us to look at some things we think are familiar in another way. His story is about how through Jesus he changed his ideas about God.

Gestalt shifts involve changing our mind about something.

I see Gestalt shifts in spiritual direction as well. Spiritual direction is about caring for the soul. Spiritual friends help  us put on a new pair of glasses so we can see  God at work in their lives at times when we did not perceive God before. Spiritual friends  ask questions like, “how is your heart” instead of “how are you doing.”  Spiritual friends follow a rule of life where we “bend the knee of the heart”1 and “listen with the ear of the heart.” 2 Spiritual friends help us find our own sacred space inside of each of us as well as finding  sacred spaces outside of us in the world. We begin to see what  Barbara Brown Taylor describes in her book,  An Altar in the World.

The Gestalt shift of spiritual friends is that we look beyond the surface and see the Christ in each other, especially in the person we previously were having difficulty with. We begin to see them in a new light, often very wounded just like the rest of us.

1 Prayer of Manasseh, Book of Common Prayer p. 91.

2 Prologue to Rule of Benedict.

Joanna joannaseibert.com