Unity

Hagia Sophia, by Luciana Hartwin

Lenten Vespers, Week Five: Holy Wisdom

A Reading from Hagia Sophia, by Thomas Merton:

There is in all visible things an invisible fecundity, a dimmed light, a meek namelessness, a hidden whole-ness. This mysterious Unity and Integrity is Wisdom, the Mother of all, Natura naturans. There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in word-less gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being, welcoming me tenderly, saluting me with indescribable humility. This is at once my own being, my own nature, and the Gift of my Creator's Thought and Art within me, speaking as Hagia Sophia, speaking as my sister, Wisdom …

O blessed, silent one, who speaks everywhere! We do not hear the soft voice, the gentle voice, the merciful and feminine. We do not hear mercy, or yielding love, or non-resistance, or non-reprisal. In her there are no reasons and no answers. Yet she is the candor of God's light, the expression of His simplicity …

All the perfections of created things are also in God; and therefore He is at once Father and Mother. As Father He stands in solitary might surrounded by darkness. As Mother His shining is diffused, embracing all His creatures with merciful tenderness and light. The Diffuse Shining of God is Hagia Sophia. We call her His "glory." In Sophia His power is experienced only as mercy and as love …

Hagia Sophia in all things is the Divine Light reflected in them, considered as a spontaneous participation, as their invitation to the Wedding Feast. Sophia is God's sharing of Himself with creatures. His outporing, and the Love by which He is given, and known, held and loved. She is in all things like the air receiving the sunlight. In her they prosper. In her they glorify God. In her they rejoice to reflect Him. In her they are united with him. She is the union between them. She is the Love that unites them. She is life as communion, life as thanksgiving, life as praise, life as festival, life as glory.

Here ends the reading.

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

I learned as a child that wisdom is not knowledge, though I often struggled at the time to distinguish between the two. Knowledge consisted of data, facts, information. Wisdom was described to me as how we use that knowledge, how to apply and tailor it to specific situations, how to string the data together into some coherent whole. But I never found that explanation satisfying.

Wisdom is one of those things that we all believe in, we all experience, we all talk about, regardless of culture or creed. Yet it’s typically tenaciously difficult to define. Wisdom proves elusive, hard to nail down. Like art, we shall know it when we see it. Wisdom shows us how to live a good and proper life, according to the Book of Proverbs. Wisdom reveals life to be but vanity and suffering, according to Ecclesiastes. And those two were supposedly written by the same guy, part of the Bible’s “wisdom literature.”

All religions have wisdom traditions, as do all philosophies. Philosophy literally means the love of wisdom. And one quickly finds connection between wisdom and mysticism. Mystics are those, in any tradition, who seek unity with the Absolute, a direct connection to God. All religions are born of mystical experience, of encounters with God, however termed. That’s what all of this is about, all of Christianity: encountering God in Jesus, becoming one with Him in Word and Sacrament. Christ is our mystical union with God.

At that’s what wisdom is, at heart. Wisdom is oneness: the unity, if not uniformity, underlying and transcending all that there is. In Taoism, that’s the Tao. In Judaism, that’s the Law. In Buddhism, that’s Enlightenment. It’s the realization, the personal experience, of the oneness undergirding all Creation; indeed, our oneness with God. Hindus sum this up in their famous phrasing, “Atman is Brahman,” the self or soul is God.

That doesn’t mean, mind you, that I, this ego RDG Stout, am the Creator and Father of all, the Source and Ground of all being. Rather, it means that I and all things are created by God, sustained by God, and return to God. We are fashioned in His image, brought to life by His breath. When we affirm that God creates ex nihilo, out of nothing, we mean of course that He creates us out of nothing other than Himself.

Jesus teaches us that the greatest commandments are to love God with all we are, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. And that’s because we all are one. My neighbor is my brother; more than that, he is myself. We are all the one Adam. We are all the Body of Christ. And God dwells within us. We are temples of His Spirit, says St Paul. I love God by loving what He loves. I love God by loving His Creation, for He is the Father of us all. We are one with each other. God would be one with us.

Sophiology, in Christian thought, is a branch of theology, which is how we think of God. The Christian insight, the Christian revelation, includes the understanding that God is Three in One: One Substance, One Essence, in Three Underlying Realities. We are not alone in this. Many faiths speak of God as Three and yet as One. Over the course of these midweek Lenten Vespers, I have spoken at length on the reality of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; and how the Spirit and Son join us to God in the Church.

Tonight I want to speak about the Oneness of God, which we term Holy Wisdom, or Hagia Sophia. Sophia is not some fourth member of the Holy Trinity. She is not known apart from Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. She is the Oneness that they share. If the Three are God, then Sophia is the Godhead. If the Three are the personal Divine, then Sophia is transpersonal divinity.

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all possess Wisdom, all share the One Essence, and so the Spirit and the Son are rightly called God’s Wisdom in the Scriptures. Just as we cannot love in the abstract, but only love specific people, so we cannot know Wisdom in the abstract, but only through the Trinity, the God in Three Realities. She is also, of course, the outpouring of God’s self, His kenosis, which makes possible all of Creation. God creates for love and joy. He pours out Himself for His children.

Thus God’s own self, His Substance and Essence, is the source and ground of existence. “In Him we all live and move and have our being.” You are made in the image of God, housing the Spirit of God, baptized into the Body of God. He is our root, the divine spark within. Creator and Creation differ, therefore, not so much in substance as in mode. If God is perfect being, infinite and eternal, utterly actualized, lacking nothing, then Creation is becoming, called out from nothing, up into existence, at last to be “gods in God”—holy ones, saints.

Sophiology speaks both of Divine Wisdom, the Oneness of God, and also of Creaturely Wisdom, the unity, interconnectedness, and interdependence of the cosmos. Yet at the root of things, at the very beginning and the very end, these two Wisdoms are the same. There is but one Sophia, one single divine unity, gathering all into God. In the words of Jesus Christ, the Word and Son of God:

I pray … that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us … The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

Wisdom is the root of all religion. Wisdom is the Love who makes us one. Wisdom is the God alive within you. Wisdom calls us home when we are done.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

If you would like to contribute to St Peter’s ministry online, you may do so here, and we would thank God for your generosity.