The Four Initiations of a Man: Sage

“But
if you wish to know how things come about, desire not understanding;
ask for grace, not instruction, the groaning of prayer, not diligent
reading, the Spouse not the teacher, God not man, darkness not clarity,
not light but the fire.” -St. Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey to God

I
have a good friend that is the Vice President of one of the largest
Christian Ministries in the world. He is a prophet and a servant. The Lord has him reading a book a week, taking karate (with his son) and
helping re-invent the families of America. He is becoming a true wise
man…

Truly wise men become men for others instead of just storehouses of
information. Martin Burber, Karl Rahner, Thomas Aquinas, and C.S. Lewis – these men did
not lose their fascination with wise men, educated academics, or
literary males, but integrated their knowledge and research into global,
cosmic, and divine concerns. (This is C.S. Lewis pictured to the left.)

The “Sage” or “Wise Man” archetype is the man who integrates his
left-brain knowledge into the bigger and often nonrational realm of
wisdom. They are not satisfied with being technicians or mere academics
.
The uninitiated man stops with the accumulations of facts and
information; he does discipline it (the Warrior), taste it (the Lover), or
integrate it with the big picture (the King). Without these, he becomes an
arrogant peasant, a narrow specialist, a withdrawn dreamer, an office
bureaucrat.

If we do not both validate and then challenge the life of the mind, we
cannot create the sage or wise man. That process is called
contemplation or meditation. You have to be spiritual to be a true wise
man. Francis told us that we could do any work or study “as long as it
did not extinguish the spirit of prayer and devotion,” which always had
to come first.

You can be brilliant and faith-filled at the same time! The true sage
has a balance between knowing and not knowing, between intelligence and
not needing to be intelligent, between darkness and light, the wise man
knows what he does not know.

Victor Frankl says: “Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment instead.” It is such willingness to live with bewilderment that characterizes the true wise man.