When you push the accelerator down on a golf cart it takes off quickly and then slows back down to a reasonable speed. The reason it behaves this way is due to a little thing called a governor switch. I shouldn't know this. The only reason I do is because one of my childhood golfing buddies knew how to remove those things. We were young and wanted to go faster.
But life, like golf carts, requires a governor switch. It's called humility.
There's no governor switch.
In these type of religious atmospheres it’s often been hard to put my finger on the strange and distinctly unfriendly feeling. It’s a sort of quiet violence which initially is tricky to articulate and call out but eventually leaves its evidence in a trail of marginalized and wounded people.
As long as the quietly competitive ethos remains business as usual we become intoxicated like the frog in the pot of cool water numb to the fact that the heat is gradually accelerating to the point of being cooked and eaten like an appetizer within the larger buffet of cutthroat consumerism.
Recently I was powerfully reminded of the wisdom of St. Benedict while spending 48 hours of silence at St. Walburga Abbey in northern Colorado. The tone of Walburga is a clear reflection of Benedict’s first rule: Listen. Listen, he says, “with the ear of your heart.” He suggested the spiritual life is about exercising muscles beyond abs or intellect and to stretch our feelings, emotions, and imaginations in hopes of conforming further to the way of Christ. This way of radical listening is like a detox for the soul removing us from the momentum of egotistical climbing and competing. In this listening environment I was invited to see the reality of my own addictive and narcissistic tendencies.
Humble listening moves us toward an incarnational lifestyle of giving and receiving – openly and gently accepting the ‘other’ (including the 'other' side of myself).
The sisters of the Abbey get it.
I joined them to pray the hours (except the ones at 4:30am!) and interacted with them minimally during meal times, but what I absorbed from them was a shocking humility full of power and grace. In the silence and beauty of the Abbey grounds this humble life seemed to be intentionally cultivated in the deliberate absence of life’s daily scoreboard.
Sometimes our understanding of humility is mistaken as passivity or weakness, but that’s not real humility. Real humility is sharply prophetic and it’s power is expressed in the world through compassion. When humility expresses itself through compassion it 's like a flashlight revealing just how abnormal and insensitive all the climbing and competing really is.
In his book The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann notes, “Empires are never built or maintained on the basis of compassion.” Jesus undermined the empire through really inefficient means like weeping and grieving over poverty and death. He once did that over a poor man named Lazarus and another time he did it over the poverty and death of his city – Jerusalem. Before healing and resurrection took place there was an apparent humble display of compassion.
True humility invokes change.
We/I need a new governor switch – a rule or pathway to regulate our speed and cultivate true humility. We don’t think it into existence. We don’t achieve it through more climbing and competing. We weep for it and at least part of us likely has to die for it. God says it like this, “If my people who are called by my name (that’s us!) will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, I will listen, forgive them and heal their land.
Comments