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.
1.
“You cannot follow both Christ and the cruelty of kings. A leader who mocks the weak, exalts himself, and preys on the innocent is not sent by God. He is sent to test you. And many are failing.”
– Pope Leo XIV, Head of the Catholic Church
When I have taught the Scriptures, I enjoy telling people they are timely as well as timeless.
They were written for a particular people, in a particular place, dealing with a particular problem.
Yet, they can be applied to anyone, no matter where they are, dealing with very different situations.
The Scriptures have much to say about leadership today.
Whether people want to admit it or not, the Bible is inherently political. If the Second Greatest Commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself, we must pay attention to public policies and politicians. Out of sincere love of neighbor and a call to help them to carry their burdens, a faithful follower of Christ must push back against abuse of power and any attempt from the Top of a society to take advantage of or dehumanize those at the Bottom of a society.
2.
“There was not a single question or doubt I raised for which our good Lord did not have a reassuring response. “I have the power to make all things well,” he said, “I know how to make all things well, and I wish to make all things well.” Then he said, “I shall make all things well. You will see for yourself: every kind of thing shall be well.”
– Julian of Norwich, English Anchoress
Surprisingly, I have been reading Julian of Norwich’s writings. I have read them three or four times before, but this time, they are gripping me and holding my attention in a new way.
It is fascinating that she writes about Christ as our “liberator,” God “one-ing” us to Himself, the need to know ourselves to know God, sin as “nothing,” and the insistence that through God “all things will be well.”
The quote above stood out to me, and it demanded that I reread it aloud.
It is beautiful because it says God has the power, the knowledge, and the wish to make all things well, and we will see it someday for ourselves.
Now that is a bold hope.
Despite all the pain, devastation, fractured relationships, natural disasters, wars, and conflicts, somehow, God will make all things well.
3.
“We can be sure that whoever sneers at [Beauty], as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past, whether he admits it or not, can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”
– Hans Urs von Balthasar, Swiss Theologian
Hans von Balthasar was an important theologian of the 20th century. His magnum opus, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, was based on the idea that theology is often built upon logic but can also be built upon beauty. Drawing from the Greek philosophers and their trifecta of “goodness, beauty, and truth,” he sought to frame the Christian faith in a new fashion.
I stumbled upon von Balthasar’s work after reading Bonaventure of Bagnoregio. Through The Soul’s Journey into God, I learned how Bonaventure saw Christ as an archetypal beauty, through whom all other things derive their own beauty.
Perhaps it is the fact that a large part of my interior life leans toward being an Enneagram 4, but I find a strange poetic comfort in the idea that our beliefs about God can be based on beauty as much as logic.
4.
“Poetry is an invitation to be completely present to the world.”
My goodness, I feel that we all would benefit from getting out of our heads a bit more often and being more present to the world.
This probably means that all of us would benefit from experiencing more poetry.
5.
“Who, looking at the universe, would be so feeble-minded as not to believe that God is all in all; that He clothes himself with the universe, and at the same time contains it and dwells in it? What exists depends on Him who exists, and nothing can exist except in the bosom of Him who is.”
– Gregory of Nyssa, 4th Century Theologian
One thing that I enjoy about the early Patristics of Church History is how they emphasize the mutual indwelling of God in all things and all things in God. It is as if God is pregnant with the universe, and the universe is pregnant with God.
Instead, most people have a more Platonic understanding of reality today. If they are not strict materialists, most people believe we are here on earth and God is up, off, and far away in some other realm that is more perfect than this one. As I said, this is more of a Platonic way of looking at reality than a Christian one.
The end of the New Testament finishes with a New Heaven and a New Earth that are merged together in a New Jerusalem, a Garden-City.
That is more an eschatology of integration rather than separation.
I am convinced that the realization that God is not far off but is intimately a part of everything we experience with our five senses would completely transform our ethics, mode of being in the world, appreciation for the environment, and love of each other.
