For wisdom is better than rubies; and all the things that may be desired are not to be compared to it.

(Proverbs 8:11)

Images are taking a holiday in this blog post

Have you ever stood in our beautiful cathedral, or in front of something else that is beautiful, such as nature or one of God’s beloved human beings, maybe even a family member or dear friend, and it suddenly occurs to you that its beauty leaves you cold?

If you are gentle and do not condemn yourself for forgetting how to love, you might realize that you cannot even find your heart or yourself—you have gotten lost in your surroundings. Where there once burned a sacrifice of love there is now charred landscape.

Burn out. But don’t we all agree that good work energizes us? We create ways to add more creative activity when there is no room for more. More is always good, we think, as long as it is important and interesting. We add, shake, stir, and see what happens to us.

As an artist— a word people tend to think of as synonymous with sensitive—it is not hard to acknowledge here that I get sick on imbibing my surroundings without rest. But it is counter-intuitive in my consumerist culture that I should do with less, and especially with fewer meaningful things—even when they weigh on me and flatten me.

On Sunday, like a flattened cartoon character, I popped myself out of my surroundings and sent myself to the desert. It was brown and barren, as dry and hot as a sauna—I picked it because it had a sauna. It was a new inexpensive hotel in an ugly location. It was clean, plain, and as unlike the place I was experiencing my soul to be.

I sat on the edge of the bed. The dead art on the wall and I faced each other for a while. I flopped over to begin to catch up on twenty years of missed television—I had been doing more important things. A program about Hudson River School painters set off a stream of criticism in my head such as what ran when I was younger and painting feverishly. It wore me out and I fell asleep.

I awoke to the AARP Movies for Grownups awards, appropriate to this story of me as Rip Van Winkle. The actors looked the same as when I last noticed them, twenty years earlier, just slower-moving and with more makeup. They glittered into the brown room, able in stilettos but often awkward as they tried to express wisdom appropriate to the evening’s theme.

In wisdom they seemed young compared to church people I have known, such as the elderly woman I overheard telling herself with the tenderness of Jesus to rest (“don’t cry,” she said) until she felt able to move again. I had neglected to speak to myself that way before I ran to the desert. I have not gained her wisdom, yet.

My night alone in the brown room drinking herbal tea was not bad compared to how sensitive people and artists often end up. But it took my mind a very long time to be convinced that my desert was not for doing anything or for making anything. There was nothing to do or make there—once the television was off there was only facing myself in the face of God—there was only prayer.

What finally came forth from my mouth and my pen was, while needed, utterly plain. It was two lists: things that happened to me in 2019 and people and groups I pray for. It relieved me to hold all I had been carrying in my head with just a few fingers. I saw myself again as a mere image of God.

When I had quipped in an email to a friend that I felt tempted to pray a “cursing psalm,” she wisely asked why I could not. That is when I went to the desert and wrote lists.

Writing teachers also encourage writing lists when lists are all we can utter. Not all art seems contemplative any more than contemplation necessarily seems like art. But we need do to what we need to do to begin to approach God and to locate ourselves within God. Often we need both art and contemplation.

The wisdom literature of the Bible, much of it poetry, is both art and contemplation. These works bear the marks of writers’ art while they lead us to face God within in our interior deserts. Proverbs are dialogical in that they cast the reader into a bewildering image that demands an emotional response and creative action.

Iron up against iron; thus a man up against the face of his neighbor/friend.

(literal translation of Proverbs 27:17)

I thought that I would write about the first monastics—the desert fathers and mothers, the abbas and ammas who fled the newly institutionalized Church only to be sought out by those who were trying to act in the spirit of the proverb above. But a more thorough meditation on this subject than I was prepared to write recently appeared in my inbox and saved me the trouble.

There is a story there of Amma Syncletica saying:

There are many who live in the mountains and behave as if they were in the town, and they are wasting their time. It is possible to be a solitary in one’s mind while living in a crowd, and it is possible for one who is a solitary to live in the crowd of his own thoughts.

This story about Syncletica reminds me of biblical scholar Kathleen O’Connor who speaks of wisdom as being spirituality of the “market place.”

I can imagine the abbas and ammas watching those they had left behind in the cities come huffing and puffing toward their caves (I did not learn this in class) while remembering Proverbs 1: 20,

Wisdom cries aloud in the street, in the open squares she raises her voice

and throwing up their hands. And then, perhaps, Syncletica prayed and became wiser.

In Proverbs, Wisdom is personified as a creative, extremely busy woman. Early Christians associated Wisdom with Logos and Christ.

Jesus allowed others to be constantly up against his face and let their wisdom be sharpened by his wisdom. It is engaging with others who engage God that teaches us to hear Jesus speaking wisdom through our own voices to others and, just as important, to ourselves.  Art can bring wisdom too. But sometimes we just need the desert.