Clergy and academics among the poorer listeners in studies of listening skills by linguists and psychologists so I am perhaps even less qualified than Blair to speak on this topic but I will press ahead anyway. Speaking personally I do a lot of listening in my job as well as speaking, mostly with my graduate students. They come to study a specific topic – why do they want to pursue that topic. What is there of their own desires, interests, longings in the proposed topic. How to moderate between those desires and their need to become experts in their chosen field of study.
What listening skills I may have were enhanced by my own doctoral research project which involved me in interviewing more than 50 people individually and in small groups about industrial mission in chemical factories and steel works on Teesside. I am sure before I began that I was not a good listener – but by the end I could conduct an interview without a tape recorder and go sit in the car afterwards and recall almost the whole conversation verbatim. Listening in other words is a skill that can be learned, though it maybe also unlearned. And of course we can also be selective listeners - how often have I been told at the dinner table ‘but dad you’re not really listening’!
The Bible is full of stories involving listening as a core skill. The most famous perhaps is Elijah who after his terrible contest with the prophets of Baal goes into the wilderness in a state of exhaustion and dread, fearing he alone in all Israel has not bowed the knee to the idolatrous religion which demanded child sacrifice. But God then instructs him to listen for his voice and Elijah listens – and the voice is not in the earthquake, or the wind, or the fire, but it is a ‘still small voice’ which to hear it he has to quiet himself and really listen in the depths of his soul, and listen with all his senses to the movement of God both in him and in the wilderness of the desert.
Another famous listening story is that of Balaam and his ass where the ass sees the angel of God guarding the way to the kingdom of Moab with a sword and Balaam does not.
Our readings today give us perhaps the foundational listening story of all – Abram, the father of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – listening to the call of God, and he listens so well that God counts it to him as righteousness. How does he listen – he hears an inner voice but at first questions it, as we all so often do. He then goes to look outside at the stars of heaven – something it is very hard to do in the orange bubbles most of us inhabit in the western world. But when we do do this – in the highlands is the best place but perhaps you might get such a view in east Lothian on the lammermuirs though it will not be free from light pollution – we get an encounter with the infinitude, the magnificence, the glory of the creation. Moderns call this an encounter with the sublime; for the ancients the sublime spoke of God. Listening to God and listening to nature are then closely related. Abraham’s reward for listening well was the reward of salvation itself- not only would he live to a ripe old age but his descendants would enjoy the land of promise.
In all three of these stories what is intriguing is the central role played in them by the non-human world, by creation , or what we today call nature.
The infinitude of the stars, the stillness of the desert, the obstinacy of an ass – these are the voices from nature that God chooses to speak to God’s people at moments of momentous change and revelation.
Israelites and the Fathers of the Church believed that nature was moved by angels or angelic powers. Angels are the messengers of God and they appear at boundary moments – Abram becoming Abraham and Sarah becoming pregnant, Balaam going from Israel to ….? . Elijah on the cusp of the demise of Israel as a great power and its exile in punishment for its idolatry. Similarly in the NT the Gentile Kings followed a star which announced Jesus’ birth, Peter sees a sheet full of different animals and learns of the calling of the Gentiles, Paul on the Road to Damascus hears the voice, and sees the figure of Christ, in the skies.
Modern media images of angels are not so much of the voice of God in nature at great boundary moments – they are more like personal assistants, supporting people in the midst of their struggles with illness or bereavement, accidents or depression. These modern cultural images of God speaking, of humans listening are more reminiscent of TV series like Friends than they are of Biblical accounts of humans encountering, listening, to the voice of God.
Many of us spend a lot of time communicating with and listening to our friends – mobile phones, texting, emailing. Friends are central to flourishing and happiness. But listening to God and listening to other people while related are by no means the same skill. It is quite possible to be a good listener to other people and not to hear the voice of God at all – millions in our very secular country apparently no longer hear God’s voice but this does not mean they are not good listeners.
Jesus clearly saw the two kinds of listening as in conflict – this is why at key moments in his ministry – after his baptism, after extended periods of teaching with the crowds, before his trial and crucifixion – he goes off to a mountain or to a garden to pray to God and listen to God’s voice. In the Wilderness Jesus hears more than one voice. The loudest voices appear to be those of the devil – the three great temptations to political power, ecological power and spiritual power. But in the strength of the Spirit he discerned that these were not the call of God.
The Desert Fathers similarly took to the wilderness to struggle with temptation, to clarify their spiritual calling and to discern the voice of God.
Do we need to go to wilderness?
Clearly for many of us this is not an option, not even an occasional one, though it is I think desirable as the long established tradition of making a retreat indicates.
One of our problems today is that we live in the midst of a cacophony of sound. We awake many of us to a radio programme, we perhaps travel with headphones or with our mobile phones or with the car radio on. Offices – especially the new open plan environments – are places of endless chatter and buzz, and our working and home and travelling environments are also filled with the noise of machines – telephones, cars, buses, planes, trains, computers, photocopiers, printers, fans, air-con systems. Then there are all the various kinds of electronic entertainment which can fill our leisure time, and not least TV, films, radio. Noise pollution and light pollution taken together mean that the urban environment and domestic and working environments are increasingly places where all non-human voices are excluded – we don’t hear the wind as Elijah would have heard it in the wilderness, we don’t hear the movement of the trees in the wind, we don’t hear the birds singing, we don’t hear the original peace of creation. How much harder then to hear the still small voice, the revelation of God.
We may not need wilderness, we surely do need quiet if we are to listen to God, and allow God to speak to us.
Prayer for some people is just this – listening. Sister Wendy on a recent TV discussion on state of religion around the world said precisely this that prayer is not words uttered by her so much as it is her listening, attending, making inner space, for God to speak to her.
A particularly powerful form of prayer which does seem to involve precisely the kind of listening to nature that is characteristic of so many of the great revelatory moments of Jewish and Christian religious history is the breath prayer. The idea is that you sit in a quiet place and take up a seated position with a straight back and just practice taking regular deep breaths and listening to the breath and the movements of the body as the air makes its way into and out of your mouth and chest and stomach. Breath for the Hebrews was literally the Spirit of God which gives life to the body and they were right in this perception for each breath brings oxygen which reaches through the blood to every part of the human system. When we listen to our breath then we are listening to the Spirit of God moving in creation, to the angelic forces which lie behind the natural world keeping it in motion and sustaining even our own bodies. As you listen to the rhythm of the Spirit in your body you may want to repeat a word or phrase along with your breathing such as ‘Jesus have mercy on me’ or ‘Veni Santi Spiritus’ ‘Come Holy Spirit’.
Another very powerful exercise is to use your imagination to put yourself into the position of someone in the Bible who meets Jesus, perhaps using the story of the famous meeting between Jesus and the woman at the well in the Gospel of John. Imagine that Jesus approaches you, asks you to give him a glass of water, and then invites you to express to him your deepest desire. Tell him from your own inner cacophony what it is you really long for, and then allow him to speak to you; literally listen for his words to you, imagine that you hear him speaking to you just as he spoke to the woman at the well. This is powerful medicine for the soul. I can think of few more powerful medicines actually.
Give it a go this Lent.