Pursuing Holy Wisdom
By Cardinal Thomas Collins
In August we celebrated St. Anne and St. Joachim, the parents of Our Lady and the grandparents of Our Lord. On many occasions Pope Francis has called on all of us to show appreciation for grandparents, and in 2021 he established the annual World Day for Grandparents and the Elderly.
Anne and Joachim, those heavenly grandparents, call us to share in the holy wisdom that comes from many years of experience, astutely understood, within the context of humble faith. It is that humble faith which transforms the raw material of intelligence, learning, skill, and knowledge into the wisdom that is so much more profound. Again and again in the wisdom books of the Bible we learn that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom—not fear in the sense of being frightened, but rather that wonder and awe in the presence of God which strips away our illusions of self-sufficiency. What I am in the sight of God, that I am indeed, no more, no less.
Intelligence, learning, skill and knowledge are in themselves insufficient, and can easily be destructive. Mere intelligence can make possible a greater capacity for evil, unless it is tempered by a humble and contrite heart. And learning can be mere pedantry; one can have more degrees than a thermometer, and still be a fool. Skill is valuable, but it can be used as easily to do evil as to do good, while knowledge, especially in this age of information overload, can leave us overwhelmed and confused.
No, what we need now is wisdom—holy wisdom—which integrates and purifies all of these lesser human gifts and makes them fruitful. We should ask Saints Anne and Joachim, those wise heavenly grandparents, to intercede for us that God might grant us the wisdom we need to navigate safely through the stormy seas of life, homeward bound to our heavenly haven.
As we celebrate Anne and Joachim, we reflect upon the wisdom which should be the special attribute of grandparents, and of those who are old—though it is by no means automatic that wisdom comes with age. Solomon, that paragon of wisdom in the Old Testament, was wise as a teenager, asking of God only for a discerning heart, but as the years went by his heart became hardened by lust—sexual lust and the lust for power and control—and he became foolish. And in the great tragedy of Shakespeare, King Lear shows us the folly of old age, when the king is blinded by his arrogance so that he punishes those who are truly loyal to him and rewards those sycophants whose loyalty is on the lips but not in the heart. A humble and contrite heart is essential in those who seek wisdom; it is our ego that blinds us.
Wisdom comes not from years alone, but from humble reflection, in the light of faith, upon the lessons yielded by experience, either personal experience, so often painful, or the insights which we less painfully discover by prayerfully reading the sacred scriptures, by studying the lives and writings of the saints and spiritual masters, and by becoming immersed in the rich philosophical, literary, and historical heritage of humanity.
In 1921, after the horror of the great war, and amid ferocious civil strife in his own country, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats described a grim reality which should give us pause as we reflect on our own situation of violence, social injustice, increasing wars, anger, and the seemingly unstoppable advance of godless secularism and the culture of death, at a time when Christians around the world are being persecuted more than at any period in history:
"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are filled with passionate intensity."
In such times of crisis, when illusion is substituted for reality, and when its affirmation is mandated under pain of being called a bigot, and when people are divided from one another in anger and mutual incomprehension, in society and even in the Church, we have a particular need for wisdom; we need to go deep, deep, deep in our surrender to God in prayer and adoration, and in our search for holy wisdom to guide us through the storm.
Appropriately, the readings for the feast of these iconic grandparents speak to us of wisdom: of knowledge and experience and intelligence tempered by humility and illuminated by the grace of God.
The first reading is from Sirach, one of the great Wisdom books of the Bible, so venerated by the early Christians that they called it Liber Ecclesiasticus, “The Church Book,” because they used it in the spiritual formation of the Christian people. The reading is the introduction to a 7-chapter section of the book, in which the sacred author praises great people of the past, who inspire us by their words and actions, and so help us to grow in wisdom. Although we can learn from the school of hard knocks, from bitter experience of the mistakes we make, it is preferable to learn from the wisdom of those who have gone before us. Sirach tells us: “the assembly declares their wisdom, and the congregation proclaims their praise” (Sirach 44:15).
The Gospel for the feast is a very brief portion of Matthew Chapter 13, that great treasury of parables, which stimulates us to think actively with imaginative wisdom, wrestling with the imagery until we grasp the point: “Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. Truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it” (Matthew 13:16–17). We who know Jesus are offered a richer share of holy wisdom than even the great heroes of the past who are praised by Sirach, for we have heard and seen the Lord, in our own days through word and sacrament, and that vision offers us the divine perspective that wisdom requires. A fundamental attribute of authentic discipleship is the wisdom to see who Jesus is, to hear what he teaches, to take it to heart, and to live accordingly.
So how, under the patronage of the heavenly grandparents, can we acquire the wisdom we need? Here are a few suggestions:
We must see the social environment in which we live from the perspective of God; he reveals that to us through the words of holy scripture, and through the living tradition of the saints.
Obviously, we need to be aware of the particular circumstances of the society in which we offer witness to God. But holy wisdom requires that we start not with that awareness, but with the truth of the Gospel; only then can we accurately see and fruitfully serve the society into which we are sent. This is the mandate of Jesus: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:19–20).
Evangelical leadership does not mean having our ear to the ground and our finger to the wind, as Churchill once wisely observed of secular leadership. We need, first of all, to know the stars we steer by—faith and reason—and especially the wisdom offered by the Bible and the great saints of the Church. Only after that will we know how to act in our contemporary society. As the airplane safety instruction so wisely says: put the oxygen mask on first, and only then help others who are with you. So every day spend some time in prayer, at the still point in this spinning world, and every day read one chapter of the Gospel, and also some other portion of scripture. For further wisdom, read the lives of the saints, and the great spiritual writers.
If we are to be wise, it is also essential that we see what is real, and not be deceived by illusion. In the late 4th century two young monks, John Cassian and his friend Germanus, went in search of divine wisdom, seeking the way to live as faithful disciples of Jesus in a corrupt and violent world, not all that different from our own. They already had the wisdom to seek insight from the old monks living in the deserts of Egypt, and many years later, when he himself was old, John Cassian published the notes of his interviews with those wise spiritual grandparents in his great classic, The Conferences. One of the key things that they told him was the need to avoid illusion. In the lifelong journey through the desert we need to be able, as the prophet Isaiah teaches us, to draw water joyfully from the wells of salvation (see Isaiah 12:3) and not be deceived by the mirages that surround us, which offer only sand, and not the life giving cool water of the oases of word and sacrament.
For any who are still under the illusion that our secular environment is not a spiritual desert of toxic mirages and ferociously antagonistic to our faith, one look at the pageants of the Paris Olympics should bring a sharp recognition of the reality we face.
To acquire wisdom and to recognize illusion, we also need to disconnect in silence from the incessant chatter of technology. Be still, and know God; only then can we have the enduring deep wisdom that is essential to our mission as disciples of Jesus.
Fruitful apostolic action arises from adoration. As the motto of the Carthusians wisely states: the cross stands firm, while the world spins. In whatever adapted form is appropriate for our state of life, we need to disconnect from mindless, frantic connectivity, and be still. “Speak Lord, your servant is listening.” This is the path of holy wisdom, especially if, wherever we can, we spend time in silent adoration before Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament.
Illusion is the great destroyer. To see reality, and to escape the trap of illusion, that favorite trick of the Father of Lies, we need to be grounded in our Catholic intellectual and spiritual tradition, and especially in the Word of God. We need to be guided by the gift of reason—for God put our heads in so prominent place on our bodies because he wants us to use them. What is real? What is illusion? That matters. Clarity is our friend, and chaos is our enemy. Many a deadly crocodile lurks in the swamp of ambiguity, and those who are most vulnerable are its prime victims.
In the first pages of the Bible, God banishes chaos and establishes order. In the last pages of the Bible, in the Apocalypse, Saint John has a vision of “a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more” (Apocalypse 21:1), the sea that is the primeval symbol of chaos.
Saint John Henry Newman, that truly wise man, had as his epitaph the words, “Out of shadows and illusions into the truth.” That wisdom should guide us through the shifting shadows of this valley of tears through which we journey home to the heavenly city Jerusalem. The stakes are too high, for each of us personally, and for the societies in which we live, for us to allow mere subjective sentiment to determine our actions. This is especially true when we consider conscience, which is not just a matter of doing what we feel is right. We need objective stars to steer by, and they are found in the doctrines of faith and in the inspired words of scripture.
Wisdom, holy wisdom, that is what we need to guide us home by God’s grace through this valley of tears.
Saints Anne and Joachim, wise heavenly grandparents, help us to have the wisdom to see God’s will, and the courage to do it.
Cardinal Thomas Collins is the Archbishop Emeritus of Toronto. This essay was adapted from a homily preached at the Knights of Columbus Supreme Convention on August 7, 2024.