Listening Widely
LETTER BY BRIAN MORYKON
Knowledge alone doesn’t guarantee wisdom.
Neither does practice alone. A person can be faithful in physical exercise, but if they have poor form, it harms the body over time. It’s the same for spiritual exercise and the soul.
Wisdom combines knowledge and practice. It begins with listening widely to people whose lives match their words. From that listening, we discern with the Holy Spirit what is good and true. We come to know these truths with our whole being as we put them into practice.
Listening widely is crucial here. We need learning spaces outside our current context and clan — spaces where we are likely to encounter ideas that spark internal resistance. Carolyn Arends encourages students in the Renovaré Institute to pay attention to such resistance. It may be an invitation from God to grow.
Looking back on my life, the books and spaces that most shaped me were ones I was a little scared about entering. If you’d asked me what I was scared of, I may have said, “Of being led astray.” At a deeper level, I think I was afraid of being wrong, of losing my tribe — even scared, perhaps, of losing my connection to God, who I assumed dwelt most fully inside my tidy theology.
Of course, we do well to exercise reasonable caution with what we read and who we listen to. And we need wise community to tell us when we fall off the rails of orthodoxy. But many of us never even leave the train station of our own tradition and preference.
And that’s a shame. Because within the narrow way of Jesus are vast and varied landscapes of Christian tradition — from all times and every nation — each containing buried treasure. We are poorer when we don’t venture out to discover them.
One thing Renovaré feels called to do is unearth some of these treasures and put them on display. Decades ago, a book of curated writings called Devotional Classics did this for me, bringing to light writers I’d never heard of — or heard of but never dared to read.
Here in 2024, we’re offering podcast conversations about Christian luminaries through the ages — from the Desert Fathers and Mothers to George Washington Carver.
So, Lord, help us to listen widely and listen well to your servants of all kinds, especially the ones who aren’t like us. May we, by your power at work in us, embody what we hear and become people of wisdom, gentleness, justice, and love.
Brian Morykon
Director of Communications
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LET’S DIVE IN...
CURATED BY GRACE POUCH
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1.
Amisho “Sho” Baraka came on our Life with God podcast for a fascinating conversation with Nate Foster about George Washington Carver — a man whose faith directed his genius toward the good of others.
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2.
Enjoy a bird’s eye view of George Washington Carver’s story, as shared by the C.S. Lewis Institute.
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“We just see her as a great poet, but her literary work was steeped in gospel and Christocentricity,” says Sho Baraka of Revolutionary War-era poet, Phillis Wheatley. Read Wheatley’s 1773 poem, “On the Works of Providence” on renovare.org.
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Renovaré Board and Ministry Team member, Tina Dyer, writes that reading from a wider variety of Christian voices deepened her spiritual formation and affirmed her sense of inclusion in God’s family.
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In his book Lent, Esau McCaulley (author of Reading While Black) writes: Instead of becoming a source of despair, our sin becomes the arena of God’s glory. He doesn’t have barely enough grace to forgive us. He is rich in the stuff; it overflows from his very nature. Read an excerpt from the Lent chapter, “Facing Death, Finding Hope.”
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6.
For those of us who fit the bill, Christianity Today’s article “Reading While Not Black” offers “two guiding principles for majority-culture people engaging minority-culture perspectives.”
Grace Pouch
Content Manager