Last Monday was World Mother-Language Day.  Al Jazeera celebrated the day on their Interactives page by collecting 25 proverbs from 25 different languages, recited by speakers of that language.  If you scroll down this page, you’ll discover it.  It is very cool.

This comes a couple of days after I came across Hinemoa Elder’s AROHA: Māori wisdom for a contented life lived in harmony with our planet.  

The structure of the book is kinda cool.  She has one whakataukī for each week of the year — and so 52 in total. 

Hinemoa Elder roams the garden, the bush, the ocean, the birds and the fish etc as she collects these proverbial sayings and writes her own personal reflections on them. 

They have so much in common…

Both affirm the value of proverbial sayings, that ‘short sentence founded upon long experience, containing a truth’ (Cervantes) — and they stick with everyday human life to find them. 

To be a sage, you had to work hard and work continuously.  You had to be alert to your context and responsive in how you brought the wisdom traditions to bear on it.  Your goals were peace in family and community, character building in habits of restraint and integrity capable of minimising the chaos of life, survival in complex and dangerous political situations, and preservation of the community’s religious identity in times of oppressive occupation (6). 

… and then McKenzie goes a little bit further.

The Hebrew tradition expresses it explicitly, just seven verses into the first book: ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ (Proverbs 1.7).  For them, it is about observing human experiences and the natural world, and it is about receiving what has been handed down through ancestors and traditions — but it is more than that and it is earlier than that.  It starts with God and with fearing him.  

“Fear … ?!”  Yikes.  Here fear leans more to the sacred than the scared.  It leans more to ’twas grace that taught my heart to fear’ than to ‘grace my fears relieved’.  This fear speaks of a level of reverence and awe that takes God so seriously that our lives begin with him and build around him and his purposes, as creator and redeemer of the world and its people.

McKenzie writes about the bended knee, the listening heart, the cool spirit and the subversive voice. With each of these four, she zooms out a bit, to take in Jesus as well.  He used proverbial sayings — in fact, the heart of his teaching, the parable, belongs to this same family of genre.  Jesus is a sage.  For McKenzie, he fulfills and completes the Hebrew tradition — even, at times, subverting it with his teaching, ‘the gracious words that came from his lips’ that so ‘amazed’ people (Luke 4.22, 36). 

Now, Hinemoa Elder does not need to go where Alyce McKenzie goes.  Of course not.  She is still a sage, engaging with sages, with a wisdom that needs to be heard.  But as I respond to her gentle invitation, in just the 13th, 14th and 15th words that she writes — ‘open your heart’ (4) … I try to do so as a believer in the God and a follower of the Jesus to whom McKenzie points.

nice chatting

Paul