David Brooks, columnist for the New York Times, has written an insightful book on what helps and what hurts interactions between people. (How To Know A Person, Random House, 2023). Along with many other helps, he lays out two styles of interpersonal relating.
One he calls the Illuminator and the other the Diminisher.
The Diminisher is the person whose attention is mostly focused on himself and who regards the other person through the window of “whatever he can do for me.” The result: very little of that other person is ever revealed.
The Illuminator’s presence has the opposite effect. It lights up what’s happening in the inner life of the other. By his genuine interest in the other as other, the Illuminator allows that person’s deeper, more uniquely personal dimensions to emerge. By his openness to who is truly there, by his receptivity to the unrevealed parts of the other, he illuminates more of who that person really is.
This difference can highlight a helpful distinction in our own coming before The Lord. And certainly, it connects with Jesus’ challenging question, “Who do you say that I Am?”
Do I imagine I mostly have the answer to that question? Do I enter prayer with a somewhat knowing attitude about what and Who is there? Will I allow my previous experiences of The Spirit’s presence to hem in what newness could be coming to me now? Or do I rather come before The Lord, not just in prayer, but in everyday life, with that wide open stance, “what is there still to discover about You?”
The question: do I come to the gospels with those “illuminator eyes,” the ones that are always in search of what of God is just out there ahead of me, what of Jesus’ ways and attitudes are still to be uncovered?
The life-altering text for Vincent, “The Spirit of The Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor,” (Luke 4:18) kept speaking new things to him all through the years.
“Who do you say that I am?” asks The Lord. The responses to that question never run out, are never exhausted, will always lead us further into God’s own life.
Tom, I’ve just now reread your reflection and this time it sends me back, with regard to the “Diminisher,” to the “voluptuous one” who keeps saying in her heart, “I, and no one else” (Is 47, 8. 10), and whose claim, no doubt, finds echo in today’s political campaigns.
And, with regard to the “Illuminator,” I don’t doubt it that, as you were writing, you had in mind, yes, the one whose advice is that we ask, “when there’s question of doing some good work,” ‘Lord, if you were in my place, how would you act on this occasion?’ (SV.EN XI:314)
Thanks for the light you shed.