We’ve crossed a new threshold in life, which is to say, we’ve recently bought a van. Our two girls were absolutely giddy at the prospect of no longer having to sit in the same row.
But how quickly the giddiness fades.
“I can’t hear the music!” the younger one wails. “Turn it up!”
“It’s already so loud,” I protest from the driver’s seat. My wife concurs. “It’s going to hurt your ears.”
My daughter is displeased with that response, crosses her arms, contorts her face into a look of absolute misery, and tucks herself into the side of the seat. I, feeling quite justified in my parental wisdom, shrug.
But as the days pass and driving duties shift—what with all the passengers we can now ferry about—I find myself in the back seat. And, importantly, I find myself straining to hear the music.
“You were right,” I say to my daughter. “It is hard to hear back here.”
She looks at me with the smugness I deserve. And the next time I am in the driver’s seat, I, dutiful father, press all the buttons I can find on the front panel until the sound is balanced appropriately throughout the car and all ears are happy.
In the Ignatian tradition, we talk about the “Ignatian plus sign.” What’s that? In short, St. Ignatius invites us to give one another the benefit of the doubt by way of the Presupposition with which he begins The Spiritual Exercises. We should “be more eager to put a good interpretation on a neighbor’s statement than to condemn it.” (#22)
Sometimes, though, we think we already have put our best interpretation on another’s statement. We think we understand that person’s perspective just fine. We are convinced that our way is correct, and no further work is required.
That is, until we put ourselves in our neighbor’s shoes. Suddenly, we see much more clearly—or, in my case, hear much more clearly—the unique place from which our proverbial neighbor’s statement originated.
In the Presupposition, Ignatius implores us to “search out every appropriate means” through which we may, in charity and truth, engage the words of our neighbor. That might mean doing more than simply thinking about those words; it might mean getting up and getting out and trying to encounter the place and the people from which they came.
It might mean riding along in the backseat instead of the front.
In the end, my daughter was right, and I was wrong. But I was only able to know that by sitting next to her and experiencing the car ride through her ears. Because I did, we were able to make changes in the car that improve the experience for everyone.
Would that we could make such changes through such fruitful encounters in all areas of our lives.
Photo by Marc Pagliuca on Unsplash.
