Hearing the Truth Requires HumilityRead Time 9 min

Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Isaiah 35:4-7

James 2:1-5

Mark 7:31-37

On a summer day, warm and befriending, while on a walk through the neighborhood, I happened by one of the local parks. Set back in a grassy corner, two 8-year-olds were engaged in a kerfuffle over the rules of their game, any fairness obviously paralyzed by their vocal skirmish. The one was bent on being heard, shouting about rules needing to be followed. The other had no intention of hearing his truth, and so he held both hands over his ears, all the while screaming “blah, blah, blah, blah.” In frustration, the first finally turned around and walked away. “Hey, where you going?” called the other, but the first one simply kept on walking, truth tucked away in his back pocket.

We don’t always want to hear truth. Too often, truth will expect change on our part. Truth can complicate our given stance on life. It can blur the clarity we’ve created for ourselves. Life can be much simpler, we think, if we are deaf to the voices we do not want to hear.

The journalist Frank Bruni recently wrote a book titled “The Age of Grievance.” For the most part, it is a recounting of largely political grievances we’ve encountered back and forth for the past two or three decades. It tends to be a history of our blurring of American life as we’ve grieved over the business of running a nation. We blame others for the state of affairs in which we live. We out-shout one another, lest we hear their truth. We think life will be much simpler if we are deaf to someone else’s wisdom, only we don’t think of theirs as wisdom.

The last chapter of Bruni’s book offers a solution — humility. He suggests we recognize how no one of us has the full answer to living successfully as a nation. It takes humility to accept the fact others too have some of the wisdom necessary to negotiate life. In short, no one has all of the wisdom; everyone has some of the wisdom. Only humility on the part of each of us, he writes, can address the grievances we have with one another. It means we cannot pretend to live life as someone who is deaf to a part of life.

The week’s Gospel is that of Jesus curing a man who had been both deaf and mute. The part of the tale that’s easy to miss is that it was the man’s friends who brought the man to Jesus, which is probably how it usually happens to us as well. It is others who so often bring us to hearing what we did not hear or perhaps even do not want to hear. Left to our own devices, we can be quite content in not hearing. It’s others, often our friends and those who love us, who become the catalyst that enables God to do what God does best, that is for God to open our ears to truth and wisdom and the grounded realities of living the Gospel.

This week’s portion from the Letter of St. James bluntly confronts us with our temptations to give preference to the more respected and honored in our society over those who may find themselves living on the fringes. The letter tugs at our consciences and reminds us how we’ve all succumbed to the temptations in spite of our best intentions. Sometimes, we’d rather be deaf to that reality.

At this point in history, two groups of individuals who often tend to be easily dismissed or ignored by our culture and to whose plight many are deaf are the unborn and the immigrants. We’ve conveniently divided ourselves as a nation in support of one and deaf to the other — often that support is based upon our political leanings. What we so often do not want to hear, what we are so often deaf to hearing, is the Gospel’s charge to care for both, equally so and without political bias. If only we would hear their stories.

The story of the two 8-year-olds in the park had not yet ended as I walked on. From the far end of the park, I watched as the two came to terms over their squabble. The first had simply walked away, stopped and turned back. Too far away for me to hear them, it seemed the other began to grudgingly listen to the first and finally gave in. A bit of humility for both, perhaps. The two then returned to their game.

Always in the game of life it is the hearing that opens us to new beginnings. It is how relationships form anew, in the story of the Gospel and in the stories of our lives. It is what God does best.

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

When have you tried to openly listen to someone with whom you disagreed?

Can you name any wisdom or truth in the political party which you oppose?