Sister Doreen’s Reflections
“My children, if you heartily accept my words, and treasure my requirements, incline your ear to Wisdom, and take her truth to heart.” (Proverbs 2: 1-2 Inclusive Bible translation)
In my experience with open heart surgery in 1999 I found that I was almost overwhelmed by the many people and things that I needed to listen to. While reading Exodus I also saw so many examples of both listening and not listening while the Israelites journeyed in the wilderness. I thought of all the reminders that so many Gurus have held out to us, that it is the listening heart, a special kind of listening with one’s heart, wholehearted listening, that is at the heart of the spiritual journey, the quest for fullness of life, for meaning, for peace of heart. The very first word of the Rule of Benedict is “LISTEN”. This listening is at the heart of Benedictine discipline, practice, and spirituality. We are to listen carefully with the ear of our heart. It offers the gift of obedience.
Pondering these things then, has continued all through my life. It is the experience that God speaks through all that is – through creation, each other, through daily life and circumstances, through contradictions and differences, through division and unity. It was and has been (perhaps always will be) a call to listen, and to respond. I know that my deepest desire is for responsive listening in my quest for fullness of life for myself and for everyone. It is a quest for meaning, for peace of heart.
Listen – to listen I know I need to return again and again to my heart through a process of centering, through taking things to my heart – pondering, waiting, really looking, being present to the meaning at the heart of things. God wants nothing more than for us to feel unconditional love and help others experience it too. We cannot do this unless we listen to the needs of our brothers and sisters. A listening heart is willing to be vulnerable and humble. It must know when to speak and when to allow for sacred silence. A hard work discernment task that perhaps is true for a lifetime.
Listen – attention, attitude, and adjustment I pondered these words as components of active listening. One of the lessons in the Exodus journey was seeing that effective listening was about self-awareness. You must pay attention to whether you are only hearing, passively listening, or actively engaging. The silence of a listening heart is dynamic silence – an active silence. Looking back today I can see just how important it is as a gift. It is a gift each of us is invited to give to others, the gift of silence, of listening together, and listening to one another. Silence is so important for listening, to be able to hear that gentle breath of peace and harmony during whatever circumstance we happen to find ourselves in with each other.
In those Heart meditations written some long time ago, I know that for today I need to re-own them anew. These truths are important gifts for me and for each other and for our world. I share these words that I wrote long ago and need today:
… to receive this blessing I have found that I most often journey there with a listening heart feeling like I am caught in a gap! In fact, most of the time we live in a gap-tension lifestyle, caught between where we feel drawn to be and where we are living our life, where I truly am and where I pretend to be, wish to be, or think I ought to be. Like the Israelites who time and again discovered that God is in the gap, I too have come to know that God is a God of the gap! And in the gap-lifestyle, in that place where I really am, God offers healing, forgiveness, strength and empowerment.
Brother David Steindl-Rast in his book: ‘A Listening Heart’ challenges us to practice wholehearted listening: “Our eyes see, but only our heart looks through things to their meaning. Our nose registers scents, but only our heart will track like a hound its ethereal quarry. Our tongue tastes, but only a heart can feast. Skin touches skin but being in touch is a matter of heart. Our ears hear, but only a listening heart understands.”
More wisdom from the past so needed for today:
- It is when we can live from a listening heart that we begin to understand that with God we always start exactly where we are.
- God is always now and here, wherever we are, in whatever unchosen place or situation, and it is here that we met God.
- Our journey through life, with the cosmic Jesus, is one that unfolds out of all the choices, wise and unwise, that we make. There, the God of the gap waits.
- My listening heart tells me that beauty, truth and imperfection go together and are held together in the gap by being acknowledged, a truth born of a listening heart.
- Imperfection is not a sign of the absence of God! It is the sign that ongoing creation, the becoming of all things, is a rugged process. We can, and must, celebrate the scars! They are part of the blessing of God. It is doing the hard work of dwelling in our listening heart that these become truth for us.
- It is imperfection that unites us into helping each other.
- It is shared weakness and need that draws from a group its gifts and powers of healing.
It is true that it is our indifference, a heart that does not listen, that cuts us off from ourselves, others, and God’s blessings. It is a lack of passion that takes away our dignity, our value, our worth as human beings and poses a threat to humanity and to our world. With listening hearts, we need to rediscover this Love, this God of the gaps, within whose love and energy we rediscover our true selves. There we know ourselves to be born with the capacity to love and to be loved. There we recapture something of our true nature. There we come home to ourselves. It is in this moment of homecoming, our Benedictus, God’s blessing, our reconnecting with that inner most core of meaning, that we can embrace our world, from that centre of strength we know we are loving and lovable. From that centre point all things are possible.
Our world will become a new place when we choose to take love seriously. This is the task and the challenge of a listening heart.
