What is Wisdom
The final chapter of David Brooks' book How to Know a Person is titled "What is Wisdom?" -- an exploration much like the chapters we have been studying in Ecclesiastes. Brooks, a New York Times columnist and author of more than 20 books, writes that his understanding of what a wise person is has changed notably in recent years.
Like many of us, Brooks once envisioned a wise person as someone who "doles out life-altering advice in the manner of Yoda, Dumbledore, or Solomon." A wise person knows how to solve life's most complicated problems, deliver an engaging speech, or drop a wise, pithy comment at just the right moment, Brooks writes. Or so he once thought.
After researching How to Know a Person, among other works, Brooks realized that a wise person is not someone who simply tells us what to do or think; wise people start by witnessing our story: "They take the anecdotes, rationalizations, and episodes we tell, and see us in a noble struggle. They see the way we're navigating the dialectics of life -- intimacy versus independence, control versus uncertainty -- and understand that our current self is just where we are right now, part of a long continuum of growth."
We all know smart people, Brooks reminds us, but smart people are not always wise. The gift of a truly wise person is their receptivity -- their ability to listen and create an atmosphere of hospitality where others feel safe to be themselves, he writes.
It's not only the admirable acts of heroism or great altruism that define who we are, according to Brooks; "it's the everyday acts of encounter": "She who only looks inward will find only chaos, and she who looks outward with the eyes of critical judgment will find only flaws. But she who looks with the eyes of compassion and understanding will see complex souls, suffering and soaring, navigating life as best they can. ... She will envelop people in a loving gaze, a visual embrace that will not only help her feel what they are experiencing, but give those around her the sense that she is right there with them, that she is sharing what they are going through. And she will maintain this capacious loving attention even as the callousness of the world rises around her, following the advice in that sage W. H. Auden poem: If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me.
As we have learned in Ecclesiastes this spring and summer, wisdom is defined by our reliance on our Creator and our own self-awareness. Do you see how Solomon's definition in Ecclesiastes undergirds Brooks' realization that wisdom is about our ability to see and receive others with our full selves, listening and loving well? And do you hear Jesus' love and teachings reverberating in both definitions?