Tag: discernment

What is wisdom?

Homily for the 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time (C).

I’m back to my day job in Rome, so this week I’m posting a homily from 2016, given the day after my ordination to the diaconate.

Ordination to the diaconate 2016, St. Ignatius Church, Boston, MA

Today’s Gospel reading is perhaps the single most unfortunate passage in Scripture to have to preach about to a congregation consisting mostly of family members, so we’re going to work our way up to it by starting with the Old Testament.

The Old Testament reading is from the Book of Wisdom.  You’ll be happy to know that I took an entire course on the Biblical wisdom tradition and have prepared a brief 45-minute summary as an introduction to the homily.  We can skip all that, however, if you will consider for a moment the question of what it means to be wise.  

To understand what wisdom is, it can be helpful, first, to think about what it is not.  Wisdom is not the same thing as being clever; we probably know people who are clever manipulators, for example, but not really wise.  Wisdom is not the same as knowledge, as knowing lots of facts.  Teachers know that there’s a difference between a student who memorizes what he hears and then regurgitates it, and a student who actually thinks about what she’s learning.  Wisdom is not the same thing as being educated.  If you’ve been in school as long as I have, you realize that there are some very foolish people with PhDs.  And we all probably know people who didn’t receive much education who nonetheless we’d consider wise because they had a sense for people, a sense for what was right and wrong, a sense for what really matters in life. 

Continue reading “What is wisdom?”

Catholic self-help

My friend and Jesuit classmate Fr. Michael Rossmann has just published a book, which upon its release held the status of Amazon’s #1 book in “self-help for Catholics”. Actually, I didn’t know there was such a category (and neither did Fr. Rossmann).

Inside the snappy cover, Fr. Rossmann makes a point I think is very important today — really saying yes to something or someone means saying no to other things. Never committing in order to keep one’s options open means refusing to choose the things that matter most.

The book is called The Freedom of Missing Out and continues the long Jesuit tradition of practical help for good decision-making that goes back to St. Ignatius’s rules for discernment. In fact, the influence of Ignatius is not far below the surface, though the book is illustrated with examples from all walks of life and lots of contemporary research. While Rossmann draws on the best of the Catholic tradition, his words about commitment and freedom will ring true to people of any religion.