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.  

It is a collection of whakataukī, or proverbial sayings.  Aroha, as the title, is ‘a way of thinking that encompasses love, compassion, sympathy and empathy’ (4) — while whakataukī are a ‘portal, a doorway into the ancient, sacred energy of aroha, the timeless wisdom of Māori culture’ (5).

Hinemoa Elder is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and has lived her life in the public eye here in Aotearoa New Zealand.  She writes with warmth as she chats away with us.  She is open with her own griefs and hurts, while also demonstrating how these whakataukī have helped sustain her.  The book often feels like a cry from the heart, with many sections concluding with gentle, pleading questions for us to engage.  It is very appealing.

In it all, she is very much the sage among us. 

The structure of the book is kinda cool.  She has one whakataukī for each week of the year — and so 52 in total.  They are collected under four Māori core values (see on the left) which are among those with a high profile now, explicitly guiding institutions like schools.  In our return to Aotearoa New Zealand, I’ve enjoyed beginning to discover how rich and deep and full they are.

The book is blessed with a superb Subject Index.

[This is such a fascinating area.  I’ve just interrupted myself to watch a 10min video about ubuntu, a core value in the African worldview — see here … with similarities to whanaungatanga]. 

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. 

Each reflection starts like this (see on the right): the whakataukī in Māori, or te reo, followed by a translation and then a pithy expression of the meaning.  It is so well done — and makes the book accessible for anyone, living anywhere.

All sorts of themes emerge: from beauty and ageing to suicide (‘I want to rid the world of suicide’, 121); from friendship to meeting ‘the emotional needs of babies’; from mothers to epistemology (‘advocating for the inclusion of indigenous knowledge alongside what is conventionally thought of as science’ 110).

Reading Hinemoa Elder’s book took me back to Alyce McKenzie’s book from almost twenty years ago — Hear and Be Wise.  She writes about the proverbial wisdom within the ancient Hebrew world, captured in books of the Old Testament like Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon. 

I’d love to hear Drs Elder and McKenzie in conversation.  

Wouldn’t you?  I wonder how they’d listen and speak…

The have so much in common…

Both address an ancient and neglected area in finding wisdom for life and living.

Both have a focus.  Elder speaks of aroha, while McKenzie writes of shalom.  We could go a little further.  McKenzie sees the purpose of the wisdom sayings to be about (a) preserving shalom; (b) managing fools and foolishness; and (c) building character.  In her own world and way, I suspect Elder would agree.

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. 

Both collect their proverbial sayings around certain themes, and many of those themes are the same — like friendship, for example.

I woke up to wisdom when I read these statements on page 1 of McKenzie’s book: “I am convinced that this is the era of the sage.”  Our culture “craves sages.”  This is what Elder offers her context.  She is a sage.  McKenzie expresses it in this way a few pages later.  Surely, Elder would concur?

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).

A tradition of wisdom sayings is part of what ancient and indigenous cultures have to offer those who are willing to listen today.

… 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