Of wisdom and misery
One of my pastors preached a series on the book of Ecclesiastes this summer. His comments on wisdom (and those of Qoheleth, the teacher/writer of Ecclesiastes) caught my attention. Qoheleth writes:
I devoted myself to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under heaven… but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind. For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief. (Ecc. 1:13,17b, 18)
And my pastor said this:
Wisdom made Qoheleth miserable. Why? Because it revealed that so much in life was beyond human repair. Wisdom became for Qoheleth a kind of x-ray machine. It showed the break in the arm but it offered no way to heal it.
I’m really curious to hear what others think about these descriptions of the search for wisdom. When I land in place where wisdom is – in a conversation with someone, on this blog (!), while reading a book, in a time of prayer – I experience the opposite of misery. I experience a lightness, a hope, a deeper understanding of the world and God’s work in it.
I’m guessing that the kind of wisdom that Qoheleth found was a different kind of wisdom than we are together looking for.
Talk to me. Help me to contextualize and exegete the Teacher. Search for wisdom…
This is such a wide river that you are wading into. It depends upon how you are defining wisdom. There is the joy of a gift of “knowing,” which I think comes from God; perhaps that is what you are describing, which makes you happy. There is the wisdom of experience, of living and observing. There is the wisdom of the ancients, passed down through story, poetry, etc. There is Wisdom as a being (typified as female), in Scripture. Then there is the wisdom of life, things that we may not have wanted to know, but we have had to learn…such as what we learn on a journey with a loved one who has cancer. In my case, my daughter recently passed away after 10 months with cancer. I did not want to learn what I am learning…but I am trying to accept what I must, so that I can integrate even this horrendous event into my life, and allow God to work in me. There is some kind of wisdom waiting to be given & received, I hope.
For further thoughts, you might investigate “Original Blessing” by Matthew Fox. He has a chapter on “Letting Pain be Pain,” which develops the idea of what pain can teach us.
Perhaps a trip to the Greek and Hebrew dictionaries might be a starting point, or your concordances, if you want to go into it with your head…otherwise, I would ask the kindest, most patient people you know…usually, they have suffered, and they have simple, earthy, wisdom. I think it often looks like LOVE.
Wisdom is neither joy nor sorrow but both depending upon our search. What good comes from seeking wisdom and enlightenment when it is only the wisdom of hope you seek?
Study the world around you, and the place we live in; study nature and people. Look at behavior and actions. In all things there is a give and take, the yin and yang.
I think the wisdom we attempt to search for is that which can uplift us because it’s safer and easier. When you start to explore the dark underbelly of things it becomes harder to see the beauty of life. Yet at the same time the light shines so much brighter.
Wisdom is more than just seeing a goodness and growing it within us; wisdom is also looking at all the flaws of this world. All the traps and trapped. All the broken souls. Wisdom is seeing the world around us for what is it and not what we would like it to be.
More and more as of late when searching for wisdom I have found heartache and sorrow. I thank God for this as well.
You know, I too am guessing it’s a different kind of wisdom. It seems to me that contextualizing Qoheleth is key, especially here. Consider this quote:
“The apartment was dark. A man hovered over a woman. She screamed, and blood flowed…”
What going on there? It could be a scene of death, as described in a novel of a crime/mystery genre. Or, it could be a scene of new life, as described in a different genre of writing…let’s say, a newspaper account of a woman giving birth at night during a power failure.
So, in a similar way, it seems to me that–based on the context of looking at life under heaven/under the sun/without God–Qoheleth’s wisdom is quite likely a source of sorrow. From a human point of view so much seems random, meaningless. Many things in life are broken, and “under heaven/under the sun/without-God-wisdom” usually offers few ways to bring healing. And, humans feel helpless and hopeless as a result.
That’s why I’m glad that “after all has been heard…the conclusion of the matter” is that God is completely in tune with what goes on in his creation, and also responds accordingly (Ecclesiastes 12:13-14). To me, it seems that life lived in pursuit of God and his wisdom is neither pessimistic nor idealistic but realistic…understanding that life still brings intense storms, and that the proper foundation will stay solid and reliable (Matthew 7:24-27).
That’s why I am encouraged by “the faith and love that spring from the hope” in the gospel. Why? Because Godly wisdom is worth searching for–it’s “the knowledge of God’s will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding…” bringing growth, knowledge, strength, power, endurance, patience and other blessings (Colossians 1:5, 10-12) for a life of ministry in a stormy, broken world.
Doug,
Thank you. There are times when I feel wholly inadequate and feel as though I cannot change things. I forget it’s not my place to right all the wrongs but it is my place to try to affect those with whom I come into contact with in a positive way.
I think Karen has an important point: this IS a very wide river you are wading into. There are so many definitions and sources of wisdom that any response at all could only begin to comprehend a small piece of the whole.
It feels to me that Qoheleth’s search for wisdom comes out of his desire to be like God; a desire that has gotten us into trouble right from the beginning of human time. In fact I think any time we seek “the knowledge of God’s will” we are pretty much going to get into trouble. Because however close we may feel to God at times, however much we may be aware of that spark of God that lies within us, the paradox that lies in the wisdom phrase “there is nothing that is not God” is really that we are not God.
To me, wisdom — the human variety, that is — may be more about the humility of that paradox. If I think of the wise people I know, I see that they understand that none of us is protected from or immune to that break in the arm, the car accident, the cancer, the suicide of a child. Dreadful things happen to good people as well as bad, so how do we deal with that?
If wisdom comes from such trauma, perhaps it is a wisdom that says more about compassion and humility than about knowledge. What we learn at such times is that everything we thought we knew may have been wrong; everything we thought was safe was not. In wisdom we watch with tenderness our own desperate efforts to protect our hearts; we watch with compassion as others struggle with great pain; we see at last that we are not alone, that this undercurrent of fear and pain is, in fact, universal.
And then I think of the Buddhist practice of Tonglen, about which I began reading just last night: When we breathe in, we breathe in the sorrows and the pain and the suffering, and feel them, not just our own, but sensing how our own are replicated in so many other lives. Taking that, we drop into the clear well of being that connection to humanity and God can bring, and then we breathe out compassion and tenderness for all whose lives are linked with ours.
This has been rich… Thank you Karen and Doug, Scott and Diane for your experiences and suggestions. It *is* a wide river, isn’t it? And context makes all the difference. There’s Godless wisdom and God-full wisdom - wisdom that looks like love (Karen) and wisdom that looks like humility (Diane)- wisdom that is sorrow and joy or neither sorrow nor joy - wisdom that surfaces within and after trauma…
I feel like I threw the word wisdom like a stone into the flat surface of a lake and now I’m watching the ripples.
I remember my Psalms and Wisdom Literature professor, John Stek, talking about wisdom (*hoch-ma*) as a description of the grain of reality. A wise person says, “This is the way things tend to work, as far as I can see.” Neither pessimistic nor idealistic, but - as Doug says - realistic. And as Scott says, “Wisdom is seeing the world around us for what it is…”
But for me, the kind of wisdom that brings light to the darkest places - the wisdom that is just around the corner from Qoheleth, is the *real* with a twist of the *ideal*. I don’t mean this in a sugar-coated way… I mean… the grain of this earth with a twist of the grain of the next. It’s Friday, but Sunday’s a-comin’…
When I was 23, my first husband was killed in a car accident. I held on - for dear life - to something one of my professors said. “No matter how much good will come of Layton’s death, nothing will ever make up for the value of his life. The goodness of Layton’s life ending too soon in death cannot be outweighed by the good that God will bring from his death” (paraphrase of John Cooper). I think I held on to this so tightly because it affirmed the value of Layton’s life. That was wisdom. It was the wisdom I needed in that moment.
And then there is the wisdom of death being swallowed up in victory… another kind of wisdom - the one with the twist. I digress.
Thanks for contextualizing - for sharing your hearts.