How Wisdom Is Exchanged

A few days ago, while riding my bike past St. James Church near my home, I suddenly understood Wisdom Exchange differently. The church sits in the middle of a school campus. It is a small, modern chapel with stained glass windows and large wooden doors. It even has church bells that ring on Sunday mornings, to the joy, and possible dismay, of the liberal neighbors in my West Coast college town.

Before I go further, I should disclose that, for better or worse, I was not brought up religious. I have little valence around religious symbols and no particular grounding in the universality of their teachings. In fact, I have sometimes frowned when I heard that someone was sending their children to the private school attached to this church, worrying that religious education might narrow them rather than open them to the plurality of perspectives that postmodernity has made possible.

But that morning I had an epiphany (no pun intended). As I passed the church, I looked at the cross above it and suddenly saw it differently. I saw the intersection of two dimensions: the vertical and the horizontal. I wasn’t seeing the cross as a torture device, or even particularly as a symbol of Christ. Rather, I saw it as the place where what is true for me meets what is true for you and, more importantly, what may be true for all of us. All of a sudden I realized that this is a beautiful image for what we are trying to do in Wisdom Exchange.

Modernity gave enormous authority to the individual. It freed us from many inherited structures and allowed us to think for ourselves. But a world of increasingly autonomous individuals still required institutions, governments, churches, experts, and leaders to create coherence. Authority remained largely vertical. And we know the limitations of that arrangement. Too many people were excluded from determining what counted as true or important.

Postmodernity challenged those hierarchies. It gave us a much greater appreciation for the limits of perspective, the plurality of difference, and the necessity of context, all while opening the public conversation to voices that had been excluded. In other words, it flattened the vertical dimension and strengthened the horizontal.

As we now well know, that liberation came with its own difficulty. If every perspective is equally authoritative simply because someone holds it, how do we make meaning together? Meaning itself requires context; what matters most changes according to the moment. Certain perspectives carry knowledge or responsibility that others do not. For example, a parent and child are equal in human worth, but they are not interchangeable. Neither are a teacher and student, physician and patient, host and guest, or leader and member of a community.

We need both dimensions.

The vertical without the horizontal becomes hierarchy without relationship. The horizontal without the vertical can become relationship without enough structure to hold what is of value.

Wisdom Exchange lives at their intersection.

Each of us brings what is true for us in a given moment and places it into relationship with what is true for others and what may be true for the group. We do not surrender our individual knowing to the collective. Nor do we assume that because a truth belongs to us, the group must organize itself around it. We bring our truth into relationship. That is where wisdom is exchanged.

We have discovered that this sounds easier than it is. It depends on honesty and sincerity. It requires enough trust to reveal what is actually happening inside us without knowing in advance how others will respond. It relies on the willingness to listen when someone else’s experience complicates our own. And it is sustained by a commitment to repair because, inevitably, we will step on one another’s toes.

Most of us have had surprisingly little practice doing this: contacting what is alive and real within ourselves, bringing it into relationship with another person, and then remaining present to what emerges among us in the larger relational field.

But we are getting better at it.

And one of the delightful surprises is that it is not only challenging, it is enlivening and fun. So much so that many of us make room in already busy lives to jump on calls several times a week! We are finding that making meaning together is deeply nourishing. At times it can feel very much like love. And I dare say that it is, for love in its deepest sense is the experience of knowing and being known while remaining distinct from one another.

Seen this way, some of the ruptures we have experienced recently in our community become more understandable. At times we can lean too far toward the vertical, toward the idea that the leader or expert knows and the person with authority decides. At other times we can lean too far toward the horizontal and believe that “if I experience this relationship as good, it must therefore be good for the group.”

Neither impulse is wrong, and each carries important sentiment. But neither, by itself, generates wisdom. Wisdom emerges through the encounter.

When we bring what we know into relationship, we can see what none of us could see alone. The group may discover an intelligence greater than the sum of our individual insights. We may also discover that not everything good belongs everywhere. Some relationships, experiences, and forms of intimacy find their greatest beauty precisely because they remain private and close to the heart. In essence, belonging does not require that every boundary disappear. Quite the contrary. Belonging depends upon boundaries, because contact happens at the boundary; it is there that we encounter one another, making understanding and connection possible.

This is why the how of Wisdom Exchange matters so much. We are not exchanging wisdom because one person possesses it and gives it to another. We are exchanging wisdom because each of us brings what we can see from where we stand, allows it to meet what others can see, and stays long enough for something larger than any one of us to emerge between us.

The vertical gives us difference, discernment, responsibility, and form. The horizontal gives us relationship, mutuality, participation, and connection. And at their intersection is the practice we are trying to learn together.

That is what I saw as I rode past that little church: a vertical line, a horizontal line and the place where they meet.

That place represents how I experience Wisdom Exchange.