Twenty years ago, I got stuck behind a van with a slightly dull missionary.
All of us missionaries were on some trip, and I discovered myself preparing for hours of driving with this man as my companion. I didn’t know him, but I sensed that if we got to talking, then some political and cultural differences were going to grow to be painfully obvious.
In short, I judged this man, fiercely, before he a lot as opened his mouth. I had sized him up, categorized him, set barriers between us, and thereby diminished him and myself in the method. All this, I believe, makes me a roughly normal human being. We are consistently doing this to one another.
But before the van ride began, I recall feeling a rare and particularly painful prompting of the Holy Spirit. In a moment I even have never forgotten, a phrase flashed through my mind: “There isn’t any such thing as a boring person.”
I felt convicted and inspired . As a missionary, I consistently found myself speaking with students concerning the dignity of human life, and the way that couldn’t be explained without God. Yet I had denied my fellow missionary’s image-bearing dignity before I even knew his name.
I ended up spending hours of that van ride attending to know a human being I still consider very fondly. Years later I still smile at his concern for his children, the compliments he gave his wife, and his drained but very real smile. I doubt he remembers this ride, but my life was modified by a small prompting from God to listen to someone I had instinctively diminished.
‘Illuminators’ and ‘Detractors’
All of this brings me to the newest book from New York Times columnist David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. In an uncanny echo of the language that marked my very own epiphany, Brooks writes, “There isn’t any such thing as an extraordinary person.” Perhaps that sounds trite at first, like saying the universe is big. But there isn’t any end of awe when you experience that truth.
Brooks’s phrasing also evokes a passage from C. S. Lewis’s sermon “The Weight of Glory.” His opening chapters delivered to mind Lewis’s reminder, in that sermon, that angels or demons are all the time lurking beneath extraordinary human fa çades. “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses,” Lewis wrote, “to do not forget that the dullest and most uninteresting person you may seek advice from may sooner or later be a creature which, in case you saw it now, you could be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption similar to you now meet, if in any respect, only in a nightmare.”
Brooks’s major claim in How to Know a Person is that extraordinary things occur after we listen to other people. On each a private and a national scale.
For Brooks, our declining ability to relate to at least one one other is at the basis of our public crises, from political divisiveness to economic insecurity. Both personally and socially, Brooks argues, we collapse after we don’t feel seen. But his primary aim just isn’t saving democracy or easing workplace turnover. This book is rather more personal. Brooks writes less like a prestigious newspaper columnist talking to the country than a father talking to his children. And the approach works.
He seems to have genuinely experienced a change in his own life. As a result, he desires to let you know that your best joys will likely be present in full relationships—and the way your best sorrows will come from the broken ones. I, for one, found myself wanting to listen.
Brooks divides the world into categories that, for him, merit proper nouns: “Illuminators,” whose attention to other people enhances them, and “Detractors,” whose indifference to other people diminishes them. Brooks is at his best when he’s telling stories of Illuminators. And stories are a giant a part of the book. Some are his own, but as befits a seasoned journalist, most of them revolve around other people.
Some sections of the book offer practical suggestions on learn how to be an Illuminator, even specific recommendations on what to say in conversation. One that immediately struck me was the reminder that focus is an on/off switch, not a dimmer. When you give it, give it fully.
My favorite example within the book highlights someone familiar to many readers of CT, the writer and journalist (and former CT editor) Andy Crouch. Brooks credits him with “listen[ing] to other people as if he were a congregant in a charismatic church. While you’re talking, he fills the air with grunts and ahas, amens, hallelujahs, and cries of ‘Preach!’ I really like talking to that guy.” As someone grateful to have shared a number of such “charismatic conversations” with Andy, I couldn’t agree more. Those moments modified me, which illuminates Brooks’s point: We are modified by individuals who pay us true attention.
This is a claim value pausing to noticeably consider. Brooks signifies that really seeing someone just isn’t just good in your empathy or understanding, but ultimately good for the opposite person, in that our attention to others brings out a new edition of that person. We alter people just by seeing them.
In that way, illumination just isn’t only a life hack to higher understand the world around you. It is a profound act of affection. It jogs my memory of the best way God’s love makes us lovable.
In considered one of the strongest claims of the book, Brooks argues that this type of attention is an ethical act. Such a belief, he cautions, just isn’t necessarily predicated on believing in God. Even so, his language will ring familiar to Christian readers, and Brooks invites all his readers to a minimum of consider within the concept of a soul.
Warm mutuality
It bears repeating that there’s nothing explicitly Christian about this book, even when Christian readers ought to search out themselves eager for a world where more people treat others as God’s image-bearers. The book, though, just isn’t all about how we treat others. One of its core themes is that our life, greater than the sum of what has happened to us, is what we make of what has happened to us.
Brooks seems to issue this as a cheerful challenge. He doesn’t really dwell on the incontrovertible fact that lots of our cultural identity narratives run within the opposing direction. Instead, he offers a gradual drumbeat of science, sociology, and good storytelling to remind us that human beings can’t be reduced to either their experiences or their suffering. And Brooks doesn’t shortchange pain and suffering. Much of the book’s middle focuses on seeing people “of their struggles.”
In a wealthy chapter on suffering, Brooks writes that sharing our grief and pain with others is how “we overcome fear and know one another on the deepest level.” Quoting considered one of my favorite authors, Frederick Buechner, he writes, “It is very important to inform a minimum of every so often the key of who we truly and fully are … because otherwise we run the danger of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to simply accept as a substitute the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the true thing.”
I discovered this chapter one of the compelling, and it resonates with my very own goals in writing a recent book on friendship, Made for People, where I argue that you just cannot experience God the best way you were meant to until you do it alongside other people. I felt a friend in Brooks, because he got here to a high point on this chapter, insisting that character formation just isn’t the solitary grunt work of the driven individual but the nice and cozy mutuality of living life while seeing and being seen.
As with any fatherly advice, some parts of the book might sound lofty or implausible. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, a few of his advice can seem overly commonsensical, as if he were simply repeating things readers must have learned from their actual parents.
Still, it’s noteworthy that such commonsensical truths need repeating in today’s culture. David Foster Wallace famously wrote that an important realities are sometimes the toughest to see and discuss. The topic of knowing others appears like that. How have we come to a degree where most individuals seem ill-prepared to treat others as deserving of our full attention? I don’t know. But we now have. Why isn’t this a five-alarm fire? Brooks is attempting to make it one.
Loving and lingering
Though Brooks never puts it quite this fashion, I left the book with the sense that seeing others is, above all else, a way of loving others. In other words, it’s a necessary precondition of fulfilling the Great Commandment. If Jesus tells us to like God and love neighbor, it’s assumed that we know God and see our neighbors.
Christians often intuit the primary part, that loving God involves studying him. But Brooks’s book jogged my memory that the identical must be true for other people. How could I really like my neighbor without lingering, without making eye contact, without asking good questions—briefly, without wondering, Why do they think that way?Why did they vote for that person?What are they afraid of?Why are they afraid of it?
Sure, the universe is big. Sure, nobody is boring. But what if we actually gave such awesome truths the deep attention they deserve? That’s Brooks’s challenge.
And for me, a minimum of, it worked. A short time ago, during a conversation with my wife, Lauren, she said something that I desired to take offense at. Initially, my mind began mounting a defense to clarify my actions. But in real time the book got here to mind, and suddenly I genuinely wondered, What if, as a substitute of defending my view, I explored hers? So I asked a matter. It led to an ideal conversation. I’ve loved her for 16 years, but I saw her in a latest way.
All by themselves, moments like that make How to Know a Person an abundantly worthy investment.
Justin Whitmel Earley is a author, speaker, and lawyer living in Richmond, Virginia. He is the writer of Made for People: Why We Drift into Loneliness and How to Fight for a Life of Friendship.
