The Soul of Quiet Calm

“The man who listens speaks to eternity.”

*Proverbs 21:28

To listen well means the willingness not to be listened to in return. To expect a lack of commensurate attention. Many well-meaning friends, family and strangers will often have the sincerest of affections for you, but not have the ability to still their own frenetic spirits long enough to even become capable of hearing you. Listening is oftentimes the very loneliest of activities. Yet it remains the most needful of hospitalities in our noisy, clamoring, distracted world.

“Let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath. For the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God.” So said Yaakov, the brother of our Master. This passage has perplexed me for no less than twenty-five years. How do we get from the hearing/speaking ratio all the way to wrath in a single sentence? I mean… did I miss that calculus lesson one week in Sunday school..?

”For the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity. See how great a forest a little fire kindles!”

Photo by Matt Howard on Unsplash

I can’t say that I’ve come to understand it, but I think I’m beginning to perceive the correlation at least. Our culture is so loose-lipped that we don’t have much investment in the real estate of listening. All of our emphasis is on being heard, not so much on hearing. That creates an atmosphere of social suffocation, relational disillusionment, disassociation from community. This is our culture.

If I’m reading the epistle right, Yaakov places the heaviest emphasis of spiritual formation right in our mouth. He likens the tongue to the bridle in a horse’s maw, the rudder of a ship, or the spark that sets an entire mountain forest aflame. The extent to which we govern our speech indicates the amount of self-control that we possess. Even as I write that, I am overwhelmed with a sense of dread for how much further I have to go in this apprenticeship. Will I ever get there, wherever “there” is?

All the while, full knowing that we have nowhere else to go, no other path of ultimate hope to walk out, these are the only means available to us in order to restore the world. Of course, we can do precious little of that without renovating ourselves. We are continuum creatures, after all. We attract the kinds of people that we are, and we replicate the kinds of people that we become. For all of our obsession with mission and purpose, we cannot do any better externally without first becoming better internally. The reverse would be as absurd as an athlete hoping to perform better on game day without metric tons of practice beforehand. The musician, the artist, the dancer, the marksman, the fighter. Pick your metaphor; the same rule applies.

Perhaps the noblest, humblest soul would always be content, no matter what level of attention she received. Maybe she could listen every day with a level of hearing that always weighed in favor of the other before her. I’m not there yet, but I’d like to be.

It’s possible that the most glorious destination we could ever achieve is an unmarked grave.

C. T. Giles