Christian spirituality elicits great desires in people so that they can better serve others. In our hyper-competitive culture, greatness can take on different meanings. Some think it means engaging in high-profile activities, landing notable positions, and achieving big results. Following deep desires may lead to such outcomes, but not necessarily. Reducing greatness to honors, positions, riches, or similar metrics is a trap, as it leads to ego-driven ambition, radical independence, workaholism, and perfectionism. In Christian Contemplative Practices (Ignition Spiritual Exercises) we are warned about the seduction of seeking the empty honors of this world as a gateway to overweening pride. Magnanimity should be thought as a reflection on how we do things not what we accomplish. In a recent explanation of Magnanimity it means:
- having a great heart, having greatness of mind, having great ideals, the wish to do great things to respond to our calling by the creator. For this very reason, to do well the routine things of the every day and in all daily actions, tasks, meetings with people; doing the little everyday things with a great heart open to the Creator and to others with kindness, compassion, and hospitality.
Every day, people do great things that we may miss because we are not seeing deeply enough. We look for the dramatic, earth-shattering results or blaring trumpets, but greatness comes in different forms. A friend of mine is extraordinary in their ability to listen, never multitasking when they talking to someone else, always looking at me when we are talking in person. Simone Weil’s writes “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” At the conclusion of her novel Middlemarch, George Eliot describes the magnanimity of her central character, Dorothea, is like so many other ordinary everyday saints, people who do ordinary everyday things extraordinary well:
- “Her full nature…spent itself in channels which had no great name on earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and the rest is unvisited tombs.”
The Creator calls us to do “great things,” whether those things become widely known or not. With holy boldness, we jump into the arena, striving valiantly with a large heart open the Creator and others.
Excerpts form: Seeing with the Heart, by Kevin O’Brien
