Like Species

In her column of August 2, 2010, Rev. Meg Barnhouse wrote:

...Sometimes the place where you used to find wisdom gets destroyed. People fail you, a church disappoints you, new information strips away your feeling about a scripture. It’s as if your wisdom tree is lying in splinters.
 In the aftermath of such a coming apart, we are tempted to take our piece of wisdom home with us and stick it in a place of honor, savoring and celebrating that one little piece of wisdom of which we can be sure, pulling it out whenever there is a new question, a new issue, acting as if that piece of wisdom is self-sustaining, and as if it is enough, on its own, to sustain us.

In acting like this, we are forgetting the crucial next step. What is needed is to bring our piece of the wisdom tree back together with the others, to stand together on the roots of what wisdom we have. We do have wisdom within us, but it is not enough to hold and savor just the wisdom we can grasp. Our piece needs to be added to the others....

A minister once told me that she needs to be with her 'like species' sometimes. I think she was meaning the same thing as Meg Barnhouse. It's not enough to have and to hold wisdom, it's the joining of wisdom with others who understand that makes the difference, and especially when something bad happens.

Besides adding our piece of wisdom to a congregation, it's what happens when people join together to share like experiences, such as parenting, love of reading, skiing,  grief, addiction, and all the things that bring strangers together in common interest, passion or pain; that bring 'like species' together.


When I write it, it sounds so obvious, but adding my wisdom to others is a concept I've had trouble with for a long time.  I suspect others may question their wisdom and who would possibly care about it, too.  When I think of 'like species,' what ministers can only get from or give to other ministers, what a mother can only give to or get from another mother, I see more clearly that the everyday kind of wisdom (as opposed to lightning bolt revelations or War and Peace type examinations) is indeed something we all have and is wasted if we keep it to ourselves.


She goes on to say:


It is difficult to walk a good spiritual path solo. It helps to be in relationship to a community where your wisdom can be made more whole, challenged, and where it can have fresh life breathed into it by touching it, again and again, to its roots, by bringing it together with the wisdom others carry with them.


So true. If life itself is a spiritual path, then so true.  







Link to Rev. Barnhouse's full column: http://www.uuworld.org/spirit/articles/169762.shtml