January 29, 2011
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Inside out wisdom
When I was in undergraduate school learning to be a social worker, they required us to take classes on how to do research. They were not my favorite classes because they required exact answers based on data and provable formulas. I much preferred classes that allowed for answers that were less exact and more philosophical, fuzzy answers so to speak. One part of the research classes I do remember was the belief that it was important to remove researcher bias from the data collected. We learned how to do blind surveys and how to have control groups and other methods to validate that the surveyor or survey did not affect the results of the research. The effort that went into removing researcher bias was impressive. However, by the time I made it to graduate school, to learn how to be an even better social worker, the new buzz was all about how it is impossible to remove researcher bias due to the fact that the researcher views the data through their own lens of understanding. We all understand the data life gives us from our own lens of understanding.
Our perception of what is going on around us is largely based on our previous experiences, our education, and our core beliefs. Two of us can see and hear what is happening in Egypt and have very different understandings of what it means. Based on our past experience with unrest in the Middle East we may see it as a liberating force destined only to improve the world or the precursor to World War III. Based on our life situation we can hear the news of significant cuts in government spending and see it as a prudent response to deficit spending or as a threat to our employment. One of us can hear the diagnosis of cancer and respond with the assumption it will be treatable and manageable while another hears the same diagnosis as a death notice. Our wisdom is based on what we have been taught, what we have experienced, and what we have been taught to believe. Most of us have been taught good behavior will be rewarded and bad behavior will be punished. Most of us have also experienced that that good behavior not only isn’t always rewarded but is sometimes punished and bad behavior is sometimes rewarded rather than being punished and this conflict between what we have been taught and what we have experienced sends us to our belief system and asks why do bad things happen to good people?
We take our question to the courts of God to demand to know why what we experience is not the way we have been taught things should be. My belief is that God responds that what we have been taught is out or our human wisdom if how things ought to be. We trust in an external system of rewards and punishment while God works from a system of internal rewards and punishments. The reward for doing what is right is not in a life without difficulty or suffering but a life of knowing we have done what was right regardless of whether the outside world recognized our good behavior. The punishment for doing what we know is wrong is feeling a distance from our moral center and being disappointed in ourselves. Doing what is right when we don’t have to or when it would be to our benefit not to seems foolish to the world but is wisdom for those who understands what God requires of us and those who understand the contentment that comes from being in right relationship with God.
The Beatitudes found in today’s Gospel reading make no sense to us when we read them using our world wisdom lens. Being poor in spirit, mourning, meekness, hunger and thirst, and persecution are not seen by the world as blessings but God says they are. Poverty of spirit brings us to desire more spirit, mourning means we have loved and been loved, meekness means we understand our place in the universe, hunger and thirst means we know what it is like to have had access to righteousness and miss it when it is gone, and persecution means we have stood up for something important to us regardless of the cost. The blessing comes from gaining a better understanding of ourselves rather than being rewarded by the world. Mother Teresa put it this way, “People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway. The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. For, you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.”
If we are to find wisdom, if we are to find contentment, we must find it from inside. God’s wisdom is from the inside out not the outside in. We are challenged as people of faith to examine what we think to be the wise thing to do based on our experience and education using God’s wisdom that sees well beyond our limited understanding of rewards and punishments. God understands eternal consequences. God guides us toward rewards that will last us long after this mortal life has ended. God cares about rewarding, feeding, nurturing, and caring for our souls. Reaping rewards in this lifetime, seeking a life free of stress and suffering in this lifetime, working to get ahead in this lifetime at the expense of gaining rewards for eternity, learning how to trust in God for an eternity, and working toward finding our contentment in God, is a very shortsighted wisdom. I would say it is no wisdom at all. Amen.
