FEATURED ARTICLE: THE LOST LIFE OF LISTENING

Posted on by Lisa Deam

A couple weeks ago, we explored a needed Christian virtue: humility. This week’s featured article takes a look at a common vice: pride, or what the Latin fathers called Superbia. Author Paul J. Pastor believes pride to be the defining vice of our age. In an article in ChristianWeek, he defines pride not (only) as a nose-in-the-air type of attitude, but also as self-obsession. Many of us are tempted to think about ourselves so much (whether good thoughts or bad) that we miss what’s going on in the lives of those around us.

We might expect the antidote to pride to be a dose of humility. Perhaps it is. But Pastor believes another important corrective can be found in the practice of listening — of being truly attentive to another person.

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As I look around our world, and indeed within my own often-dark heart, I am convinced that listening is the needed thing. Nothing can replace it, nothing can give a short cut to it.

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Pride makes true attentiveness impossible. And in the reverse, true attentiveness sends pride fleeing like shadows before a floodlight.

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To listen requires us to set aside our view of ourselves as the unrecognized expert or the one of right opinion. To listen requires a measure of personal security that few of us have. To listen, in short, requires love, and love must be learned from the Great Lover.

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In fact, listening to others begins with listening to God:

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Listening was, you remember, the one command given to the disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration:

A voice came from the cloud, saying, “This is my Son, whom I have chosen; listen to him.” (Luke 9:35 (NIV)

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[A]s deeply as I believe anything, I believe this: if we cannot listen to God, we cannot know him. Know about him? Sure! But know him? Never without presence, never without quieting out hearts and turning to him in humility. It is in listening to God that we learn the skill that can be salt and light to our world.

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In short: listening can help us be superb while letting go of Superbia.

Read more.

FEATURED ARTICLE: RECOVERING THE VIRTUE OF HUMILITY

Posted on by Lisa Deam

When we as Christians need to be reminded that humility is a virtue, we might be in a spot of trouble. Such is the point made in a recent New York Times op-ed. The author, Peter Wehner, laments the dearth of humility today and seeks to recall Christians to this quiet virtue. He’d like to see more of it not just in our churches but also in civic life and especially in the political sphere. I certainly second that motion.

I was especially interested in the way Wehner defines two kinds of humility: moral and epistemological:

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I have become convinced that Christians should be characterized by moral humility. This doesn’t mean followers of Jesus should be indifferent to a moral order grounded in eternal truths or unable to judge some things right and others wrong. But they ought to be alert first and foremost to their own shortcomings — to the awareness of how wayward our own hearts are, how even good acts are often tainted by selfish motives, how we all struggle with brokenness in our lives.

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Epistemological humility should also characterize Christians . . . This doesn’t mean one ought to live in a state of perpetual doubt and uncertainty. If we did, we could never speak up for justice and moral truth. It does mean, however, that we’re aware that what we know is at best incomplete. “We see through a glass darkly” is how St. Paul put it in one of his letters to the Corinthians: We know only in part.

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Perhaps we could usefully think of humility as a spiritual practice, one that grounds us and helps us relate to God and our community. Might we also be called to humility as writers? Surely so. As we put words to screens and paper, we come up against all that we do not know and cannot express. We rely on one another and on God to try to come up with a fuller picture.

Read this op-ed in the New York Times.