Slow Down

We need to awaken the quieter virtues to be all Christ wants us to be.

I awoke to the sound of gunfire. I lurched out of bed, grabbed my aching knees, threw on my robe and ran to the window. Would I see a police squad storming my neighbor's house or a psychopath aiming a rifle into the sky? Neither. There, in the driveway, a car backfired as the driver threw our newspaper onto the honeysuckle. I stumbled out the door, hoping no one would see my sleepy face and pale, skinny legs. Then I squinted down at the headlines: economic problems, terrorism, political wrangling, and a sex scandal. Quickly, I moved to the sports page.

By the time I got back inside, the upstairs thumped to the beat of my daughters' music. Perhaps the car had awakened them as well. After a shower, a shave, and breakfast, l completed ten minutes of "devotions," including 20 seconds of high-quality prayer. Then I checked my e-mail, called a business and got put on hold (while being assured that my call was valuable), played computer solitaire to bide my time, checked e-mail again, heard the microwave ding, took out my reheated coffee, checked e-mail again, gave up on the phone call, kissed my wife goodbye, hopped in the car, and drove to a store.

As I raced through curves, radio announcers told me to buy a lottery ticket, get tires at a discount, and call in to win a free pass to the latest movie. At the grocery store, I grabbed a "homemade" lunch package, waited impatiently in the long line, heard the "beeps" of the cashier's scanner, read outrageous headlines on the tabloids, listened to music coming out of the earbuds of the guy in front of me… and so on and so on.

Oh, the noise, noise, noise, noise.

On any given day, many of us would say that Dr. Seuss's Grinch was right. Every Who down in Whoville sings for our attention and money, and we get fed up. We scream from our caves that we are going to unplug once and for all… then we turn up the volume of our favorite rock songs, and the world is put right again.

Our Daily Cacophony

Noise could be understood as everything that clamors for our attention. Of course, there is physical noise, such as the hum of the freeway or the incessant meowing of my elderly cat. But we hear other sounds as well: noises about how to live, what is important and who we need to be.

Noise is not evil. Some noises we can control; some we cannot. Some we ignore; others drive us crazy. And some sounds get into our heads and motivate our actions.

Physical noise. We don't need to be convinced that the world is noisy to our ears. We hear cars, trains and planes. Washers, vacuums, fans. Screaming kids. At a recent college football game I attended, the sound system blasted deafeningly whenever the game stopped: advertisements, announcements, pounding music that made conversation impossible. Silence was not to be tolerated.

There are also physical noises that don't come at the ear, but at the eye. We live in an image-saturated world, a world that shouts at us visually. From TV, the Internet, movies, and magazines, this blitz of images flashes by at a rate too speedy to process rationally, and it often moves us to overstate the photographic values of beauty, artistic composition, flashiness, violence, and newness. We flit around, treating life like a series of snapshots. Sometimes we are amazed by images, sometimes dulled. We may close our eyes for relief, but usually not for long.

Cultural noise. Contemporary America sends us thousands of messages a day, from "Get the body you always wanted" to "Don't miss this movie's exciting bloodbath." Our glamour-conscious society tells us to do what it takes to be and stay beautiful, rich, young, and famous. All of this requires more: more sexiness, more consumer goods, more twentysomethingness, more popularity. Conveniently, all of these are available for purchase.

Freedom of choice is a value of supreme importance. The whole point of having an enviable appearance and the right amount of wealth is that we will then be able to do as we please, like celebrities do. Choose your dream vacation. Choose a self-serving moral system. According to our culture, freedom is important because with it we can have more fun, and more fun is, well, more fun than we are currently having.

And if fun is the purpose of life, we should have extreme fun. Snowboard off a cliff! Rent a Bugatti speedster for a day! Make love for ten hours straight! Why have ordinary fun when we can have an epic experience?

Curiously, while we are trying to live the message that everything matters now, we are also told that nothing really matters. There is no Certain Truth, no transcendent reality. Since all is opinion and feeling, the best we can do is find some pleasure in the moment, some diversion from our troubles. Maybe we can make a difference here and there but most of the time, we contend with the paradoxical sounds of the noise of everythingness and the noise of nothingness. We are overwhelmed with stimulation, but we are often left feeling empty.

Emotional noise. Our memory can loudly replay events we wish had never occurred. Sexual abuse, parenting mistakes, estrangement from friends. And most of us hear accusing voices that tell us we don't measure up. We all hear voices from our past, voices that say we are deficient, that we will never amount to anything.

We also hear naggingly loud questions about the future. Will I be able to get a good job and keep it? Will I ever get married or stay married or have kids or raise them well? Will l fulfill my dreams? Will I fulfill my parents' dreams? Will the earth survive, or will we survive what is happening to the earth? Will anyone ever love me fully? Will I know God or stay faithful to him? What if I never get better than I am right now? What will happen when I die? Sometimes we suppress these questions; sometimes we face them well. If not addressed, these noises can shout down our spirit and stunt our growth. They can damage our ability to hear God's voice.

Deafening Noise and Deafness

When noise overwhelms us, we move from one urgency to the next. We retreat into the superficial world we have decided to occupy, sometimes to such a degree that those who do not seem to care about consumer culture appear to us as odd and out of touch.

Take Jesus, for example. We are astounded that he commanded a leper not to tell anyone about being healed (Mark 1:44), and we are baffled by his silent reply to Pilate's question about where he came from (John 19:9). Although Jesus doesn't seem to understand good public relations, perhaps his choices are more consistent with divine character. First Kings 19:11-12 tells us something about the distance between God's ways and ours:

Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart
and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was
not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but
the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake
carne a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the
fire came a gentle whisper.

If our church services are any measure of our desires, we seem to prefer a God of wind and earthquake and fire to a God of quiet presence. We want a showy, special-effects deity, a God at least as flashy as our culture. Otherwise, we're bored.

What the deaf lose first. When our daughters were teenagers, we sometimes argued with them about their media choices. This did not always go well. Too often we resorted to the classic standoff: "I am wiser than you are" vs. "You are too old to possibly know what is good for me." During one of these debates, we heard this argument: "Look, seeing sex in a movie does not mean I am going to go out and hook up every night!"

Of course, literally, our daughter was right. And this got me thinking. Our larger problem may not be the gaining of imitated immoral behaviors but the losing of subtle, soft-spoken character qualities. The noise of culture overwhelms the less brassy aspects of life, including what I call the quieter virtues: discernment, innocence, authenticity, modesty, reverence, contentment, and generosity. Because we tend not to notice these important virtues, I want to turn up their volume so we can hear what they have to tell us.

For the deaf, the sign language of virtue. If we are becoming deaf to these good things, perhaps, like the literally deaf, we need to learn a language—virtue language—a method of speaking that will help us find our way in the clutter and clamor of our existence. But there's a problem with this word virtue. For many of us, it doesn't just come with "baggage"; it has a hotel bellhop's rolling luggage cart packed to the top and is barely able to make it into the elevator. We see the clunky mess as the doors open, and we say, "No thanks, I'll take the stairs." To some, virtue just sounds old and stuffy, rather something Greeks cared about, and Romans, and monks—all those folks who wouldn't survive our culture for a day. But virtue is relevant, necessary, and exceedingly practical.

Perhaps a contemporary comparison will help. My favorite sport, tennis, provides many parallels with virtue-living. The court has boundaries. Most of the time, my goal is to smack the ball as hard as I can and keep it in the court. It isn't easy. The harder I hit the ball, the more likely it is to go out. Living a virtuous life is like this. It's living as all-out as we can while keeping our choices inside important boundaries. Sometimes we make mistakes, and the ball goes into the net or sails long or wide. So, we pick up the ball and try again. The more we focus and practice and discipline ourselves, the better things typically go.

One goal of all virtue practice is greater freedom. As Paul says, "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free" (Galatians 5:1). I practice tennis so that I am free to hit the ball as I intend to hit it. Living the quieter virtues should lead to freedom, not a perfectionism consumed with moral nitpicking. For example, if I am not content, I am not free to live without what I desire. If I am not authentic, I am not free to tell a difficult truth-and so on. In the best of times, living Jesus' way of life is about the joy of playing freely.

What the Quieter Virtues Are and Aren't

Just as the word virtue has its strengths and weaknesses, so does the word quiet. It conjures up images of shadow-fearing wimps and shushing librarians. But the quieter virtues are as tough and bold as they need to be. One reason they are enduring is because the quieter virtues are offshoots of traditional virtues. I like to call the traditional virtues "parents" and the quieter virtues their "children" The parents are the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, courage, and temperance, and the Christian virtues of faith, hope and love. Thus, discernment is a child of prudence, innocence is a child of justice, authenticity of courage, modesty of temperance, reverence of faith, contentment of hope and generosity of love. Perhaps this familial perspective will awaken the quieter virtues more fully for you.

In addition, the quieter virtues are not necessarily quiet—and they certainly aren't timid. Though they sometimes get lost in the loudness of our culture, the quieter virtues can make a ruckus themselves. At times, authenticity (a child of courage) requires daring intensity.

Reverence (a child of faith) may call for a boisterous reaction to sacrilege. Neither are the quieter virtues dull. G. K. Chesterton reminds us that living the life of faith means giving "room for good things to run wild." We are to be fearless adventurers, not fearful tight rope walkers. If Jesus' application of the virtues ranged from controversial debates with religious leaders to dramatic prayer in the wilderness, our application need not be dull either.

Let us listen intently to the gentle whisper of God.

For Discussion Or Reflection

1. In light of the examples in this chapter, what noise clamors for your attention?

2. To what degree has physical noise made you "breezy, shallow, unconnected"? What does this mean for your relationships?

3. Which cultural noises do you listen to the most and why: image consciousness, freedom for fun's sake, or the paradox of everythingness and nothingness?

4. What emotional voices from the past and about the future speak loudly to you?

5. Discuss 1 Kings 19:11-12. Why do you think God is sometimes loud and sometimes quiet? When do you notice the supernatural? How might you connect this discussion to the relationship between deafening noises and deafness?

6. What is our initial reaction to the idea of quieter virtues? If you resonate with the need for them, what attention are you giving to them?

Exercise

For 24 hours, record every exposure to the media. On an hourly basis, write down the type of media (TV, Internet, cell phone, texting, magazine, movie, ail advertisements and so on)and record your response or reflection in the moment.

During the next 24 hours, abstain from every form of media. Do not use the phone, cheek e-mail, go to a movie, look at a single advertisement. Write down what you did each hour and what it was like resisting or fasting from the media.

1. What does this exercise say to you about your involvement in a noisy world? (Did you think that you "would die" during your day without media?)

2. To what degree does addiction or dependence describe your involvement with the media? What habits would you like to break, maintain or create?

Adapted from Awakening the Quieter Virtues, by Gregory Spencer, chapter 1, copyright(c) 2010. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press PO Box 1400 Downers Grove, IL 60515. www.ivpress.com.

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