My Conversation with Sophia
Reflections on Wisdom’s Contemplative Path
by
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Prolog
One night those familiar old Quaker words were echoing in my ear “Friends, meet together and know one another in that which is eternal, which was before
the world was.”
Eternal, I thought. Timeless.
From there my mind slipped easily to the melodies of the recent CD Timeless Quaker Wisdom.
Timeless Wisdom—what might that be?
I found myself musing on Wisdom’s words in the Bible “From everlasting I was firmly set, from the beginning, before earth came into being” (Proverbs 8:23).
Before I quite knew how I got there, I was hearing more echoes: the timeless, eternal Wisdom is so vividly present, and so personified, in Scripture books
like Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes, and in Ecclesiasticus and The Wisdom of Solomon.
Feeling led to refresh my memory of those ‘Wisdom Books’, I immersed myself again in some of their mystery. Were these echoes beginning to empower some
inner dialog I was seeking?
Time slipped by, and at length I felt myself becoming drowsy; I heard the eleven-o’clock hour beginning to strike
…three…four…five…six …
A dignified, tall and erect female figure appeared silently, her face at once serene and intense, and her voice at first echoed faintly as if from a long
distance away.
*
The Dialog
You are standing before me and your penetrating gaze follows me; you seem to be peering into the very depths of me. I have never seen you before but at
some level, I know that I have always been aware of your presence.
I am Wisdom.
Those first three words I hear have a strange way of reverberating all through me, almost as if they were coming out of me…
You will have to open to me what that wide-encompassing word means.
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About the Book
In the Bible, a mysterious Lady Wisdom appears in many guises and dominates in the “Wisdom Books” of the Old Testament and Apocrypha. But just what is this spirit that is so central to all of creation? In My Conversation with Sophia, author William Z. Shetter shares an imagined conversation with Sophia, the personification of wisdom.
Through this conversation, Shetter addresses how this ancient wisdom speaks to us today by exploring twenty-six facets of wisdom that include such subjects as attentiveness, simplicity, growth, humility, grace, and compassion. My Conversation with Sophia shows that wisdom is not the amassing of knowledge, but rather, it is insight. True wisdom is not only a matter of the mind but of the heart as well.
Shetter explains how wisdom’s timeless core is alive in the form of the wisdomlight that is at the center of all of us. We explore our own wisdom path in a spirit of contemplation—reflecting attentively on the depth of what our experience is telling us. As Sophia opens an awareness of the centrality of wisdom in the world’s great religions and ethical systems, she provides a deeper understanding of wisdom as the divine breath of all the great sacred paths.
William Z. Shetter takes the reader into the metaphorical and mystical realms of life as smoothly as gliding across a still lake in a canoe. His
Conversation with Wisdom gently leads us all into dialogue with the ineffable sage that moves within history and beyond it. It is a tremendous springboard
for an individual or group on a journey of deepening spirituality.
—Melanie Supan Groseta, Benedictine Oblate and Spiritual Director
About the Author
After devoting more than forty years to an academic career, in his retirement William Z. Shetter has been turning, in both writing and activity, increasingly toward contemplation. Most recently he is the author of Some Thoughts on Becoming Eighty-five. He is a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).