The Questions We Ask, Part III:
With Whom Are You in Conversation?
Here are Part I and Part II of this series.
“Be intentional about your inputs.”
Those words stuck with me. I was a young man attending a leadership conference and rooming with an older man whom I greatly respected, despite the fact that he tucked his undershirt into his BVDs (a habit that I gently informed him was weird, for which he has since thanked me). He introduced me to what was at the time The Mars Hill Tapes, a subscription service that, every other month, shipped a cassette tape to your mailbox filled with in-depth interviews with a wide variety of thinkers and conducted by Ken Myers, an extremely thoughtful Christian whose career began on NPR’s All Things Considered. It was essentially a podcast before podcasts — or laptops or cell phones, for that matter — existed. Today, Mars Hill Audio Journal continues to produce exceptionally thoughtful content, though of course they do so digitally and send MP3s to your email or to an app on your phone.
This old friend of mine (to remain nameless here due to my mentioning his embarrassing underwear-tucking habit) made the case that we are so relentlessly bombarded with worldly inputs — many of which we do not choose but cannot avoid — that we must be intentional about filling our mental and spiritual inboxes with resources that will contribute to our sanctification and general flourishing as human beings. We must be intentional about our inputs.
Philosophy professor James K. A. Smith has written extensively about cultural liturgies, by which he means those public habits which shape us, even when we don’t realize they are doing so. Drawing from the work of Marshall McLuhan and philosopher Charles Taylor, Smith makes a very strong case that the inputs that shape us are much more subtle and subversive than we might realize. We must, therefore, be intentionally aware of what is shaping us, and intentionally proactive about having “our compass recalibrated” as Smith puts it.
So what is the question that we should ask to cultivate this intentionality?
Smith points to the first question that Jesus asks the disciples in the Gospel of John: “What do you want?” Our answers to this question might surprise us (Smith surmises that we don’t always want what we think we want). This is definitely the place to start. The Socratic cliché bears repeating: the unexamined life is not worth living. If we say we want to follow Jesus, but our time, energy, and treasures are spent seeking comfort or entertainment, or some other idyllic or idolatrous fantasy, we have to ask ourselves, is what I say I want really what I want. This point is so foundational and expansive that I cannot do justice to it here, and so I recommend reading Smith and others on this point (see recommended reading in part IV of this series).
Assuming that what we truly want is to be fully human by surrendering ourselves — mind, body, soul, and strength — to Jesus Christ the King, I’m going to suggest a more practical question, and again, one that I learned from Dr. Richard Horner of the Christian Study Center in Gainesville, Florida: With whom are you in conversation?
With Whom are You in Conversation?
Toconverse is a verb that comes from the Middle English meaning “to live among or be familiar with” and before that from the Old French meaning “to keep company with” and before that from the Latin “to turn with.” A Conversation is more than an exchange of words. It is living with, keeping company with, and even turning (i.e. changing) with (and because of) our conversation partners. So who are our conversation partners?
This goes back to the admonition given to me by my friend-of-the-odd-habit: be intentional about your inputs. Of course, by putting it in a question form, Horner has elicited honest reflection about what our inputs actually are. And as we’ve seen from Smith, those inputs take not only the form of words on a page, stories on a screen, or the preaching of pundits, but they are also the embodied messages of the oft-unexamined habits that form us. These are the conversations we’re having, and they are forming us whether we know it or not.
What’s more, often our most trusted conversation partners — close friends, church community, and family members — don’t always turn us in the right direction. In fact, they may turn us in several wrong directions all at once unless we are all, as a community, practicing this kind of intentionality. We must help them as they help us to be discerning about what in fact is of Christ and what is not.
At the same time, we must avoid echo chambers. In other words, as we avoid being shaped by ungodly forces, we must not bury our heads in the sand and refuse to listen to ideas that challenge or offend. We must diligently seek out sanctifying resources that help to redirect and recalibrate our hearts toward the love of Christ, while simultaneously exposing ourselves to the thoughts and experiences of what sociologists call the Repugnant Cultural Other, or RCO (for a wonderful study on this, I recommend How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds by Alan Jacobs). We need to both turn ourselves in the direction of that which is True, Good, and Beautiful, while listening to, and trying to understand, the voices of a mis-calibrated world.
Love God. Love others. Love God so that you are equipped to love others.
As for avoiding the echo chamber, the first best way is probably to simply listen to neighbors, co-workers, family members, and friends who do not share your convictions. Try to understand them. Try to see life through the lenses of their presuppositions before you try to show them life through yours.
Beyond that, don’t block people on social media just because they don’t agree with you; in fact, follow some people with whom you disagree. Follow them and refrain from commenting. Read articles from a wide range of publications, but again, do so only if your are committed to being formed by trusted voices first.
The key here is to read from within the presuppositions of the RCO in hopes that they will become, as Jacob’s puts it, a little less R and a little less O. The difficulty is to love these conversation partners without necessarily embracing their ideas (and in many cases, necessarily not embracing their ideas). We must love every individual equally, for each of us is the imago Dei—the very image of our common Creator!—but each of us is also fallen, and so, again, our hearts must be recalibrated if we are to first of all love the things of God so that we may help others do the same, and thereby flourish as human beings. In the next post I will suggest several means of accomplishing this.
More to come in The Questions We Ask, Part IV …
