Apologies to Tina Turner for hijacking her song title and making it worse, but the question of the day is why junkyard … wisdom?
Everybody understands the junkyard piece, at least they do when they read my bio. I grew up working Saturdays and summers in our family’s wrecking yard – aka junkyard – and it shaped my perspective on the world. I see life through the prism of a family business that bought junk and sold parts.
But how does wisdom fit into this perspective?
Wisdom is elusive to define. It is many layered, showing up in a variety of ways. Sometimes holding your tongue is wisdom, sometimes speaking boldly is wisdom, sometimes remaining calm is wise, sometimes jumping into action is the right course. Point is, wisdom can be defined through a wide variety of prisms.
The simple textbook definition of wisdom is, “the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment.” I like the blending here – wisdom is not just experience, not just knowledge, but both blended with good judgment.
So what, exactly, is junkyard wisdom?
Like the Webster definition, junkyard wisdom is also a blending. In the junkyard context, wisdom is comfortably understanding something (a junk car most commonly) in the tension of its contrasts.
In the junkyard we would buy wrecked or worn out cars. We bought them “as is.” The source varied – insurance companies, abandoned vehicles on the roadside, or just people wanting to get an old clunker out of their crammed garage. But in each situation, the seller saw their vehicle as, more or less, junk. Insurance companies didn’t want to pay to fix up the wreckage, the city saw the abandoned car as a nuisance, the owner of the clunker was just happy to get rid of it.
We’d buy the car – or tow it for free – and bring it to our yard.
At this point the car went through a metamorphosis. We bought junk. But we sold parts. The parts were possibilities, dreams actually, because they were solutions to your problems. You had a good Mustang but it had a dented fender. We had a junk Mustang that had a fender in good condition. We bought junk, but we created value by solving one of your problems.
We held the two competing perspectives – junk and value – in tension together. We wanted your junk, even had to have your junk if we wanted to stay in business. But we still viewed it as junk. We saw the parts as being worth more than the whole, and acted accordingly.
That, in its own gritty way, is wisdom. We held two seemingly opposites – junk and value – in the same old jalopy nobody wanted.
Richard Rohr shares the same insight – minus the junkyard context – in this bit of insight:
“The spiritual gift of discernment (1 Corinthians 12: 10) is when seemingly good things can be recognized as sometimes bad things, and seemingly bad things can also be seen to bear some good fruit.”
That sounds an awful lot like buying bad things – wrecked or worn out cars – and bearing good fruit.
But is this discernment that Rohr speaks of wisdom? Read further:
“This is the difference between merely having correct information and exhibiting the true spiritual gift of wisdom (1 Corinthians 12: 8). Both knowledge and wisdom are good, but wisdom is much better. It demands the maturity of discernment, which is what it takes to develop a truly consistent ethic of life.”
The sellers of all those junk cars had the right information – the car was broken, trashed, worn out, unfixable. But they didn’t discern the value to others – the still functioning parts that would replace some other vehicle’s brokenness. Yes, I know this metaphor can be taken too far. Plenty of people understood their junk car had value to us. But they had so significantly discounted the value as to be almost meaningless at times.
Rohr continues with a few insights about how this relates to us as people:
“Once you have learned to discern the real and disguised nature of both good and evil, you recognize that everything is broken and fallen, weak and poor—while still being the dwelling place of God: you and me, your country, your children, your marriage, and even your church and mosque and synagogue. That is not a put-down of anybody or anything, but actually creates the freedom to love imperfect things! As Jesus told the rich young man, “God alone is good!” (Mark 10: 18). In this, you may have been given the greatest recipe for happiness for the rest of your life. You cannot wait for things to be totally perfect to fall in love with them, or you will never love anything. Now, instead, you can love everything!”
Did you catch that one line? “You cannot wait for things to be totally perfect to fall in love with them, or you will never love anything.” That’s wisdom we desperately need. In our hearts, our families, our marriages…we need to stop waiting for perfection and just love “as is.”
Junk cars, like broken people, often have the parts to make something whole.
Here’s the thing: I’m really glad Rohr wrote this, but I had learned it decades ago from my time working in the family junkyard.
His insight is junkyard wisdom at its finest. It’s holding the opposites in tension, recognizing their inherent contradictions, but understanding the very contradiction is what makes them worthy of our attention. It’s seeing the contradiction as how life is, not something to be avoided. It’s entering into the contradiction, living in the tension, and thriving.
Put spiritually, we are broken people living in a broken world, yet we are still loved by God. Put in junkyard terms, they are junk cars, yet they are solutions for other brokenness.
That’s junkyard wisdom.
Quotes by Richard Rohr were taken from the book Yes, And … Daily Meditations.