She is The Way ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester Unitarian Universalist Church
March 27, 2022
“She shines without dimming… She rushes to reveal Herself to those who yearn for Her.” (Wisdom of Solomon 6:12-14)
Who is ‘she’? We know this presence by many names. She is probably best known by her Greek name, Sophia, or Wisdom. In the Hebrew Bible she is known as Chokhma, Wisdom. She is the feminine aspect of the Divine, and throughout the ages she has had many names, Inanna in Sumerian lore, the Virgin Mary in Christianity, the Mother, the Master Builder.
“Sophia!” wrote Hildegard of Bingen. “Sophia! You of the whirling wings, circling encompassing energy of God:
You quicken the world in your clasp, one wing soars in heaven, one wing sweeps the earth, and the third flies all around us. Praise to Sophia! Let all the earth praise her!” (in Women in Praise of the Sacred, Jane Hirshfield, ed., p. 67.)
Sophia, the Wisdom of God. Here from before the beginning of time, at the ‘beginning of the beginning,’ the first of God’s creation. Sophia, or Wisdom, was beside God, not just the first of God’s creations, but the means through which all the rest of the creation emerged. She orders all things, illuminates all things, and acts in harmony with all of creation. She is both a mystery, and knowable to anyone who seeks her.
This is Wisdom – available to anyone, offering herself to anyone who wishes.
This is a different view of Wisdom than how we normally define it. We so often think of wisdom as attainable through knowledge, through learning and study, or through simply living our lives and learning all the lessons that life conspires to teach us, day by day. The School of Hard Knocks, we might call it. Hard-won wisdom.
Of course, all of that experience is certainly valuable, and many of us desire it. I remember a number of years ago telling a mentor that I aspired to wisdom. We were grieving together, facing the death of a mutual friend, and she commented that I was growing wise. “I’ve always wanted to be wise,” I said, “but not at this price.”
The wisdom personified by this feminine manifestation of the Divine, Sophia, or Chokhma, is something different. It’s not ‘becoming wise’ through life’s lessons, although we do well to heed those. But this wisdom we are hearing so much about today has existed since before the creation. And we don’t learn it so much as we learn how to connect with it, to open to it, and to orient ourselves toward it. In a way it’s similar to our discussion of faith last week, with the sense that faith emerges from our perspective, our orientation.
Rabbi Rami Shapiro offers his own interpretation. He shares that there are two perspectives we can choose to orient ourselves to: the narrow mind, or place of fear, and the spacious mind, the place of love. We see evidence of both types of mind throughout the Bible, and of course, everywhere we look throughout our lives. We see the narrow mind in the Book of Genesis, for example, when God rejects the first humans for touching the Tree of Life. It’s present in all the rules and the commandments – the ‘thou shalt nots’ – all the threats of eternal punishment for wrong actions. But the spacious mind is present throughout the Bible as well, especially in what are known as the Wisdom books – Proverbs, especially, Ecclesiastes, Job, and the Wisdom of Solomon and the Wisdom of ben Sirach. There are we likely to find an expansive view of life, not one governed by fear, but one that flows from love of life. And in the Hebrew Bible, and in ancient religions, this expansiveness, this Wisdom, or spacious mind, is personified as feminine.
(This and other references are drawn from The Divine Feminine in Biblical Wisdom Literature, by Rami Shapiro, Skylight Illuminations, 2005.)
It was ironic this week, as I was preparing to preach on this topic, that we all had an opportunity to watch the two perspectives of narrow mind and spacious mind playing out on television. Of course, I am talking about the Senate hearing to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court. There you saw the wisdom presence: calm, and ordered, and confident. And there was the narrow mind hard at work: those who allowed their fear of change, their fear of losing power, their fear of the Other, to so undermine their perspective that they were unable to hide their rage.
We see the two perspectives playing out daily as we watch footage of the war in Ukraine: the willingness to destroy in order to gain power, and the willingness of complete strangers to help each other across national borders and language barriers.
These spectacles are a cautionary note to us all. They are warnings to be careful to seek the spacious mind; the mind that will guide us toward love and compassion, and harmony. A warning of what happens when we orient ourselves toward fear. But how do we live in order to open ourselves to Wisdom? Where will we find Sophia, or Chokhma, or Mary, waiting for us?
The first step, always, is to be able to see, to discern. To notice the outline of the Virgin in the window, to notice the cycles of life, and the patterns that underlie our existence. To notice, we have to be fully present and live with attention. This is one element of Wisdom; she exists outside of time, before everything. She is visible when we notice, and always present in the patterns of the cycles of life. If she doesn’t intrude in your meditations, you can find her in the tides, in the patterns in the sand, in the emergence of life in the spring. Since she exists outside of time, she is always in the moment.
Once we can discern the presence of Wisdom, our work is alignment, and attunement. Wisdom was present before the beginning of creation, and so she ordered all things, poured herself into all of creation. She is there, the foundation of everything. To gain wisdom, we orient ourselves with the current of life, with the natural flow of life and death, with love and growth as the natural order of all that is. Then wisdom is ours: she joins us. We don’t acquire wisdom, we align ourselves with it, harmonize with it.
Rabbi Shapiro points out the connections between Sophia and the Tao Te Ching, the Chinese system of thought known as The Book of The Way. Hear this portion of the 25th passage of the Tao:
“There was something formless and perfect before the universe was born.
It is serene….Eternally present.
It is the mother of the universe.
For lack of a better name,
I call it the Tao.
It flows through all things,
Inside and outside, and returns
To the origin of all things.” (Tao Te Ching #25, trans. by Stephen Mitchell, Perennial Classics, 1988.)
Sophia invites us and calls to us, if we are listening and can hear the invitation. Rabbi Shapiro tells of his efforts to turn her away, until ultimately he surrendered to her calling to him. She doesn’t teach us; her way is not knowledge. She illuminates the way for us.
The rabbi explains it this way: suppose you awake in bed some night, and suddenly notice a shape at the foot of the bed. It’s coiled, and sitting there, still. You fear that it is a snake, waiting for a chance to bite you. Afraid to move, you lie wide awake all night unable to take your eyes off of it in case it begins to move toward you. Eventually, the sky begins to lighten, and in the gray light of dawn, you begin to see things more clearly. And you see that the shape isn’t a snake at all, but the belt that you took off before you went to bed.
What changed was not the item. What changed was your ability to see, to discern the reality of what you were seeing. And that is Sophia’s presence: she lights our path, and shows us the way forward.
Three things are required of us in order to attain wisdom. We must first be observant, paying attention to the patterns and the order of life. As a result we become aware of Wisdom’s presence, and then, third, choose to align ourselves with her. Hold some of the images of the last few years in your mind: all those times when people, out of fear, have tried to fight the natural flow of life, tried to place limits on people, on knowledge, and have failed to act from a spacious place of love for all of creation.
Looking at ancient religious traditions, including different books in the Bible, we can see that there have always been two forces in opposition to each other: the force of creation, of love, and Wisdom. This was largely depicted as a feminine force, the feminine manifestation of the Divine energy. And then there has always been the patriarchal response: the narrow-minded response of fear, anger, repression. The willingness to take lives, to destroy in order to control, to exploit the lives of humans and animals and the earth itself for their own gain.
I wonder often how we lost so much of the wisdom offered to us by those ancient earth-centered traditions, that celebrated life and birth and growth. How did we lose sight of that? In fact it is still present, calling to us, but buried under the powerful narratives driven by fear and greed and lust for power. It was buried so deeply that many are surprised to find how often we are offered feminine representations of God, if only we have eyes to see them. But the New Testament, the story of Jesus’s birth, death, and resurrection, and the religion that grew to worship him, seems to have turned Sophia from the feminine Wisdom of God into Logos, the Word of God. In our reading from Proverbs, in the Hebrew Bible, we heard these words:
“Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth…” (Proverbs 8:23-24)
And then let’s listen to the words that open the Gospel of John in the New Testament:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him.” (John 1: 1-3)
Wisdom, Sophia or Chokhma, became the Word, or Logos. And the feminine became masculine. And so it has been ever since. We have lived as a result in such a way that wisdom, and love, have been so buried that powerful white men can look at a brilliant Black woman and only see a threat to what they perceive as the order of things.
Over time, we have lost half of our narrative; the story that orients us to love and to life.
But there is a better way. This Way has existed since before time and creation; found in the flow of life and of love throughout the universe. This Way is available to anyone who becomes aware of it. This Way does not have limits; it includes, rather than excludes. This Way is Wisdom. She is the Way.
My friends, whatever name you choose for it, may you seek spaciousness of mind, and to unite in harmony with all that is life-giving and loving. May you find the Way.
