Openness is a precious talent and virtue. It contains and implies transparency. It has many significant dimensions: openness to the future, readiness to learn and to be transformed. It keeps seeing new perspectives on life, new concerns, and new opportunities. Not least of all, openness means a heart open to others. Openness is the radiance of inner truthfulness….
Openness, is, above all, a fundamental attitude toward God, his truth, and his grace. Open people continuously let themselves be showered with both gifts and challenges by the first source of truth and love. Openness makes us inventive and creative. Openness often shows us new horizons and beautiful vistas in the realm of the Good and the True. Those gifted with openness let themselves be surprised, and, in turn, provide others with refreshing surprises, new insights and opportunities….
Openness flourishes in the fruitful soil of gratitude toward God and toward our fellow human beings. Gratitude is, as it were, the open channel for the reception of new graces, new insights, and new possibilities. At the same time, openness is the fruit of a pure heart, which at all times and in all things is tuned to the wavelength of God’s salvific will. We request and cultivate this openness through the prayer, “Thy will be done.”
Openness is also inseparable from the spirit of community. The virtue of openness is not a petty concern for one’s own self, but a caring for the common good. This cause is advanced by a constant readiness to listen to one another, to prize the insights and the creative activity of others. Ρ
From The Virtues of an Authentic Life: A Celebration of Spiritual Maturity by Bernard Häring, CSSR. Published by Liguori Publications, 1997.
The author of more than 80 books and some 1,000 articles on theology, spirituality, and related subjects, Fr. Bernard Haring, CSSR, was easily one of the most renowned and highly regarded theologians of the twentieth century.