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Wisdom as Loving Knowledge

 

            The title for this inspirational piece comes from the title of a wonderful article by Thomas Ryan I recently encountered.  Ryan is a Catholic who lives in Sydney, Australia and teaches in a university there.  I do not know him, but would welcome a trip to Australia and a chance to meet and be in conversation with him.  In the meantime, I will simply share some of the insights I gleaned from the article.

            I was attracted to the article because the focus of Ryan’s work is the amazing book by the former Secretary General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjold.  I remember reading this book a long time ago.  Revisiting it reminded me it was published after Hammarskjold’s untimely death in a plane crash in Africa in 1961.  I am tempted to pull the book off the shelf and read it again. 

            Ryan explores the spirituality of Hammarskjold and demonstrates how that spirituality informed his life and action.  One of the things Ryan does is to show how the affective and cognitive ways of apprehending God function together in the Swedish thinker and leader.  This is simply a fancy way of saying that Hammarskjold knew God through both head and heart.  Before jumping into that, however, I would like to share a quotation from a book of a friend of Hammarskjold, Gustave Aulen, who was a Swedish theologian who died in 1977. 

            Aulen picks up on one of Hammarskjold’ famous ways of talking about responding to God.  He said we offer our “Yes” to God.  We apparently see this as early as 1953.  Aulen tells us that this Yes to God that Hammarskjold offered meant “something new had come; it meant union with God, living in the hands of God, receiving rest and strength from him---and thus it also meant new integrity for the ‘I,’ (‘the wonder: that I exist.’) integrity instead of chaos, freedom instead of the bondage of self-centeredness.”  This is an amazing passage in itself. 

            Coming to know and respond to God does mean that something new has come.  It is easy to think about the Apostle Paul saying the old person dies and a new person emerges in our faith.  For Hammarskjold it involved self-surrender and service.  This is what I remember from my reading so many years ago.  He inspired because he was talking about faith in action---a life given to God and to others.  I also love the line that Ryan adds in commentary.  Ryan says that “Authentic self-realization is only found in self-transcendence, in self-surrender.”  This seems appropriately counter-cultural to so much of what we see in our celebrity-drenched world of today.  To be authentic requires going beyond ourselves, not grabbing stuff to feed our overblown ego!

            Where does wisdom come into the story?  That was the second reason I was attracted to read this article.  I have written a fair amount about the virtues, of which wisdom is one.  Ryan knows this literature about virtues.  In working with Hammarskjold he realized that wisdom comes to play a primary role, compared to the other virtues, such as trust, justice, etc.  Ryan offers some detail in showing how Hammarskjold longed for wisdom.  In my own Quaker spirituality I would talk about becoming “centered,” meeting God at the inner sanctuary of my soul.  Hammarskjold talked about “a point of rest at the centre of our being.”  This sounds very similar to me.

            There at the point of rest Hammarskjold tells us we are to wait and pay attention.  There we will come to experience God and know God.  We will know God in both the cognitive and affective sense---our head and heart.  But the primary mode is the affective---the heart.  It is from this place that we are given the gift of wisdom.  My own understanding of wisdom, I think, would be shared by Hammarskjold.  Wisdom is both experience and knowledge.  I believe for Hammarskjold it was wisdom because he was given both experience and knowledge.  It is not surprising that he had to use poetry and imagery to convey wisdom’s truth.  It is not easy to describe the indescribable!  We have to talk about God when, on one hand, we know words are inadequate.

            Ryan shares one passage from Hammarskjold that shows how he tries to articulate his own experience of “tasting” God.  Hammarskjold writes, “You take the pen---and the lines dance.  You take the flute---and the tone shimmer.  You take the brush---and the colors sing.  In this way everything becomes meaningful and beautiful in that space beyond time which you are.  How then can I keep anything back from you?”  What an exquisite way to try to utter something about the wonder of life and acknowledge the God who makes life both possible and wonderful.

            Hammarskjold was deeply aware that he was known and loved by God.  He knew this more deeply than mere head knowledge.  He knew it in his heart---in the core of his very being.  It was wisdom, an experience of being united to the Creator and Sanctifier of life itself.  It led to an amazing life given to the service of making a better world.  Like the One he followed, Hammarskjold gave his own life.  I am grateful for his witness and his challenge.

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