Where Wisdom Leads
To Your (and My, and Everyone's) Deep Center
And where does the way of wisdom lead? To the deep centre of who we are… There to discover the ground of our being, whom many would call ‘God’, and to recognize the deep centre of each other… — Margaret Silf, The Way of Wisdom
Is light a particle or a wave? Physicists may answer that question by saying “It depends on how you look at it.” We can identify light as a “thing” that exists (a particle), but it’s just as accurate to see light as a process or a dynamic flow of energy (a wave).
Wisdom is like light. There are discrete “units of knowledge” that we think of as emblematic of wisdom: “love your enemies,” “do not judge” and “forgive seventy times seven times” are examples of discrete wisdom-sayings or wisdom teachings associated with Jesus of Nazareth.
But just as light is a process as much as a field of measurable units of energy, so too wisdom seems to be a process (of insight, of understanding, of compassionate knowing) as much as it is a collection of pithy insights. Margaret Silf points out that the process of wisdom takes us on a journey: and the destination of that journey is, ultimately, our “deep centre.”
We are accustomed to thinking of spirituality in terms of the human heart. The Bible acknowledges the heart as a chalice into which the wisdom of God is poured (Proverbs 2:6, 10). So is the “deep centre” the same thing as the heart — or something even deeper, that place deep within us that Thomas Merton called le point vierge?
Whatever you may think of the deep place within where wisdom leads us, Margaret Silf reminds us (like Merton did sixty years ago) that this deep center is in everyone, and the wisdom that helps us to discover our own deep center also impels us to recognize it in each other. Why does this matter? Because it reminds us that we are one.
We meet God in that place that is deeper than our hearts, and the God we meet there also comes to us through the hearts of all people. To be wise means to learn to recognize this all-pervasive divine presence. And once we recognize it, then we calibrate our lives by it. Wisdom, then, is simply a doorway into love — and love, of course, is simply another name for God.