"Life in the Balance Part 2: Intellect and Inspiration"

Listen to the sermon from May 26, 2013 by Rev. Amelia Fulbright, “Life in the Balance Part 2: Intellect and Inspiration.”  Today we continue with our series on “Life in the Balance,” while we also celebrate what’s known as Trinity Sunday according to the liturgical calendar.  If you were here last week, you might remember that I gave you a trinitarian image with 3 ways to construe the notion of balance.

First, there is the image of the scales, reminding us that balance has something to do with holding two things together in equal measure.  Secondly, there is the person with excellent balance, characterized by strength, poise and agility.  Thirdly, there is the tai chi symbol, which helps us to view balance as an ongoing process, whereby seemingly opposing forces actually work to temper each other’s extremes.Last week we reflected on what it might mean to take a balanced, holistic approach to change, and today we bring these images to bear on what it means to be wise.  We begin with the personification of Wisdom in Proverbs 8.

“Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice?  On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand; beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries out: to you, O people, I cry, and my cry is to all that live!”

Jeff Paschal suggests that when we think of wisdom, we “often imagine a stern, tight-lipped person, a killjoy, or a solemn judge in black robe.”  But that is not the biblical image of Wisdom, portrayed here in Proverbs as Woman Wisdom--- street evangelist, master architect of Creation and daily delight of God.  This Wisdom is fully embodied, getting her hands dirty in the work of creating God’s universe, and she is a playful, joyous spirit.  Actually, she IS the personification of the Holy Spirit given to us at Pentecost.  Orthodox renderings of Woman Wisdom, or Holy “Sophia” as she is known in Greek, generally show her as a lady in red, the color of the Spirit.When I read the description of Sophia found in Proverbs, making her way through the streets of town, taking her stand and drawing in the crowds with her voice and her vibrance, it reminds me of the well-known poem by Maya Angelou:Phenomenal WomanBY MAYA ANGELOU~ stanzas 2 and 4  I walk into a roomJust as cool as you please,And to a man,The fellows stand orFall down on their knees.Then they swarm around me,A hive of honey bees.I say,It’s the fire in my eyes,And the flash of my teeth,The swing in my waist,And the joy in my feet.I’m a womanPhenomenally.Phenomenal woman,That’s me.Now you understandJust why my head’s not bowed.I don’t shout or jump aboutOr have to talk real loud.When you see me passing,It ought to make you proud.I say,It’s in the click of my heels,The bend of my hair,the palm of my hand,The need for my care.’Cause I’m a womanPhenomenally.Phenomenal woman,That’s me. Perhaps you think it a bit shocking to think of Wisdom as a woman with a “swing in [her] waist,” but it is true to the biblical witness.  It does challenge some of our Western philosophical underpinnings, though.  In the West, we have inherited Greek and Roman ideas about masculine and feminine and their relationship to knowledge and wisdom that may be stumbling blocks to our imaginations.  These ideas go back to Plato’s understanding of body and soul.  Plato believed the human soul to be eternal, and the body he described essentially as a temporary home, or shell, where the soul might rest until it could ultimately be freed back into eternity.  The rational mind was understood to be part of the eternal soul, and over time, masculinity became equated with reason and rationality, while femininity was associated with the body and sensuality.  In this dichotomy, you can easily see how men were eventually understood to be closer to God by virtue of their greater capacity for reason, and the flesh and the feminine were seen as expendable, even hindrances to the enlightenment of the soul.Believe it or not, we can actually see this dynamic still playing out in a contemporary sitcom called “The Big Bang Theory.”  In case you haven’t seen this show, let me tell you a little background.  The show is about four male scientists in their twenties.  Three of them are physicists with PhD’s, and one is an MIT-trained aerospace engineer.  They are all highly intelligent, but less wise about things like social skills and interpersonal relationships.  Dr. Sheldon Cooper, in particular, is a certified genius with an IQ of 187.  Sheldon earned his first PHd at 16, but he is fairly clueless when it comes to things like love and humility, and he fails to understand irony, sarcasm and other subtleties of communication.  (You might say that Sheldon has all the brilliance and impeccable grammar of Dr. David Gavenda, but without Dr. Gavenda’s class and personality!)  Sheldon often relies on Penny, a beautiful blonde aspiring actress that lives across the hall, to school him on how to behave in social situations.  In the scene we are about to watch, Dr. Cooper has come to Penny for acting lessons so that he can at least learn to “pretend” to connect with his students on a more personal level.  Let’s see what happens... “Penny, my body and I have a relationship that works best when we maintain a cool, wary distance from each another,” Sheldon protests.Most of us, based on our individual personalities and upbringings, tend to favor one aspect of ourselves over the others.  Some of us rely on intellect as our primary way of knowing and encountering the world, others of us prioritize feelings, and still others listen first to the telling instincts and sensations of the body.  This is absolutely natural, and like the characters on “The Big Bang Theory,” we even tend to excel in areas of life where we can employ our primary ways of knowing.  But the call to a wise and balanced life urges us to listen more carefully to the parts of ourselves we have tended to neglect or marginalize.New Testament scholar Everett Ferguson says, “The familiar dichotomy in Western thought between body and soul is a product of the Platonic tradition.  Thus in the modern world the clumsy word psychosomatic (from psyche, “soul,” and soma, “body”) has had to be coined in order to put back together two things that from the biblical perspective never should have been separated.”In other words, Plato is not Christian theology!  Our heritage as Christians must be traced back to ancient Hebrew ideas about the soul.  In Hebrew thought the soul encompassed all aspects of human being--- the mind (including thoughts and emotions), the animating spirit of a person, and yes, even the physical body.  One aspect of a person could not easily be separated out from the others, and all aspects were understood to reveal the divine image.The ancient spiritual tool known as the Enneagram demonstrates this call to balance well.The Enneagram is similar to personality tests such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.  It describes nine different personality types, each with their corresponding strengths and weaknesses.  It also goes on to identify each of these nine personalities as head-centered, heart-centered or body-centered.  On a spiritual level, the Enneagram is understood to represent nine “faces” or manifestations of the Divine, and the idea is that when held together, these nine types represent wisdom in all its fullness.  What this means for us on a practical level is that we are called over our lifetimes to reach toward developing the centers of being that balance our primary personality numbers.  So for example, if one is a thinking-centered six, the task is to develop the feeling and instinctual parts of your being.  If one is a two, the task is to develop the thinking and instinctual centers, and so on.As this Enneagram reveals, wisdom in the biblical tradition is ultimately Trinitarian; it includes the all-knowing transcendent mind of God-the-Father, the tangible flesh-and-blood body of Christ, as well as the passion and playfulness of the life-giving Spirit.  And just as this Holy Trinity moves together in a well-choreographed dance, so we can nurture our own inner wisdom by finding ways to integrate body, heart and mind.Richard Rohr says that "wisdom is precisely the freedom to be present [with all of who we are]. Just try to keep your heart open, your mind without division or resistance, and your body not somewhere else.  Presence is the practical, daily task of all mature religion and all spiritual disciplines."What is perhaps most striking about Lady Wisdom in the text of Proverbs is that she is indeed “present.”  In verse 23, she remembers, “Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth... When [God] established the heavens, I was there... When he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him.”That is our invitation today, to be present to the God within us---in our minds, in our hearts and in our flesh.  AMEN.