Becoming Wise

1. Wisdom is an active, evolving practice for our complex age.

Humanity first looked inside with global sweep in what is sometimes called the Axial Age—a handful of centuries midmillennium before the Common Era.

A new Axial Age. We are living through a period of profound upheaval, akin to the Axial Age, where fundamental questions about life, death, identity, and our relationship to the world are being reborn. This era of interdependence forces us to redefine what it means to be human in relation to each other. While technology becomes more intelligent, our calling is to become wise.

Wisdom vs. Intelligence. Wisdom is distinct from mere intelligence; it leavens intelligence and ennobles consciousness, advancing evolution itself. It involves paying attention to essential humanity – our capacities for love, joy, damage, failure, finitude, and service. Spiritual traditions, despite their flaws, have carried this wisdom across time, revering beauty, mystery, and hope.

Virtues as technology. Wisdom is cultivated through practical disciplines or virtues, which act as "spiritual technologies" for being our best selves. These aren't just for saints but are tools for the art of living, explored by neuroscience as habits: what we practice, we become. This book explores five raw materials of everyday life – words, flesh, love, faith, and hope – as breeding grounds for wisdom.

2. Words are powerful tools that shape our world and our relationships.

a question is a powerful thing, a mighty use of words.

Words make worlds. The language we use profoundly shapes our understanding of ourselves, the world, and how we treat others. Words are not just containers but living entities that diminish or embolden the truths they carry. We need to move beyond small words like "tolerance" to language that describes presence and connection, like "nourishing," "edifying," and "redemptive."

Craving truth tellers. In an age of political performance and superficial discourse, we crave language that "shimmers" and holds deeper truth, as poet Elizabeth Alexander describes. Children instinctively recognize and are drawn to such powerful words. Poetry, in particular, holds what cannot be paraphrased or translated, speaking to our hearts and imaginations.

Generous listening & questions. An art of conversation rooted in "generous listening" is crucial for navigating complexity. This listening is powered by curiosity and vulnerability, seeking the humanity behind words. It yields better questions – questions that invite honesty, dignity, and revelation, rather than cornering or inciting. As Rilke suggested, some questions are meant to be lived, not immediately answered.

3. Our bodies are essential sources of wisdom, healing, and connection.

My body, for as long as it possibly can, will be faithful to living.

Embodied wisdom. Mind and spirit are physical; emotions, memories, and even spiritual experiences are rooted in our bodies. The historical division between mind/spirit and body was a "whimsy" based on limited understanding. Rituals across traditions are ancient intelligence about the body, creating visceral containers for meaning and memory.

Healing and wholeness. Modern science is revealing the deep connections between our physical, emotional, and spiritual selves. Experiences, especially trauma, lodge in the body and can be addressed there. Healing is not just curing but becoming more whole, integrating flaws and grace. As Matthew Sanford, a yoga teacher paralyzed in an accident, learned, the body is inherently faithful to living and striving for life.

Pleasure and beauty. Our senses are access points to mystery and test the mettle of our souls. Relearning the wisdom of the body involves valuing pleasure and beauty, not as superficialities, but as measures of integrity and moral good. From the taste of real food (Dan Barber) to the apprehension of beauty in nature or acts of kindness (John O'Donohue), these sensory experiences ground us and connect us to the world.

4. Love is a muscular, practical, and public virtue we must cultivate.

Love is perhaps the most difficult task given us, the most extreme, the final proof and text, for which all other work is only preparation.

Love beyond romance. Love is the "superstar virtue," yet often reduced to romantic or familial feeling. Its true potential lies in its capacity to cross tribal lines and manifest as sustained, practical care – agape or lovingkindness. This is an exacting, lifelong practice, not a feeling we fall into or out of.

A common good. We need to reimagine love as a public or civic good, not just a private one. The Civil Rights Movement, for example, was fundamentally a "work of love," aiming to create the "beloved community" (John Lewis). This required rigorous self-work and practical disciplines of conduct, embodying the vision before it was fully realized.

Belonging and care. In our complex, divided world, love surfaces as a longing for common life. Reframing issues like race and poverty through the lens of "belonging" (john powell) highlights our fundamental interconnectedness. Love, in this sense, is not wimpy but a powerful force that can make belonging infectious, challenging us to care for each other and the planet.

5. Faith is evolving, embracing mystery, doubt, and new forms.

The opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty.

Faith's evolution. Faith is not static but evolves in every culture and life, holding endlessly transforming substance. It is acquainted with fear, but also longing, transport, and a bracing vastness. Faith, in its deepest sense, is in interplay with moral imagination and involves befriending reality, including the common human experience of mystery.

Mystery and wonder. While modernity has often been embarrassed by mystery, it is an essential aspect of life and faith. Science, reaching its frontiers, is now welcoming mystery back in, finding wonder in the cosmos and even in our own consciousness (Robert Coles, Brian Greene). Wondering is a shared vocabulary across disciplines and beliefs, an animating impulse found in children and great thinkers alike.

New forms and questions. The rise of the "Nones" and movements like the New Monasticism (Shane Claiborne) signal a shift away from inherited religious identity towards chosen spiritual paths. This fluidity is reviving spiritual life and even renewing religion in counterintuitive ways. People are seeking authenticity and grappling with deep questions outside traditional institutions, sometimes finding wisdom in unexpected places like ancient monastic rules or secular social movements (Nathan Schneider).

6. Hope is a reality-based practice rooted in struggle and vulnerability.

Hope is a function of struggle.

Hope vs. Optimism. Hope is distinct from optimism or wishing; it is reality-based, reveres truth, and lives open-eyed with darkness. It is a choice that becomes a practice, a spiritual muscle memory for navigating life as it is. Cynicism, by contrast, is easy, non-generative, and judges without acting to shift things.

Vulnerability and courage. Hope is profoundly linked to vulnerability, which is not weakness but the birthplace of courage (Brené Brown). Our cultural allergy to vulnerability, driven by a desire to out-engineer failure, leaves us ill-equipped for the inevitable struggles of life. Hope is learned through experiencing adversity, having trustworthy relationships, and believing in our capacity to overcome challenges.

Signs, not solutions. Hope is often found in quiet, unassuming places and people – "signs" rather than grand "solutions" (Jean Vanier, Vincent Harding). It is embodied in small acts of care, resilience, and the willingness to stand in the darkness with others. This "critical yeast" (John Paul Lederach) of unexpected relationships and actions, often under the radar, sets in motion new possibilities that can transform realities over time.

7. True change emerges from the margins and unexpected relationships.

For change has always happened in the margins, across human history, and it’s happening there now.

Margins as catalysts. Seismic shifts in common life begin in the margins and cracks, not the noisy center. The "broken radar" of conventional media and power structures often misses the most vital and transformative work happening in society. This includes spiritual geniuses of the everyday who are below the radar and do not have publicists.

Critical yeast. Social change is often catalyzed not by "critical mass" (rallies, leaders) alone, but by "critical yeast" – small, unlikely groups of people from different parts of society who build new qualities of relationship over time (John Paul Lederach). They refuse dualism, embrace complexity, and act with love, courage, and creativity.

Humanizing encounters. These transformative relationships happen in unexpected places:

• Catholics and Protestants building ecumenical ties (St. John's Abbey).
• Pro-choice and anti-abortion advocates seeking understanding (Frances Kissling).
• Able-bodied and mentally disabled people sharing life (L'Arche, Jean Vanier).
• Urban gardeners reclaiming abandoned lots (Detroit, Myrtle Thompson, Wayne Curtis).
• City leaders committing to compassion (Louisville).

These encounters humanize doctrine, bridge divides, and reveal new possibilities for living together differently.

8. The human condition, with its flaws and grace, is the ground for growth.

The human condition, in all its mess and glory, remains the ground on which all of our ambitions flourish or crash.

Acknowledging reality. Wisdom requires honestly and searchingly knowing ourselves, including our capacity for damage and deception, the inevitability of failure and finitude. The adage that history repeats itself until we know ourselves points to the human agency behind societal chaos, from economies to terrorism.

Wounded wholeness. Life is messy, always leaning towards disorder and surprise, marked by losses and deaths both subtle and catastrophic. Yet, paradoxically, we are often "made by what would break us" (Matthew Sanford). Illness, pain, disability, and failure can become openings to deeper self-knowledge and part of our gift to the world, embodying mystical ideas that turn out to be common sense.

Virtues in practice. The gap between who we are and who we want to be is where spiritual growth happens. Virtues like humility, compassion, and a capacity to change soften us for this work. Even "sin," in a psychological sense, is the ingrained lure of going numb or failing to join inner aspiration with outer reality. Cultivating virtues is a way to bridge this gap and live with greater integrity.

9. Science and spirituality are converging in surprising ways.

The spirituality of the mystic and the scientist—a reverence for wonder and the possibility of never-ending discovery—also points a way forward...

Shared wonder. Science and spirituality, often seen as opposing forces, share a core reverence for wonder and a commitment to discerning truth while staying open to the unknown. Physicists describe the elegance of equations and the mystery of the cosmos (Brian Greene, Margaret Wertheim), while mystics delve into the hidden dimensions of reality. Both
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Last updated: June 4, 2025