Kathleen Norris is one of our wisest contemporary authors. It has been over twenty years since I first read her “spiritual geography,” Dakota, the remarkable contemplative memoir about the power of place and paying attention. It retains its power today.

In a chapter about her spiritual journey and the faith of her ancestors, she recalls a day when she was a young adult working in New York City. Out of nowhere, a question crept into her consciousness: “What is sin?” Despite her religious heritage and background, she couldn’t imagine an understandable answer. It was only many years later, when she became involved in a Benedictine community, that she gained some clarity on the subject.

Comprehensible, sensible sin is one of the unexpected gifts I’ve found in the monastic tradition. The fourth-century monks began to answer a question for me that the human potential movement of the late twentieth century never seemed to address: if I’m O.K. and you’re O.K., and our friends (nice people and, like us, markedly middle class, if a bit bohemian) are O.K., why is the world definitely not O.K.? Blaming others would do. Only when I began to see the world’s ills mirrored in myself did I begin to find an answer; only as I began to address that uncomfortable word, sin, did I see that I was not being handed a load of needless guilt so much as a useful tool for confronting the negative side of human behavior.

The desert monks were not moralists concerned that others behave in a proper way so much as people acutely aware of their own weaknesses who tried to see their situation clearly without the distortions of pride, ambition, or anger. They saw sin (what they called bad thoughts) as any impulse that leads us away from paying full attention to who and what we are and what we’re doing; any thought or act that interferes with our ability to love God and neighbor. Many desert stories speak of judgment as the worst obstacle for a monk. “Abba Joseph said to Abba Pastor: ‘Tell me how I can become a monk.’ The elder replied: ‘If you want to have rest here in this life and also in the next, in every conflict with another say, “Who am I?” and judge no one.'”

Wisdom Week on Internet Monk
Post One: “Why?” not just “What?”

The older I get, the less I focus on what I think and I become more interested in why I think like I do.

In my opinion, this is why older people can become cynical and critical of younger generations. Many young folks are still coming to grips with the “what,” because that’s where the action is. That’s where decisions are made, alliances formed, directions taken, and, I might add, wars fought. The business of the world gets done on the basis of the “what.”

Because they have made their mistakes and achieved whatever success they enjoy, people in later years now have time to reflect, and when they do they may begin to realize that the choices they made came from someplace deeper than simply their opinions or “positions.” And therefore seniors may view much youth activity as foolish or shallow at best. It’s not just that they are critical of the their choices — they sense that they haven’t experienced enough of the world to have gained much wisdom and perspective. And so the elder may graciously watch and pray and let the younger ones make their mistakes and find their way, or he may become the curmudgeon that has little good to say about the current state of the world and the way it is being run.

I hope I will always represent the former.

But here’s my point: focusing on the “why” simply doesn’t promote productivity, and so people who are actively trying to advance agendas, whatever they may be, see little value in spending too much time and energy on such introspection and self-evaluation. Once one is “out of the game,” however, there is a tremendous opportunity to “know oneself,” to look back, to look up, and to look within. To develop wisdom.

As Richard Rohr writes in Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life:

We are a “first-half-of-life culture,” largely concerned about surviving successfully. Probably most cultures and individuals across history have been situated in the first half of their own development up to now, because it is all they had time for. We all try to do what seems like the task that life first hands us: establishing an identity, a home, relationships, friends, community, security, and building a proper platform for our only life. But it takes us much longer to discover “the task within the task,” as I like to call it: what we are really doing when we are doing what we are doing.

…It is when we begin to pay attention, and seek integrity precisely in the task within the task that we begin to move from the first to the second half of our own lives. Integrity largely has to do with purifying our intentions and a growing honesty about our actual motives. It is hard work. Most often we don’t pay attention to that inner task until we have had some kind of fall or failure in our outer tasks. This pattern is invariably true for reasons I have yet to fathom.

I have no illusions about becoming a sage. But a little bit of self-knowledge and perspective never hurts. So that’s the path I’m on these days.

In preparing to help our family commemorate my parents’ 60th wedding anniversary, I have been doing some genealogical research, picking up on work that my father began years ago. It is fascinating, and has given me a perspective about my ancestors that causes me to reflect deeply on my own journey.

Stories mean much more to me than propositions these days. “Doctrine” generally leaves me cold. Seeing God “in, with, and under” the narratives of life and people stimulates my imagination, feelings, and spirit much more. Think of the way Jesus taught, think of the way the Hebrew Bible and the Gospels are written. Remember that even the epistles are pastoral letters to real people in community with one another, and recall that the goal for apostles like Paul was to become “living epistles.”

I also find that I am searching for a different kind of depth and insight in my reading material. I want to read books that make me say, “Aha!” I want to savor fiction that makes me sigh with recognition at the beauty and brokenness of life. I want to find authors with genuine insight, who seem to have seen inside my innermost being and can describe the landscapes there.

For example, a real breakthrough came for me when I read Richard Beck’s book, Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality.

The central argument of this book is that the psychology of disgust and contamination regulates how many Christians reason with and experience notions of holiness, atonement, and sin. In a related way, the psychology of disgust and contamination also regulates social boundaries and notions of hospitality within the church.

Many puzzle pieces fell into place when I began to realize how many “theological convictions” have roots in one’s own sense of that which attracts and repels. These impulses run deeper than cognition and analysis. This book (and others) helped me see that my opinions are often more visceral than rationally-based.

In my Bible reading, I find that I gravitate toward “wisdom” portions of scripture. Pete Enns wrote last week: “I like these parts of the Bible because, the older I get the more I live where the script makes less sense. Too much of life has happened. It’s all too messy.“ As I mentioned in the comments section that day, it is becoming more and more apparent to me that the wisdom teachers of Israel had a strong hand in shaping the final text of the Hebrew Bible, leaving us with a book that not only tells a story but also calls us to reflect, lament, and trust in a God whose ways are far beyond ours and in most ways, past finding out.

This is also why I am led to think much more about creation and to appreciate the insights of the sciences these days. Freed from any political motivation to stand for a “side” in debates about faith and science, I can pursue wonder and perspective. Complexity and mystery no longer threaten me, they inspire me, they enlarge my spirit. So-called “contradictions” between the scientific and “biblical” meta-narratives do not flummox me; I am content to hold my own knowledge and understanding lightly, believing that there is always more light to come. I am no longer afraid to express views countering the loud voices who warn that one cannot be a “true Christian” (i.e. Scotsman) and embrace certain scientific findings.

This week, these are the kinds of thoughts I would like to try and express, illustrate, and discuss.

• • •

The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever else you get, get insight.

• Proverbs 4:7