One indicator of a “closing mind” is addressed through active listening to others or demonstrating “intense interest” in another’s journey (James 1:19). A second indicator which I described as “an unhealthy confidence in my own cultural (and spiritual) journey that would keep me from looking at new ideas, new perspectives,” is more difficult for us to address. Put another way, this indicator points us to the need to deal with our very own pride.
Now this is where it gets sticky. We are well aware of the statement that James makes a little later in his letter where he says: “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble” (4:6). We know then that the ultimate objective is humility rather than pride. Yet, how does one become more humble? The moment that you think you are making progress in becoming more humble, you have immediately become prideful about that very progress.
C.S. Lewis in his witty yet insightful work, The Screwtape Letters, struggles with this very question. It is the fictional story of Screwtape, “a self-described under-secretary of the department of temptation,” and his nephew Wormwood a “junior tempter.” Though this quote is extended, I think it is worth the read:
“All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is especially true of humility. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, “By jove! I’m being humble,” and almost immediately pride – pride at his own humility – will appear … But there are other profitable ways of fixing his [the Christian] attention on the virtue of Humility. By this virtue, as by all the others, our Enemy [God] wants to turn the man’s attention away from self to Him, and to the man’s neighbors. All the abjection and self-hatred are designed, in the long run, solely for this end; unless they attain this end they do us little harm; and they may even do us good if they keep the man concerned with himself, and, above all, if self-contempt can be made the starting point for contempt of other selves, and thus for gloom, cynicism, and cruelty.
You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it, not as self-forgetfulness, but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character …
To anticipate the Enemy’s strategy, we must consider His aims. The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another. The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour’s talents … For we must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our Enemy; he really loves the hairless bipeds He has created.”
A “closing mind” is addressed by a certain “self forgetfulness.” As one friend put it, not thinking less of oneself, but thinking of oneself less. So one way this can happen, or can begin to happen, is when God becomes so BIG, so major in our lives that other pieces of our lives truly become secondary. It happens when we are overwhelmed by Him and His love (read Psalm 136 for example) to the point that it actually influences how we relate to others, how we do ministry.
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