• Wisdom. What images come to mind when you think of the word wisdom? An old guru with long flowing beard and loincloth sitting cross-legged on top of a mountain waiting for pilgrims to make the trek to see him? A Native woman with traditional dress and the smell of medicinal herbs wafting around as she chants the incantations that bring hope and healing. Or maybe it’s the cartoon figure of an owl from a commercial long ago, “Tell me Mr. Owl, how many licks does it take to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop?” What is your image of wisdom? And how do you get it?
• We often relate wisdom to knowledge. We look to the so-called experts to tell us what’s what. After every national event there’s a scramble to find these experts, get them on the news shows to give their expert opinions on what’s really happening in the Middle East, or in the Jon Benet Ramsey case, or with airport security. Sometimes it seems you don’t actually have to know much about the subject as long as your credentials show a person with education, a person with a lot of knowledge. But is that wisdom?

Contrast this to Robert Fulghum who boldly proclaims that everything he needs to know he learned in kindergarten. “ Wisdom,” he writes, “was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sand pile at school.

These are the things I learned, he says:

• Share everything.
• Play fair.
• Don't hit people.
• Put things back where you found them.
• Clean up your own mess.
• Don't take things that aren't yours.
• Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
• Wash your hands before you eat.
• Flush.
• Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
• Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
• Take a nap every afternoon.
• When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
• Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
• Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die. So do we.
• And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned – the biggest word of all - LOOK.

Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.

Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm. Think what a better world it would be if we all - the whole world - had cookies and milk at about 3 o'clock in the afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.

And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out in the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.” That’s what Fulghum writes. And there you have it. Wisdom.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer points out that wisdom is not in the amount of knowledge we have but how we understand the significant pieces of that knowledge. He writes, “ To understand reality is not the same as to know about outward events . It is to perceive the essential nature of things. The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential. But on the other hand, knowledge of an apparently trivial detail quite often makes it possible to see into the depth of things. And so the wise man will seek to acquire the best possible knowledge about events , but always without becoming dependent upon this knowledge. To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom.”

Or as Helen Keller is quoted in the meditation for today: “I do not want the peace that passes understanding, but the understanding that brings peace.” Wisdom.

• Solomon had it, or at least he had a chance at it. In a dream at Gibeon Solomon is asked for one wish, anything, whatever it might be. Supposedly he could’ve asked for anything: wealth, power, the Mariners to win the World Series, anything. But Solomon chose to ask for a discerning mind, or a literal translation, Solomon asked for a hearing heart. Solomon asked for a heart that could hear God’s voice and that could seek God’s wisdom and that could lead God’s people. Solomon recognized at least for a time that wisdom isn’t something we possess, but something that flows through us.
• And for about 8 chapters in the book of First Kings, Solomon ruled with such wisdom, and ruled well. Eventually though, by chapter 11, Solomon forgot. By chapter 11 Solomon seemed to have decided that if one god was good, many gods would be better, and began worshiping whatever foreign god was fashionable at the moment, or being pushed by his current favorite among his many wives. By the end of his reign, Solomon had joined the ranks of 39 of the 41 kings reported in the two books of Kings, he “had done evil in the sight of God,” and so a new king came to power.
• Solomon forgot the source of wisdom, the essential significant piece in the pile of knowledge he’d obtained, he’d stopped listening with a hearing heart, and forgotten that the key to wisdom is recognizing who is God and who is not.
• Like the woman struggling with her mother’s death, struggling to control her mother’s death, who in a dream heard God’s voice, “Your mother had a higher power, and you are not it.”
• There is a story told of Abraham Lincoln attending a prayer breakfast with a group of ministers at the beginning of the War Between the States. One of the ministers said, “Mr. President, let us pray that God is on our side in this conflict,” to which Lincoln reportedly replied, “No gentlemen, let us pray that we are on God’s side.” And there it is again, wisdom.
• In our quest for wisdom, let us seek the wisdom of Bonhoeffer that allows us to see the significant in the pile of knowledge at our disposal. Let us seek the wisdom of Fulghum in recognizing the lessons we’ve already learned. Let us seek the wisdom of Helen Keller in praying for understanding and insight that brings peace. But most especially, let us seek the wisdom of Solomon at his best; the wisdom of a hearing heart, to hear God’s voice, to experience God’s wisdom flowing through us.