What you do with what you know.

I was talking today with a friend about how people think 'wisdom' is esoteric in nature. What I mean by that is that many people have bought the 'greek' version of education that suggests that wisdom is measured by 'what you know'. This is a bit of a, well, what shall we call it? oh yes, that's right - a LIE. Wisdom is not measured by 'what you know'. At least not according to the Bible. The Jews understood Wisdom as 'what you did' with 'what you knew'. When Solomon was building the temple the story says that he called the 'wise guys' to help him. Who arrived? not philosophers or advisors or overseers, but labourers, skilled craftsman and builders... people who didn't just know about stuff but knew how to get real stuff done. That's the Hebrew idea of wisdom. And it's God's idea of wisdom too.

That's why it makes so much sense that the Big Book of AA's favourite scripture to accompany the steps is the book of James. The idea of working the steps is not having a better education around addiction - it's not understanding the recovery process - the whole thing is ABOUT DOING THEM. It's about actually doing the work - going through the steps... and that's what James is all on about - he puts it like this, 'faith without works is dead.' Well said James. Keep in mind that James is not mad at anyone - he is just simply trying to explain the Jewish idea of wisdom to a bunch of Greek folks. And since we've all grown up in an education system and culture (including our churches) that took the Greek version of wisdom to heart we need to RE-LEARN what wisdom really looks like.

So, here's me trying to re-learn wisdom from the Bible through AA. And it boils down to this: it's what I do with what I know. Wanna join me?