THE CHALLENGE TO LISTEN

ast Lent our pastor challenged us to LISTEN to the New testament readings… openly and as if it were the first time we heard them… As the forty-day task progressed, I confess I heard little. My ears were blocked with personal concerns that shouted down my own religious story and the stories being read. Hearing is a metaphor for the gift of all our senses, like seeing, feeling, tasting,… they all are gateways to God’s creation and thus to God himself. Failure to experience that blocks access to His Love.

A wise person once said, “If every time we met someone we gave him/her our full and complete attention for four minutes, come hell of high water, it could change our lives.” Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote something similar: “It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.” And Thomas Banville asserts: “The most interesting people I know are those who do the least talking, the ones who let ME talk. They’re also the most comfortable to be with because they allow me TO BE.”

Something in the human person requires, for fullness and maturity, the skill to listen to others… How frustrating it was for the biblical Prophets not to be heard. Banville claims, “Listening isn’t a passive thing; it’s work. I don’t know of any harder mental labor than listening to the words uttered by another for the feelings they reveal — or conceal. But if you care, it’s a labor of love.”

LISTENING FOR GOD

All listening is hearing God, in whatever language he chooses to speak to us: bible or sermon, nature, spiritual reading or prayer, or experience. We especially meet God in the language of other people: family and friends, children and elders, neighbors and strangers.

We discover God through the presence in others. The right use of my listening ability is sacred. If I remain deaf to the “music of life,” I shut myself out from who and whose I am.

“Just be quiet, please,” a voice reminds me, “I, God, am trying to tell you something.”

So often have we turned our conversation with God into something inward and individual. God no longer exists for us our there among the stars, among the people. He is, we claim, if anywhere, inside us. Thus, we scratch around in our own hearts and minds to find the evidence for His presence. I have no quarrel with those who seek to listen to the still small voice within. I struggle to heart it myself, almost never with any success. The self-generated noise of my own affairs drowns it out…

“If every time we met someone we gave him/her our full and complete attention for four minutes, it could change our lives.”

“Just be quiet, please,” a voice reminds me. “I, God, am trying to tell you something.”

I dare not assert that my “I” is a temple worthy to house all love, all power and wisdom. As a human being, I am painfully aware of my own insufficiency when it comes to God and my relationship with Him.

“We are all beggars” was how Martin Luther put it on his death bed. If I seek for God’s voice only within, what a limited God I am doomed to hear. I need to go outside myself and listen to the voice of his creation, to the cries and dreams of his people.

Listening to the “other” can be a profoundly devotional experience. Thomas Hart writes, “All the events of my life somehow bear God’s word to me, and to mull them in search of their significance in Him is to listen and respond to His Word… When we touch the depths of any experience we touch Him.”

Christian love means opening oneself to others, accepting others, and giving the loving gift of my listening. Banville says, “Being listened to is such a rare experience that any indication of being heard will literally turn the speaker onto the listener.” I suspect this is how God may feel as He agonizes over our deafness… to hear and to respond !

LISTENING FOR ALL

In searching for a Vocation… or in carrying out our missionary service… we learn that all human beings struggling along the trail with us — fellow seekers and sufferers — have a story that can add a unique facet of our stories. BUT we must listen to and expect to hear the voice of God speaking through them…

Open ears require a surrender of ourselves for the benefit of other human beings, a sacrifice in love for others. Such intense listening makes life full and complete. One who listens gives up self-interest for the interest of others. It requires more than attention to the sounds of another’s language. It means joining the other… from the heart.

Jesus is God’s speech, telling us who God is. Listening AND responding to the “Word made Flesh” is the greatest gift of love one can live. That Word comes to us from a child, a forsaken enemy, a companion…

“This is my Beloved: Listen to Him!”

— WILLIAM R. MATTHEWS —