Listening in the spiritual life is much more than a psychological strategy to help others discover themselves. In the spiritual life the listener is not the ego, which would like to speak but is trained to restrain itself, but the Spirit of God within us. When we are baptised in the Spirit - that is, when we have received the Spirit of Jesus as the breath of God breathing within us - that Spirit creates in us a sacred space where the other can be received and listened to. The Spirit of Jesus prays in us and listens in us to all who come to us with their sufferings and pains.
When we dare to fully trust in the power of God's Spirit listening in us, we will see true healing occur.
(With thanks to the Henri Nouwen Society)
This passage from Henri Nouwen seems to me to incorporate a really vital truth about the life of prayer, and one which I beg to suggest extends far beyond personal listening. I was writing the other day about how in the life of prayer we become "skinless" in the face of the pain of fallen Creation. Becoming permeable is perhaps another way of putting it; or, in Nouwen's frame of reference, becoming willing, surrendered listeners to the cries of the broken world, rather than passive, shrinking hearers.
If we will only listen, and listen intently, to the terrible pain and beauty of all that is made, then we can truly begin to pray: since in our silence, God's Spirit is listening in us, praying what we cannot pray (Romans 8.26). In our surrender we will become conduits by which Christ's mercy can pour into the anguish of all that we will dare to love.
2 comments:
Yes. I see the pain of the world in the eyes of the Virgin of Vladimir icon. Good reminder. Hard.
Listening - something I try to do more of, but somehow I make a lot of noise in the meantime, making that hard.
It is helpful for me to hold the thought that the word obedience comes from not being bent under a master, but from the Latin for to listen.
When I listen, I open, I surrender, I am transformed.
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