Listening

 

The other book I picked up instead of Buechner is one I read nearly ten years ago. Ed Richards gave it to me during my 2010-2011 heart adventure, and I enjoyed and appreciated at the time: The Jesuit Guide To (Almost) Everything, James Martin, SJ. It may be the only pleasant, fun, spiritual book ever. 

Well, The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton, though in prejudice I dislike Merton because, having perfected himself as a typical convert who now is Certain, he puts us down without understanding us, based on a shallow family experience. I don't appreciate Merton.

But anyway, Martin SJ. After all these years, I opened it again, random at page 126, Listening and read awhile. Martin SJ got my attention with a paragraph opening sentence, "Few people say they have heard God's voice in a physical way. (That is, few sane people)." 

As one of the "Few" - - not a secret, I've told it hesitantly in sermons and gatherings now and then since my cold Pennsylvania winter evening of February 13, 1984. Though as years go by, thirty-six-and-a-half of them now, I've looked back wondering if, as Martin SJ hints parenthetically, I need to reexamine my own sanity: I was newly ordained, working three professions (business owner, adjunct professor of political science and, now, Episcopal priest), over-stressed emotionally, and in a wrenching quandary. But I still recall The Voice as clearly spoken and uniquely sourced as ever: "I AM speaking to you, Tom Weller". So I let it be. Maybe I can ask later? I don't really believe that, but maybe later?

But Listening. Martin SJ explores all over the place. Including Listening instead of talk, talk, talking, as we do when we pray, petitioning, imploring, asking, telling, beseeching to be vouchsafed unto. Quiet, Silence, Listening have no part. Praying. Liturgically as well, in liturgy, worship. Sound. Noise. Voices, human voice. Instead of Listening, perceiving, discerning ways that God might speak. As our preacher said last Sunday, God speaking to Jesus from the mouth of the Canaanite Woman. Quite clear now that it's pointed out to me, it really was God, not just the little girl's mother, she was the vehicle, the prophet who engaged and replied so cleverly. God conveying all sorts and manner of things in, as we used to say "various and sundry ways". If only one turns on and tunes in. 

Silence. In Listening, Martin SJ remembers (I Kings 19:12) God on the mountain, speaking to Elijah in the Sound of Silence. Elijah Listening and hearing. For me, a participant of the Vietnam War Era, calling to mind Simon & Garfunkel 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAEppFUWLfc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fWyzwo1xg0

Is God in the song?

So what to do, what's to be done? Well, what does the instant conversation stir? Memories. Per Martin SJ, God can, may, does answer, respond, participate in prayer by stirring our memories. Comes to mind - - a favorite phrase, never occurred to me to ask who or what stirred a memory in response to a prayer, problem, or issue - - comes to mind 1 Samuel 3:9a, "Eli told Samuel, 'Go and lie down, and if he calls you, say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.'" 

This isn't a spiritual blog, not a political blog, not any sort of religious blog, it's just a personal blog that I've been messing with, and that has been messing with me every day for a decade. Writing, I've recently started trying to stay within the bounds of what the fishermen and sailors I spent the first half of my life around might consider "decency". It, he, my adversary the blog goes all sorts of places and wanders down primrose paths as it, he will. 

Ophelia: 
I shall the effect of this good lesson keep,
As watchman to my heart. But, good my brother,
Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven;
Whiles, like a puff'd and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
And recks not his own rede.

Oh, man, close and too personal? Including days I sometimes look back on, and think I can't believe I thought and wrote that, much less pressed Publish and opened myself for the public to Know. 

Listening. My sense of Unanswered Prayer is not as clear as Garth Brooks singing about it, but I do and have looked 'round and back and compared where and what I am to what I prayed for at the Time, and the Unanswer always, Always comes out Good, Better, Best. 

I am somewhat attuned to Listening, watchful waiting for Prayer to be answered. Some of my ludicrous moments. Asking God (it would have been driving my car around the Harrisburg area that winter and spring of 1983-1984) to guide my decision in the broadcast that came up the instant I turned on my car radio. Listening. God doesn't take instructions well. Listening. And that desperate winter night finding out that sometimes God answers prayer in visiting misery and leaving it to me to work it out, to hear, see, perceive, realize, understand, and avoid The Road Not Taken, as Frost recalls it. God speaks when least expected. In the unimaginable. From wretchedness. In poetry. In silence, the sound of it. In stirring memories. Through others: I finally gave up and traipsed off to seminary and ordination because of the constant urging of our loving Pennsylvania congregation, and my rector at the Time posing: "How many Cadillacs are enough? How much longer are you going to ignore God's call on your life?" and the light comes on again after all the years, and my realization (in the Trade it's called an epiphany) and my response, "Oh what the hell. I give up". 

I'm not a spiritual person, and the deeper I get into it the less a religious person I become. But something or someone, Who or What, takes an interest in me, always has, speck on a speck in a seemingly infinite Creation.

What I'm hearing this morning is that any fool who says religion and politics don't mix has never read the Old Testament prophets.

Oh well.

BLM&PTL

T+