On Wisdom and Desperation

“I have learned, over time, to accept what I cannot change.” The words came from an older friend over breakfast recently. These were not trivial words, I knew. This person has endured significant physical trauma—the kind of thing that irreversibly changes a life, the kind of wound that never fully heals. This was no treacly aphorism, no self-congratulatory internet meme. This was the real deal.

My wife tells me that I need to get better at sitting with silences. She’s undoubtedly right about this. My instinct is to rush in to fill the uncomfortable void with words, to skip past the pain to something like the resolution, to try to “make it better,” whatever that might mean. My instinct, regrettably, carried the day on this occasion. I smiled—warmly and sympathetically, no doubt—as the pastoral words came tumbling out of my mouth: “That sounds like some hard-won wisdom.”

My friend smiled. Perhaps they were humouring me, I don’t know. “Or maybe just desperation,” they finally said.

“Well, one often leads to the other, doesn’t it?” I blurted out. Again, those wretched silences…

I don’t know what made me say that. It just came out. As I drove to work after breakfast, I found myself pondering it more deeply. Did I mean it? Was it just more pastoral verbal filler? Was I hunting around for some kind of moral or existential symmetry that didn’t exist? Perhaps most importantly, is it true? Does desperation actually lead to wisdom? And perhaps even less plausibly, could the causal arrow work the other way? Could wisdom ever lead to desperation?

On the face of it, the answer would seem to be a rather obvious “no.” People do all kinds of unwise things when they’re desperate. I see this in lurid display every week at the jail. Desperation can drive people down some dark paths. Less dramatically but no less destructively, desperation can, over time, lead to simply giving up. Settling into apathy and resignation. Checking out. Refusing to get involved. Soaking in bitterness and grievance. Drowning sorrows in any of the many and varied ways we have of doing this. Whether it’s flailing around in self-destructive mayhem or a more incremental leakage of meaning and engagement over time, desperation can and very often does lead to the very opposite of anything resembling wisdom.

And yet, we know that there is a different kind of desperation. A desperation that recognizes, however partially or inadequately, that something has to change. The desperation that tries something new to save a failing marriage. The desperation that reaches out to an estranged kid in a less self-protective and self-righteous way. The desperation that takes a risk from the depths of a vocational or identity crisis. The desperation that refuses to accept one’s suffering as the last word in the story, that strains toward hope, despite it all. And, of course, the desperation that reaches out for God. When all our attempts to fill the job description ourselves have unsurprisingly revealed themselves to be precisely what they are: laughable, inadequate, idolatrous, sad.

Desperation can be, and often is a catalyst in wisdom’s direction. Coming to the end of ourselves can be the pathway to a new beginning with God. The examples in Christian history are too numerous to even begin to enumerate (St. Paul, Augustine, Francis, Luther, Kierkegaard, Pascal, Dostoevsky, Bonhoeffer… those are just the names within visual range on my bookshelf). Desperation can drive us deeper. It can lead us into the terrain of wisdom, where we befriend things like simplicity, strength, courage, acceptance, humility, a willingness to trust. Desperation can, perhaps most importantly, guide us away from our tyrannical selves and their incessant demands for attention, recognition, affirmation, validation, justification. This is surely among wisdom’s most necessary fruits these days—to simply turn down the volume of the self. To be ok with silence (as my dear wife says). To not need to be seen or heard.

And who knows, perhaps things might even go in the other causal direction. Perhaps, wisdom might lead to a kind of holy, chastened desperation. Not in the distressed and despairing and agitated senses of the word, but in the simple recognition of our profound need for God. The Psalm 42 As the deer pants for the water sense. The John 7 If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink sense. Desperation as an expression of longing for God and for God’s good gifts of mercy and meaning. For there is surely great wisdom in recognizing the desperate extent of our need.

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The image above is taken from a new children’s storybook Bible our church recently received. It’s called The Peace Table and it contains some beautiful artwork. This particular piece introduces the New Testament with the words “A New Beginning.” It speaks to me of Jesus as the unfolding, expanding, embracing, desperation-inciting wisdom of God.