I love pears! I think that they are my favorite fruit. But I hate pears, there’s nothing I turn up my nose up more, they are so disgusting. “Wait a minute, Monica!” you may be thinking, “How can pears be both your favorite fruit and your least favorite fruit at the same time?” Easy! Pears that are fresh and ripe and just at their peak are incredibly sweet and juicy, their skin is nice and thin, and their flesh is soft and easy to bite into. What better fruit can there be? You can’t take a bite out of a coconut or pineapple or watermelon without a lot of work first. But when we were kids, fresh fruit was very seasonal. Mandarines at this time of year, apples and pears in the fall if we were lucky, and berries in the summer. The rest of the year, it was canned fruit. There was nothing worse, in my humble opinion, than the dreaded can of fruit cocktail that we had for dessert far too often. The maraschino cherries were fine, the peaches were a little slimy, the oranges were okay, the grapes often were split and mushy but the pears? They tasted like chunks of jello that had sand sprinkled throughout. It was like eating a mushy bit of beachfront property, and Mom always knew which bowl of fruit cocktail was mine as I would assiduously eat around every single piece of pear in the bowl. No amount of persuasion could convince me to eat those little cubes! They were the worst fruit in the world as far as my 10-year-old self was concerned, and even today I will do anything I can to avoid canned pear. Yuck!
I’m sure other people have similar opinions around
fruit, maybe even pears, that might echo either my love for this fruit or my
loathing. Strong opinions are easy to
find on a variety of topics. In fact, to
be human is to have strong opinions on a variety of topics, right?
One of the complaints I hear is about how polarized we
have become. That we have such different
opinions from our neighbors that we can’t have a civil conversation any more. Whether it’s vaccine mandates or the causes of
earthquakes in Alberta, it is hard to talk about what is weighing on our hearts
and minds. We want to think in binary
absolutes – either something is good or something is bad. Just like pears, are they my favorite or are
they my least favorite, make up my mind and stop sitting on the fence, Monica!
Take a side, join the club, cheer on the right team!
Isaiah dreamed of a time when this kind of division
ended. The wolf will lie down with the
lamb, the wild will coexist with the tame, the carnivore with the herbivore,
the poisonous with the helpless. There
will be no more villains and heroes but one creation where all will
coexist. The Green Party and the
Wildrose Party will find things they can agree on, and oil workers and
environmentalists will be friends. The warmongers and the peacemakers will live
calmly side by side in safety and security.
It’s quite the utopian vision and Isaiah sees it as a real possibility
worth working towards.
Matthew’s story of John the Baptizer is a similar
message. “Change your hearts and minds,”
he preached. Start looking at the world
with different eyes. John calls us to
examine how we think of the world around us, our community, our neighbors, our
family and our friends. Just as he
called out the religious leaders who came to see him, he calls us to challenge
our assumptions. How do we see
ourselves? How do we see others? Are we caught up in either or thinking, us vs
them, winners and losers, bad guys and good guys?
John calls us to think in new ways: we are to have a spirit of wisdom and understanding,
a spirit of counsel and strength, to stop judging based on appearances, or make
decisions because of gossip and rumor.
What is
wisdom, then and how do we think in these new ways? Some theologians say that wisdom is about
changing how we think and act, whereas knowledge is solely about gathering
information and data. Data is easy. With google, in seconds we know that the
experience we had of the earth shifting under our feet wasn’t imaginary, and we
can even put a number onto it, 5.8.
That’s data. Knowledge. Wisdom is when we stay calm and don’t buy
into alarmist theories or wild speculation about why the earthquake happened.
How do we grow in wisdom? Two things are helping me – reminding myself
that an issue might be a ‘both and’ topic like pears. I can like them and dislike them, it doesn’t
have to be ‘either or’. What if I
am right and you are too? That is
helping me stay calmer in the midst of conflict, not perfectly but slowly better. Another thing I do is a mantra many life
coaches encourage their clients to use. “I
tell myself the truth and frequently ask myself what I’m pretending not to
know”. I think that is the ultimate wisdom, when we ask deep and honest
questions of ourselves and our own opinions.
John sensed that the religious leaders were coming for baptism because
they had deep questions of themselves that they didn’t even knew they had. By visiting John, they challenged their own
thinking. Some may have even joined the
Jesus movement, like Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus who buried Jesus in the
Tomb on Good Friday. By asking questions
of ourselves, looking for both and, and listening to the call of prophets to
work towards God’s vision of Peace on Earth, we can follow the path of wisdom
God wishes for us all. And when that
happens, fruit of the spirit come to us, especially Peace, a gift of the
Creator for us all.
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