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United Methodist Church |
Listening | |
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Pecot's Puttering
I am a movie lover. For as long as I can remember going to the movies, renting, buying alone or in groups – I love it and I watch everything. Or, I should say watched. For the last four years, I have missed most of the good movies and have traded gory action adventure for Bugs and wonderful recent Spanish art films for El Dorado and the Emperor’s New Groove. The animated movies are ok, but I don’t expect much from them, I tend to watch the kid’s delight more than most of the movie. So, I was pretty surprised a number of years ago when Prince of Egypt came out. In the early part of the movie Jethro confronts a downhearted Moses who has walked away from all his wealth and power feeling a complete failure. He invites him into his family and sings “You’ve got to look at your life through heaven’s eyes.” In the movie, Jethro doesn’t presume to teach Moses about his values but about his ability or inability to pay attention to life with senses tuned to God’s senses. What God sees is much different than in the grasping for power and wealth and importance that Moses was taught. I am interested in how we change how we perceive our lives because this is the foundation of true transformation. Once we start looking at things differently, hearing new things, smelling or tasting in a new way, the change is coming – of course it doesn’t have to be good always. The same thing is true of a church. Much of our work on values focuses on good things and often important things, but I wonder if we are challenging each other to look at everything with heaven’s eyes. How do we even go about this awesome task? I have seen it in the last couple of months in Zoe and Barb. Both took jobs last year that they were ready for, even looking forward to, but they really didn’t know what they were doing and had a mind to learn and see the job and themselves differently. Soon the job wasn’t right. Barb didn’t want to lead a committee all of a sudden, she really like the work of building communities that became central to its member’s lives. Zoe didn’t want to do fundraisers, she got hooked on the miracle of transformation when someone finds what they are called to give in a spiritual way. For most of the last six months, they have struggled to do what they were “suppose to” when in fact God was changing how they looked at everything. This month we commissioned both as called ministers to this congregation in community building and stewardship, respectively. Advent, yearly, presents stories to teach us a new way of seeing, as we start to look in different places than we normally look. When we do, a door opens and as if by magic something new begins to form in our lives. Our theme for December won’t be looking in a new way, but listening in a new way, but the same importance applies. As we listen to the stories, we hope we listen in new ways throughout our lives. And let the miracles begin. |
Ted |
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ListeningTwo people meet. “Hello.” “Hello.” “How are you today?” The next step is to be quiet and listen. It is a simple thing that surprisingly few people seem to know how to do. Without listening, friendship becomes a guessing game, a joust where we learn about each other while we are trying to get our word in. The depth to listening is almost endless. Beginning with simple, courteous quiet, listening can become the path to shared story, trusted conflict, resolution of war or a touch of the hearts and soul. To listen to another, no matter how much we don’t want to, is a gift. Listening does not necessarily mean assent, though many of us act as if it does. But listening creates a doorway. It begins with silence. SilenceTo be a good listener, we must learn to be quiet. There are many levels of silence. Being quiet to listen. To hear out all of what someone has to say (fair fighting is built on this principle that most of the time people don’t take the time to listen all the way through). Being quiet in order to listen means not only closing one’s mouth, but also opening one’s ears and a receptive mind and heart. “But how are you really doing?” This second level of silence is that silence of someone who has heard you out that then raises an eyebrow and stops. This is an engaged silence. No longer satisfied with just listening, it is a silence that invites a greater truth. Babies learn something about a deeper silence when they are weeping and a parent holds them close until they enter a new place. A good parent may be furious with the child, but in that moment, the holding is everything and grace comes from it. We can do that with one another as we sit through the catastrophe, quiet and seeking in the mystery of life. The image of the star of Bethlehem has something of this kind of attentiveness, over the good and the bad, the poor and the rich, a star which is God’s light shines. And for those attentive enough to even notice, it shows a way. There is the grace of someone who is a good listener and has the gift of insight. This isn’t really magic or fortune telling, but is the ability to hear at deeper levels of what someone is experiencing. Insight certainly is a gift, but it is also something we gain from reflective maturity. When we listen enough, we begin to hear to the bottom of someone or ourselves. We begin to perceive the infinite dimensions of a person that interrelate in their pain and joy and living. When we listen deep enough, someone can find themselves in our presence and life is enhanced, healed, made whole. When we listen deep enough, a pathway to new life opens up. Listening to OurselvesFor all the talking we do, very few of us really listen to ourselves. Our bodies are telling us all the time of things that are or aren’t good for us. Do we hear? Our consciences are speaking about directions to head. Our thoughts are scurrying around thinking and analyzing. And at deeper levels our very souls speak. But we don’t often listen. Most of us have “selves” inside us that are so lonely for being unheard so long they have mostly given up. Here are some suggestions about listening to yourself. Pay attention to what your body tells you and learn what it means when it says something. Do you know the difference between hunger and anxiety in your stomach? If you don’t then you will eat a cookie when you need to be talking to someone and you will eat an extra piece of cake when you actually need to be quiet for a moment. Do you know the body’s difference between passion and obsession, or tiredness and depression? It is helpful to learn the body’s language. It is important regularly to “check in” with yourself. This doesn’t have to be a serious analysis of oneself, just some obvious things. We get tied up and don’t know what we are feeling and it helps just to take a deep breath and ask the question. It is a good thing to check in with what we are doing to see how it measures up to what we want to be about in the world. As a church we must keep asking, “are we on target with our goals and mission”? If the check in is disciplined, that is regular and consistent, and if it is recorded, so we can remember it well, then the check in can lead us to see long term patterns that guide, or plague, our lives. One way to listen to ourselves is to pay attention to Freudian Slips. These are slips of the mind that usually say something different than we mean to have said, but often tell the truth about us in a disturbingly honest way. Places where we do something that surprises even us, say something we didn’t mean, do something unusual and seemingly out of place. These are places where we get glimpses into the deep life going on underneath the surface of our lives. Do you pay attention to your dreams? They tell the truth and can sometimes lead us to the place where we hear God’s call in our lives. Our society doesn’t pay much attention to the importance of dreams, but other cultures have relied on them. We lose most dreams within seconds of waking up, so the sooner they can be held on waking the better. And this means allowing oneself to wake up just a bit more slowly and take the time to remember or jot down notes. Some helps in listening to dreams.
In spiritual direction, the search for discernment of God’s path has a step of assessment of one’s State of the Soul. Checking in with the state of one’s soul can be a very helpful way to care for oneself. A far to simple, but helpful way to assess the state of ones soul is to do a graph from 0 to 10. If 0 is swamping around in the depths of sin, and 10 is filled with spiritual holiness, where are you? Are you in movement or static? And which direction are you moving if you are moving? Fast or slow? “Today I am a four moving slowly toward one” is helpful in figuring out how you are and what kind of choices you are willing to make in that day. It is kind of a “I am losing God in my life sort of day” or a “I have had it with God and am ready to do something devilish sort of a day.” For someone who really wants to move on a spiritual path, knowing this about themselves is very handy. Listening to GodBe SilentIf we are smart, we want to listen to what God “want’s” for our lives. But if we are really smart, we will stop at the level of listening quietly for God’s voice in our lives, and we will try very hard not to hear anything. Silence with God can be a joyous thing, but when God speaks, things are going to change. Enjoy the silence. Asking God to Speak and then Shutting upHow many of us include silence in our prayer time. For most of us, we talk all the way through our prayer time, asking for all sorts of stuff, even direction, and then never being quiet enough to listen for an answer. Why should we? We don’t really expect an answer anyway – do we? Prayer deepens when we have hope that God will guide us. But to realize this hope, we must shut up after -- or better, before -- we ask. Hope or faith is an important building block for listening to God. The Voice of GodWe have to be pretty careful when we start talking about the voice of God. There was an old tradition that if you saw God face to face it would be too much and you would just die. For those who make a life out of seeking out God’s voice, not for their own power – there are surely plenty of those and who knows what they hear – but for the sake of coming into alignment with the Divine Will, the sheer power of the overwhelming delight of God and the overpowering pain of God is too much for anyone to bear even in part and for a short time. We take our tragedy in very contained doses and even small encounters with wonder leave us breathless. To truly open ourselves to the level of God’s joy and pain, at once in God’s voice would annihilate us completely. To know that is to know how ridiculous it is to listen to those who think they are talking to God all the time. Psychologists and police officers are pretty clear about people who are talking to God. But within the mystery of the spiritual journey, and underneath the audacity of the claim to hear the divine voice, there is a touch of wonder and horror that comes in the voice of God. People who experience it consciously are forever changed by even the faintest touch of it. The voice that called creation into being and holds it fast in each moment binds us with a whisper to all of creation. The voice that is deafeningly silent while Jesus is on the cross becomes a transforming hope in those who hear it while in tragedy. To listen for the voice of God is to invite connection and covenant. Paying AttentionA husband decided to surprise his wife with a gift of kidnapping her to a foreign country for a surprise, romantic trip. Lots of details, but the hard thing was trying to make sure he had all her needs met in packing. So, for months, he paid attention to which soaps she used in the morning, what underwear she (not he) liked the best, which makeup she used for different occasions – all the things that men could teach themselves to ignore. It was a wonderful trip. After the trip, he remarked that what surprised and changed him was not the trip but that month of paying attention. By noticing all the little things of his wife’s life, he began to get to know her in an entirely new way as a person of worth that he could not image before. He fell in love all over again. AdventThe Advent stories are probably mostly made up by the early Christians, There may be kernels of history within them, but even that is doubtful. The stories of Matthew and Luke, tacked onto Mark’s wonderful outline of Jesus life, are meant to prick our ears, to say, “Pay attention, something wonderful is about to be told to you. And so you don’t miss it, I will give you some clues. Here is how Jesus comes to live with us.” For Luke it is, to borrow a phrase from Disney’s Aladdin, “ULTIMATE POWER in an itty-bitty living space”. Power and poverty rolled into a story of hope. For Matthew, it is like a thousand years of hopes and fears about God all get rolled up in a shining or horrifying moment of crystalline history. Advent is a time of preparation for God’s birth in our lives. As such it is essentially a time of listening to ourselves, to the world and to God, to the poor, to those who search, to those who need for there to be a change in the world and to those who want to be a part of that change. As we listen, we prepare a ground within us that God can come to. Originally published in December 2001 issue of the Good News Letter, Morgan Hill United Methodist Church. Last update: 1/16/03WG | |