October 23, 2025 // Columns

Shut Up and Listen

David Mills

The pub we were sitting in one evening was quiet enough to hear other people talking, and I heard my young friend at the other end of the long table telling a distinguished Swedish Lutheran theologian, who had been teaching Luther nearly as long as my friend had been alive, what Martin Luther actually meant.

It was kind of sweet: An earnest and gifted young man who loved his subject so much that he forgot the status of the man to whom he was speaking. The theologian answered him with perfect seriousness, as if he were arguing with another distinguished theologian in the faculty common room.

But still, my friend would have gained something if he had deferred more to the theologian, if he had said less, listened more, and asked questions of someone who could answer them.

I think many of us don’t always show God enough deference, don’t always look up to Him with the energetic submission disciples should. I know that sounds funny, because we try to do everything we’re supposed to. Of course we defer to Jesus.

But here’s one common American Catholic failing in deference (it is one of mine): We look at how much God loves us, but we don’t always listen for what He may want to tell us about ourselves.

We stress mercy and forget about judgment. (Some people do the opposite, which is just as bad a mistake.) We remember Jesus telling the woman caught in adultery, “Go and sin no more,” but not Jesus saying to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan.” And for good reason: Life can hurt. God’s closeness comforts us in a way nothing else possibly can. Christianity tells the world, “God loves you.”

But we can too easily forget the other side of Christian piety. Christianity also tells the world, “God loves you, therefore.” We also need to hear God’s judgment – which is, though we don’t always feel this way, a crucial part of His mercy.

I think we can say that God wants us to feel better about ourselves and our lives, but truly better, not just happy in the usual sense. He doesn’t offer a health-and-wealth Gospel. The test is whether we can face suffering with joy. Submission to God’s judgment is how we begin to feel better about ourselves and our lives.

True happiness is the feeling produced by real holiness. We get more of the first by growing in the second. God wants us to be better, and by being better to feel better, and by feeling better to be encouraged to be even better, and so on through (if we make it that far) purgatory, until we reach heaven.

How comforting it makes us feel to think His love is limited – not by Him, but by us. And that brings up a fact my young friend forgot in his conversation with the theologian and that we can forget in our spiritual life: the enormous difference between Him and us.

Jesus calls us His friends (Jn 15:15), but He also requires us to be His disciples. We can forget that in this case the word “disciple” denotes a hierarchy in which the master stands infinitely far above His disciples. We are Jesus’ friends, but we’re also newbies, trainees, the new recruits at bootcamp. We don’t know what we don’t know, and the only way we will grow in knowledge is to recognize that Jesus knows everything and submit ourselves to Him completely. That includes His judgment.

And we can never stop submitting, even knowing we learn but remain ignorant. Disciples are like first graders who have no idea what algebra and verb tenses are. And then like high school freshmen who have no idea what trigonometry could be used for or what a foreign language will do for them. And then like college freshmen who have no idea why the discipline they want to study has so many technical terms and why they need to learn them before they get to the fun stuff.

The only way we will become the people we should become – that by God’s grace we can become – is by submission to the Master’s mastery. We must live like real disciples, always on our toes, always listening and thinking through what we hear, always trying to follow the Master more closely.

Sitting on the subway on the way to our hotel after the pub, my friend asked me if he had talked too much. “Oh, yes,” I said. He wasn’t happy, but he learned a little more about being a disciple.

David Mills is a columnist for OSV News. He writes from Pennsylvania.