Wisdom: Discerning the Path to Virtue 

Rev. Bruce R. Russell-Jayne

My column in the Harbinger this week posed the question, “Where Will the Deer Sleep?”  In it I talked about how we now live in the company of wild deer in our suburban and even urban communities, and the question of how best to care for them.  They are beautiful to see, and they help us feel closer to a state of nature.  Therein lies a conundrum.  Should we set aside habitat for them, ensuring safe places to rest and sleep?  It would seem the humane thing to do.  But, if we protect them, they’ll just become more of a nuisance, eating our gardens and causing more car accidents.  Should we shoot them to thin them out of congested areas?  If you don’t like this idea, are you sentencing them to be hit by cars?  The treatment of wild deer in our midst presents us an ethical dilemma.  What ought we do?  Where can we turn for guidance on this question?  What can we use for the basis of an ethical solution?

When it comes to complicated problems like this, many people would look to God to tell us what to do.  Doing that in this case might leave us hanging because the scriptures don’t specifically address the urban deer issue.  If we understand the words of God to be human interpretations of the divine, we see why people often disagree on those interpretations, and it still  falls back on living, breathing people, to resolve their differences.  Another type of ethics looks at the outcome of our actions.  These philosophical systems direct us to act toward others in ways we would like to be treated, the Golden Rule, or asks us to determine the greatest good for the greatest number of people.  “These systems run into problems, too.  Some actions are good and necessary even if they can’t be universally practiced.  Sometimes the needs of the few must take precedence over the many.”

Unitarian Universalism suggests a third way.  We look inward, at our own experience and insights, and at others around us to find guidance on what an ethical person would do.  UUs live not by doctrines or a creed; but seek to build a virtuous character.  In 1803 Reverend Hosea Ballou and the Universalists coined the phrase “salvation by character.”  In 1838, Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing, in his lecture Self-Culture, said, “Grandeur of character lies wholly in the force of soul, that is, in the force of thought, moral principle, and love...Self culture [is] the care every[one] owes [themselves] to the unfolding and perfecting of [their] nature...Unless we engage in the work of self improvement, unless we purpose strenuously to form and elevate our own minds, unless what we hear is made a part of ourselves by conscientious reflection, very little permanent good is received...To improve a [person] is to liberalize, enlarge him in thought, feeling, and purpose…”   In other words, they broke from the idea of salvation by faith and established a different approach to a more perfect life, one of working on and living through our good character.

This is the second in a series of sermons on Ethics based on the 2010 UUA General Assembly lectures “The Necessity of Virtue” by the Rev. Dr. Galen Guengerich.  I gave the first, called Ethics: Fulfillment Through Character, in September if you care to check it out on our website.  In that sermon I talked about how we depend on our rational minds to discern how to be virtuous, and in so doing we can fulfill our highest human potential.  This is just a modern way of saying what Ballou and Channing were saying about perfecting our character.  It behooves us to study and discuss ethical problems, to reflect on our sense of right and wrong, and to strive for better ways of living.
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Guengerich names 7 virtues for UUs to explore and strive for: Wisdom, Courage, Compassion, Justice, Temperance, Transcendence, and Hope.  Today, we will look at wisdom, the first and most fundamental of the virtues.  A simple definition of wisdom is “the best use of knowledge.”  But becoming wise is not a simple project.  Applying knowledge with wisdom requires sifting knowledge rationally and with intuition.  Knowledge is composed of information as information is composed of data, facts and ideas.  Accumulating ideas, information and knowledge requires an inquiring mind.  So we become wise by following our natural curiosity in seeking new experiences and ideas, and we use our powers of discernment to process these into the higher levels of information, knowledge and wisdom.
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Curiosity, the desire to know something, can bring us new and interesting experiences, and it can get us into trouble.  You’re probably familiar with the antics of Curious George, the adventurous protagonist of a series of books that have been around since the 1940s.  He just can’t help himself from playing with things he doesn’t understand and continuously gets into trouble.  He proceeds from one calamity to another until he is finally rescued.  The books are fascinating to children who identify with George’s need to explore.  Like many children’s books, Curious George stories are cautionary tales.  While it is crucial to keep children safe, it is also important to allow them to use their curiosity to learn about their world.  Curiosity is a life skill needed to combat a real danger - which is ignorance.

In his book entitled Curious Todd Kashdan says:
“By being curious, we explore.  By exploring, we discover.  When this is satisfying, we are more likely to repeat it.  By repeating it, we develop competence and mastery.  By developing competence and mastery, our knowledge and skills grow.  As our knowledge and skills grow, we stretch and expand who we are and what our life is about.”

Guengerich says, “Curiosity expands the domain of our lives, the range of knowledge and the depth of our experience.”  Curiosity is the motivating force of scientific discovery and all forms of human study.    Through curiosity we acquire the skills of paying close attention and accurate observation needed to turn our inquisitiveness into creativity and thereby contribute to our culture.

From where in the human spirit does curiosity arise?  We are all naturally curious - though we each exhibit it in different ways.  Early in my life I simply had to know how things worked and so became an engineer.  Later in life I became more fascinated with human nature, and I became a Minister.  We pay attention to what we care about.  Curiosity originally meant, “the application of care or attention.”  So, curiosity emerges from caring enough about something or someone to pay attention.  Curiosity is the key element of the Buddhist spiritual practice of mindfulness - which advises us to pay attention to reality so we will know how to respond in each moment.  When we pay attention to someone, we may notice their pained expression and realize we don’t know the cause.  If we care about them, we will ask about their trouble.  In this way, curiosity invites us to go deeper into relationship, to be intimately involved with another person. 

Here is where curiosity earns the designation of a spiritual discipline.  Curiosity drives us to learn the truth about things and the way they work, and about people and what is deep inside them, in their souls.  In intimate relationships we can gain important knowledge from others that might help us, and we can learn things about ourselves that we can’t see without another’s help.  Again I quote Channing from Self Culture, “The great use of intercourse with other minds is to stir up our own, to whet our appetite for truth, to carry our thoughts beyond their old tracks.”  My experiences of sharing deeply with others have often been amazing, one from which I learned awesome things that have been critical to my surviving and thriving in the world.

Curiosity helps us to learn, but it also helps us know how to serve others.  When we listen well and begin to see into the center of another, we may see what is sweet and wonderful about them and we can sense their joys and  and their sorrows and walk along side them.  When people feel safe to tell us stories of their past we can provide comfort, and when they risk sharing uncertainties about their future, we can help then find hope.  Bearing witness to the past and acknowledging possibilities for the future, we bless each other.  Supporting one another at this level helps us feel a vital connection to the interdependent web of all existence and brings us peace.
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So far we have looked at curiosity which leads to the acquisition of knowledge, and now we’ll look at the other half of Wisdom, which is discernment, the discriminating use of knowledge.  We often think of wisdom as the quality of having good judgement and that it comes after years of experience.  A pediatrician in her 20th year of practice upon entering an examining room can almost immediately sense whether the child she observes is suffering from something serious or not - even before she asks questions.  After treating thousands of patients, she has developed a keen diagnostic intuition.  We all use intuition to figure things out, and we don’t really understand how we do it.  Our minds sift and sort inputs, make connections, and come quickly to conclusions.  The ability to react intuitively has great survival value for us, and the longer we live, the sharper our intuitive sense gets.  What we learn from our experiences and those of others increases the information our intuition can work with.  These learnings are often distilled into rules of thumb, wisdom tales, and even scripture. 

But, intuition and wise sayings can be wrong.  My parents taught me that the best investment was your house.  I believed that and acted on it for most of my life, but now after seeing house prices fluctuate the last three years my financial planning has to go beyond that old rule of thumb.  True wisdom goes further than repeating 2nd hand knowledge.  In fact, wisdom doesn’t even require long experience or deep study.  The part of wisdom we call discernment or judgement is a capability of our minds we all have if we will use it.  Discernment uses our thinking and reasoning abilities, it requires us to pay attention, and it needs us to keep our wits about us when extraneous information is confusing, to not miss the forest for the trees.

In the business world, we may be able to create a spreadsheet with all the appropriate numbers to build a case for a decision, but in human relationships it’s more complicated.  To be wise in relationships we need to pay attention to what’s happening in our own minds, including our emotions, and we need to learn what’s important to others - their longings, fears, loyalties and commitments.  To learn what we need to know about others, we have to listen to them.  Our impressions of others typically includes assumptions that others might be operating out of a world view similar to our own, but that’s not always true even with other people who attend Northern Hills.  Even if they agree with you on social issues or theology, they may have different reasons for doing so.  We must recognize that people are different from us and ask them what are their concerns and their hopes.  I always ask visitors what they want from us and how we can help.  By asking these kinds of questions, we can make wise decisions, and we will be ministering to their true needs.

Lao Dzuh said, “Knowing others is intelligence; knowing ourselves is true wisdom.”  I encourage each of us to take time in personal reflection to ask ourselves some of the same questions that help us get to know others better.  Going deep inside, paying attention to what we see there can help us understand what informs our intuitive decisions.  We can change our thinking if we decide we need to.  Just don’t get into shaming yourself.  In addition, we can learn about ourselves from others.  I encourage us to talk with those who are not like us, those who hold opinions on the other end of the continuum from our own.  We all tend to have a bias for our own side - a tendency to selectively use evidence so we can keep thinking the way we already do.  This is not the path to wisdom.  For example, if you are a hunter, you may think the solution to the urban deer problem is to allow more hunting of deer.  If you are not a hunter, you may think we should give deer more protection.  Building relationships with those who think differently helps us to know our biases and watch out for our blindsides.

Wisdom is not the sole province of the courtroom judge, the professor or the guru on the mountain.  We can all practice the art of wisdom.  We can come to know ourselves better and we can ask others to tell us about themselves and create intimate, fulfilling relationships.  We can follow our curiosity, give caring attention to the important things happening around us, and apply our experience and make discriminating decisions.  And over time, we may accumulate broad knowledge and develop the deep insight, but we should never stop being curious.

I leave you with thepoem Imagine from my new Mary Oliver book: