A Fiction Prose Reflection, Book IX of XI

byChrisWhite – 2025

On the Series:
This series weaves together the eleven cardinal virtues: Hope, Charity, Prudence, Kindness, Faith, Love, Temperance, Fortitude, Wisdom, Patience, and Justice, through a synthesis of literary prose and poetry. Each reflection reaches into the marrow of human experience, drawing on both original verse and timeless lines from poets who gave voice to the sacred. The ninth installment turns to Wisdom. Wisdom is the voice that speaks last. Patience is the silence that holds the room open for Wisdom to speak.  not as doctrine or dogma, but as an act of persistence when there is no proof left to touch.

There’s an old man just off Cheatham Springs Road, gravel long since taken root in moss, barn withered and leaning to the side like it’s whispering a secret to the hillside. Folks in town call him Burl Honeycutt, though he’s never introduced himself by any name at all. If you see him at all, it’ll be from the road, a shape in the field with a bent back and a dog trailing behind like an appreciative stray.

No one asks much of Burl. He doesn’t keep a phone. Doesn’t show up at the Baptist church anymore, not since Miss Lottie passed. His clothes are the same every season: tobacco-colored pants, a flannel shirt whose cuffs are more hole than fabric, boots held together with baling twine and grace.

But every fall, when the coyotes start coming closer and the fields go pale, folks still find a stack of split wood left on their porch, always the ones too old to split it themselves. No note. No knock. Just warmth where cold was meant to be.

They say he doesn’t talk much because he’s alone. But I’ve seen him talk to things most folks don’t even notice: the tree stump that’s been hollowed out by beetles, the creek when it runs too low, even the dirt itself, like it’s a child needing comfort. He listens harder than most preachers preach.

And when someone’s boy runs off, or someone’s girl breaks down, or a man loses the only job that kept him upright, they still go looking for Burl. Not for advice. But just to sit on that lopsided porch and watch the world turn slow. Sometimes he’ll say something. Sometimes he won’t. But they always leave steadier.

“Wisdom—it does not announce itself.
It rides in the back seat and watches the rain.
It does not flinch when the road goes crooked.”
— Chris White, “Elegy for the Voice That Does Not Shout”

It was the spring Miss Edna died that I first sat with him. I’d known her since I was a child, had watched her knuckles swell and her laughter fall silent. She’d been gone three days, and I was walking past Burl’s when he raised one hand, not in greeting, just in gravity; and nodded toward a stump across from him. I sat.

He didn’t speak for a long time. Then he said, without looking up:
“She was ready before you were.”

And just like that, the ache in me shifted. Not gone. Just… rearranged into something else.

That’s what he does. Rearranges the weight of things.

He once told a young man who was set on leaving town that the best soil grows over broken ground. He told the mayor not to build the new feed store where the swallows nested each spring—“They come back like memory. You don’t pave over memory.” And he told a child whose dog had died, “The heart has many rooms. You just found the door to another one.”

No headlines. No stage. Just Wisdom, wearing the same coat it wore yesterday, patched at the elbow, smelling faintly of ash and bread and time.

“Wisdom is oftentimes nearer when we stoop than when we soar.”

— William Wordsworth

They don’t teach this in seminary or law school or any place with fluorescent lights. What Burl knows, he learned the way trees learn to bend before the storm comes. Quiet. Observant. With roots sunk deeper than the eye can guess.

“We speak of Wisdom as if it were a crown—
but no.
It is the scar beneath it.
The hand that steadies,
not the hand that builds.”
— Chris White

This, then, is the Virtue of Wisdom.
Not brilliance. Not triumph.
But the practiced, patient art of living without needing to be right.
Of holding silence long enough for it to bloom into understanding.
Of placing firewood where it’s needed, and saying nothing when it’s found.

And if anyone asks where to find such a man,
tell them to follow the scent of pipe smoke and creek water
just past the fence that collapses into rust.
He won’t greet you.
But he’ll know why you came.