A Broad Wisdom Tradition
Father Richard describes the importance of Tradition, which includes a legacy of wisdom, beliefs, practices, prayers, and rituals:
I don’t believe that God expects all human beings to start from zero and to reinvent the wheel of life in our own small lifetimes. We must build on the common “communion of saints” throughout the ages. This is the inherited fruit and gift, which is sometimes called the “Wisdom Tradition.” It is not always inherited simply by belonging to one group or religion. It largely depends on how informed, mature, and experienced our particular teachers are.
Most seminaries, I’m afraid, have merely exposed ministers to their own denomination’s conclusions and don’t offer space or time for much Indigenous, interfaith, or ecumenical education, which broadens the field from “my religion, which has the whole truth,” to some sense of “universal wisdom, which my religion teaches in this way.” If it is true, then it has to be true everywhere.
There have been countless generations of sincere seekers who’ve gone through the same human journey and there is plenty of collective and common wisdom to be had. There is ongoing wisdom that keeps recurring in different world religions with different metaphors and vocabulary. The foundational wisdom is much the same, although never exactly the same. As in the Trinity, spiritual unity is diversity loved and united, never mere uniformity. [1]
Here is my succinct summary of this deep and recurring Wisdom Tradition:
- There is a Divine Reality underneath and inherent in the world of things.
- There is in the human soul a natural capacity, similarity, and longing for this Divine Reality.
- The final goal of all existence is union with Divine Reality. [2]
I trust and hope that my writing and teaching contain more than my own little bit of experience and truth, precisely because I have found some serious validation in both the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures, along with the testimonies of many other witnesses along the way.
Married to the Land
No other place I know speaks simultaneously of meadows and desert
| DAVID WHYTE. MAY 23 |
Married to the Land
It’s as if the solid green of the valley were an island held and bound by the river flow of stone and when in summer rain white limestone turns black and the central green is light-wracked round the edges, that dark reflective gleam of rock becomes an edging brilliance that centers each field to deep emerald. No other place I know speaks simultaneously of meadows and desert, absorbing dryness and winter wet, the ground porous and forgiving of all elements, white and black, wet and dry, rich and barren, like a human marriage, one hand of welcome raised, the other tightened involuntary on a concealed knife in the necessary protections of otherness. As if someone had said, you will learn in this land the same welcome and the same exile as you do in your mortal vows to another, you will promise yourself and abase yourself and find yourself again in the intimacy of opposites, you will pasture yourself in the living green and the bare rock, you will find comfort in strangeness and prayer in aloneness, you will be proud and fierce and single minded even in your unknowing and you will carry on through all the seasons of your living and dying until your aloneness becomes equal to the trials you have set yourself. Then this land will become again the land you imagined when you saw it for the first time and these vows of marriage can become again and again the place you make your residence like this same rough intimate and cradled ground between stone horizons, embracing and also, like the one to whom you made the vows, always beyond you, both utterly with you and both strangely beautiful to know by their distance. -from The Seven Streams: An Irish Cycle, originally published as The Vows at Glencolmcille in Everything is Waiting for You
