creating ears to hear...

Thank God blessings show up in the most unexpected places! In the last month alone I have reconnected with a few wonderful souls through Linked-in. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought of this site as a source of renewal, joy, or prayer. But it is. First, the mother of a child I baptized over 30 years ago was in touch with me  to tell me of her son's development in life; second, a father in France spontaneously sent me words of encouragement recalling the short time we shared during the baptism of his three children; and then a young woman, the granddaughter of a beloved member of my Cleveland congregation, was in touch in anticipation of some important changes in her professional life. Each message - and our follow-up - opened my heart in unexpected ways. Each person awakened in me a deeper awareness of God's guidance during my time of pastoral ministry. And each encounter revealed to us how the gift of God's  love and grace ripens over time. When person number three reached out to me, I laughed as myself saying: What do I really know about the ways of the sacred, right? 

Two biblical texts keep returning within to teach me that there are no limitations to the grace of God. Take chapter 38 in the book of Job where the One who is Holy says to the bewildered Job:

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?
Or consider what Jesus said to his friends in chapter 13 of St. Matthew's gospel:

Let those who have ears to hear, hear! (Or listen!) The disciples came and asked Jesus, “Why do you speak to them in parables?” He answered, “To you it has been given to know the secrets (or mystery) of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. The reason I speak to them in parables is that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.’ With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah that says: ‘You will indeed listen, but never understand, and you will indeed look, but never perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn - that is, change direction/repent - and I would heal them.’ But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.

Both are poetic reminders that whenever we put boxes around the divine, we not only cut ourselves off from the enormity of God's love, but we circumscribe our ability to live into awe and wonder. To have ears that hear and eyes that see is to recognize and trust that all of creation is saturated in grace. The late Eugene Peterson unpacks this wisely in, Working the Angles: the Shape of Pastoral Integrity, using Psalm 40:6. He writes: It literally reads: "ears thou hast dug for me."

It is puzzling that no translator renders the sentence into English just that way. They all prefer to paraphrase at this point, presenting the meaning adequately but losing the metaphor: "Thou has given me an open ear." But to lose the metaphor in this instance is not be countenanced; the Hebrew verb is "dug." Imagine a human head with no ears. A blockhead. Eyes, nose, and mouth, but no ears. Where the ears are usually found there is only a smooth, impenetrable surface, granitic bone. God speaks. No response. The metaphor occurs in the context of a bustling religious activity deaf to the voice of God: "sacrifice and offering Thou dost not desire... burnt offering and sin offering."How did these people know about these offerings and how to make them? They had read the prescriptions in Exodus and Leviticus and followed instructions. They had become religious. Their eyes read the words on the Torah page and rituals were formed. They had read the Scripture words accurately and gotten the ritual right... But there must be something more involved than following directions for unblemished animals, a stone altar, and a sacrificial fire. And there is: God is speaking and must be listened to. But what good is a speaking God without listening human ears? So God gets a pick and shovel and digs through the cranial granite, opening a passage that will give access tot he interior depths, into the mind and heart... with the result being a restorations of Scripture: eyes turn into ears. (Working the Angles, pp. 101-102)

The ability to hear and trust the holy from the inside out requires an encounter with the living Word or Presence of God. Without it, our spirituality is mere formalism. True hearing asks us to practice listening for the sacred in the ordinary as well praying for a regular renewal of intimacy with the Lord lest our laziness inure us to the noise, clutter, and distractions that fill each day. Ours is a culture that never shuts up. Silence is almost unheard of in our public realm. We are constantly bombarded with sounds - TVs blasting sports or news in the places we eat, gasoline pumps with mini-televisions hawking a variety of trinkets, taxi cabs broadcasting the latest Jimmy Kimmel episode, stores filled with a soft-rock soundtracks - and this noise trains us not to pay attention. We learn to practice acknowledging sounds without meaning. We cultivate a willful disregard for listening in the upside-down discipleship of inattention. Add FB, emails, and Twitter into the mix and the barrage of noise and words becomes relentless. 

Sadly, I believe this inattention nourishes both callous cynicism and compassion fatigue. Not only do we feel helpless given the magnitude of  global suffering, but we incrementally lose our willingness to pay attention to those lives we can touch with tenderness. Noise and social frenzy push us into isolation. Fear. My hunch is that the popularity of zombie television programming over the past decade is one cultural manifestation of our isolation and loss of spiritual hearing. Some of us feel like the walking dead. Others are terrified of the un-dead in our presence who seem to go through the motions of human existence without any obvious connection to life, love, or hope. And our friends, neighbors and loved ones who have become zombiefied by our fast and easy access to opioids and methamphetamines? The walking dead are everywhere.

We were created in the image of the holy. When we have ears to hear and eyes to see, there is a sacred harmony within and among us. Whenever we lose this gift, our inclinations and actions lead to unnatural death. Cynthia Bourgeault puts it like this in The Wisdom Way of Knowing:

If we were to take a snapshot of present-day America from the imaginal or inner-visionary standpoint, looking not at the deeds themselves but at the quality of energy they generate, what we would see might be a sobering picture. When we lock up our homes and become obsessed with personal safety, we are generating fear. When we bulldoze farmlands and forests to build tract housing and strip malls, we are generating greed. When we fill the planet with sixty-hour workweeks and destroy family harmony to make big-bucks, we are generating stress. These psychic toxins poured into the imaginal world quickly make their effects known in the sensible realm. It is clear that the real pollution of our environment is not just at the psychical level - the destruction of the forests, global warming, industrial and nuclear waste - but at the psychoenergetic level as well. We poison the well from which our being flows and then wonder why cancer has reached near-epidemic proportions. Tragically, it is often the most sensitive and most cosmically attuned individuals who sicken and die. (pp. 57-58)

She concludes - as do I - that once we lived with a measure of balance. But "as we race into the twenty-first century, having thrown out most of those old rules (and practices) in the quest for individual maximazation, we must now regain the balance in the only way possible: consciously and voluntarily" learning to see, hear and feel again as we "assume our part."  For me this begins with silence. Stepping out of the maelstrom of information,clutter, and noise for a few moments each day in order that I might NOT hear for a spell. Not be manipulated or desensitized. Not plugged into the consumption machines that rule our culture and compromise our souls. The late Fred Rogers taught this to us regularly on TV. Another mystical master, Thomas a Kempis, put it like this in a little book called The Imitation of Christ:

Blessed are those ears which hear the secret
Whisperings of Jesus,
And give no heed to the
Deceitful whisperings of this world,
And blessed are the good, plain ears which heed
Not outward speech but what God speaks and
Teaches inwardly in the soul.

The necessity of unplugging hit me hard yesterday when news came that the US House of Representatives was going to start an inquiry into the impeachment of the current regime. Unwisely, I broke a two year commitment, and turned on network news only to be assaulted with spin and deceit. Not so much by the actual newscasters, although they can't help fuel the fire of disagreement in the age of infomercials, but by the way each and all of the political players postured for the public. After about 15 minutes, I had to shut the damn thing off and just go on-line to read Ms. Pelosi's statement. The words of Beth Ferris on the Friends of Silence website came to me: "Then there is the listening at the gates of the heart which has been closed for so long, and waiting for that mysterious inner voice to speak. When we hear it, we know it is the Truth to which we must now surrender our lives." (https://friendsofsilence.net) There was no heart on CNN. Or MSNBC. Or Fox. Just more noise and distraction. To have ears that can hear, eyes that can see, and hearts that can feel our commonality demands silence. 

One of my guides into the practice of silence continues to be Henri Nouwen. "Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning," he wrote, "that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure." Silence helps us listen to God's truth within us.

The real "work" of prayer is to become silent and listen to the voice that says good things about me. To gently push aside and silence the many voices that question my goodness and to trust that I will hear the voice of blessing that demands real effort.

Inner silence also helps us become friends to those in need. "The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing...that is a friend who cares." Later today a colleague and friend has asked me to visit for a conversation about vocation. Silence is teaching me how to sit and listen without offering advice. Or making the encounter about me and my experiences. My prayer for today is to be still... and know.