Day Seventeen

Day Seventeen // March 16 // The Roots of Callousness

“Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet –

Callouses are the rough, thickened patches on our skin that have been hardened by years of wear and work. And when we do not keep the fruit of kindness fresh, we can develop a kind of spiritual callousness. We may feel great grief and hopelessness about humanity because we are overwhelmed by bad news. It’s incessant. It’s too much. And when we don’t know what to do with it, we risk becoming numb to tragedy, veering from empathy to callousness, to a hardness of heart and mind and soul – a hardenedness that contaminates every area of our lives, leaving us feeling hopeless about everything.

The danger of callousness is that it subtly creeps up on us when we are not aware. A powerful example of this occurs during Air Force pilot training sessions. In these sessions, pilots are warned about “hypoxia,” or lack of oxygen to the brain. The pilots are put in a chamber that simulates the atmospheric conditions at 30,000

feet in the air. Then, the pilots are told to remove their oxygen masks. Unmasked, they are asked to write out the answers to a few easy questions. Within a minute after they begin writing, their partner in the exercise moves quickly to force the oxygen mask back on the pilot’s face. After receiving the oxygen, the pilot looks down at the paper and is shocked to discover that the answers are illegible. Here’s what unnerves the young pilots: they thought they were writing clearly.

That is what spiritual callousness does to us. We don’t realize that we have become hardened. We don’t realize the unkindness of our words. We don’t realize that we shut out opinions that we don’t want to hear.

One of the great warnings of spiritual callousness is found in the Book of Isaiah. The prophet had been thundering God’s word for people, imploring them to return to righteousness, but they didn’t want to hear the truth anymore. Here is how they are described: “For these are rebellious people, deceitful children, children unwilling to listen to the Lord’s instruction. They say to the seers, ‘See no more visions!’ and to the prophets, ‘Give us no more visions of what is right! Tell us pleasant things, prophesy illusions. Leave this way, get off this path, and stop confronting us with the Holy One of Israel!’” (Isaiah 30: 9-11)

Lent calls us to an honest assessment. Have we become spiritually calloused? Have we become hardened in, to and by the struggles of life? Have we slipped into an attitude of unkindness without being aware?