Listen

Like many people I wake in the morning with a “to do” list in my head. Before I am even aware of where I am my mind is going through all that has to be done with quite a lot of emotions tagged on to how I feel about what is before me. Listening to the “Today” programme and going through the motions of getting up and getting out crowd my head with more stuff, so that although I have one of the shortest and most attractive journeys to work you can imagine, I can be oblivious to all of it, aware only of what is in my head.

But some days something happens and everything is changed. I listen.

I am deeply privileged in as much as I start my working day in a chapel, usually with time set aside before the first service of the day begins. Sitting on a chair in the chapel it is perfectly possible to continue the running commentary that began almost before I was fully awake. Minutes can pass without any awareness at all of my surroundings or myself, completely cut off in the world inside my head.

But sometimes the song of a bird or the tap of a branch on the window breaks through and suddenly, in a moment, all is changed. Hearing the bird and becoming aware of hearing the bird brings you suddenly into the present moment. Listening for the next call makes you acutely aware of the silence between as well as the call of the bird. And all this somehow makes you aware of yourself in the place in which you are. It is a kind of bird “watching” with the ears and it makes sacred the present moment.

Reading this you would be forgiven for thinking, “Well, it is all very well for you with your quietness broken only by birdsong, but I live on a main road in a town!” I was first taught to listen to the noises outside as a way of quietening myself and bringing myself into the present moment, when I lived in a town. Listening to specific traffic noises can wake you up to the present moment just as well. And even on a main road there are moments of surprising silence in which you wait, aware and listening acutely for the next sound.

St Benedict famously began his “Rule,” with the words, “Listen, my son.” He meant listen acutely as if you were a doctor listening to someone’s heart through a stethoscope. If we really want to listen we have to concentrate on something other than what is in our heads. We have to be still, to concentrate, to forget ourselves and to allow the other, whatever or whoever it is, in. In doing this, strangely, we find ourselves, our true and whole selves. Listening anchors us in the now.

The Eye of the Needle

Jesus said, “It is easier to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” As a younger person I understood that saying literally and superficially. We should not have more than enough money when other people were poor, we should be generous, and having too much money somehow got in the way of our relationship with God. Simple solution: don’t seek wealth but be satisfied with enough.

Lately, I have begun to understand things differently. Somehow wealth and impoverishment go together and a person who is poor is not necessarily impoverished.

We live in the richest third of the world peoples and yet many observers would say that we suffer lives of great impoverishment. The reason for this is our very wealth can create a life style which is deeply unsatisfying. We are spiritually and emotionally malnourished; and, worst of all, our impoverishment is largely self-chosen.

Some wealthy people chose to live in gated communities. By cutting themselves off in this way they feel safe and they can avoid people who are not like them: they can avoid pain. Behind this life style choice is the desire not to see, to nullify and not to be confronted with those things that make them uncomfortable. The result is that, of course, they cut themselves off from life itself and choose instead to exist in a cotton wool ghetto. Their lives, whether they know it or not, are impoverished.

But with the life choices we are able to make many of us do something very similar. We too, want to avoid the discomfort and pain which is part of what life is about and is for our growth and our healing, if only we recognise it. The life style walls we build are just as much about avoidance. Our walls are called “distraction.”

Distraction could be considered a commodity. In the First World we buy distraction in and fill our lives with it. And we are buying more and more. Distraction is the quick fix solution which momentarily fills the void but gives no lasting satisfaction. It masks the pain but does not deal with it. It is the fast food meal that does not nourish the real hunger. From morning until night we chose distraction because we cannot bear the pain of our own emptiness, lack of satisfaction and longing. So we fill our lives with escapism: computers, iPhones, noise, popular entertainment, fantasy holidays, magazines, puzzle books. In our touch screen world everything is on hand all the time to help us to avoid ourselves, our loneliness and our hunger for meaning. Those who live in the Second and Third Worlds do not have such choices. They are poor but they often have stronger communities and oddly more satisfaction in life than we have.

It is hard for the rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven not because God prevents it happening but because we do so. Wealth has always allowed people to buy into distraction and out of reality. But it is only in daring to become real that true satisfaction can be found.

Giving abundantly from our poverty

In the story of the Widow’s Mite (Mark 12: 41 – 44), Jesus is sitting outside the temple with his disciples watching the people put their offering of money into the treasury. The rich give abundantly. Then a widow comes along who puts in two small coins, “all that she has to live on,” and Jesus, observing her, points out to his disciples that this woman has given more than anyone else because the rich who gave abundantly still have an abundance of money. It hasn’t really cost them anything to give, whereas this woman now has nothing to live on.

The poor widow is, however, rich in her attitude to God. In the giving away of her small coins which are, paradoxically, her greatest material wealth, she honours God by putting him first, by putting service to him above her own needs. She expresses a powerful faith: one that demonstrates itself in actions. She acts with great trust as she chooses to live for God in the moment.

And, of course, this anonymous woman has given us great riches from her poverty. When she put in her little coins she had no idea she was being observed, no idea that her story would be told over and over again; that she would challenge those of us who know we give only out of abundance, who know we don’t put God first, who recognise how partial our love of God is when measured against hers. This anonymous woman has challenged us and our attachment to material wealth for centuries.

The irony is that her very gift to us comes from her poverty. She never knew that her small act of the moment would change the world, challenge wealthy and powerful people hundreds of years later. But perhaps she knew that though she was poor, she was not impoverished: that her action expressed a greater freedom in its letting go and trusting God, than most of us will ever know.

She taught us another thing, too: something the saints have proclaimed down the ages. If we live in God, when we are weak, we are strong and when we are poor, we are rich and it is in recognising our poverty that we have most to give.

How to love?

I remember asking my father when I was quite young, how it was possible to fulfil Christ’s commandment “to love one another,” including the most difficult of charges, to love your enemy. After all one could not will to love.

My wise Dad responded that although it was very difficult to love some people, we could and we should always treat people as if we loved them. That answer was good enough for me as I entered the tortuous territory of adolescence and went on being my touchstone for some years afterwards. But as I have got older it will no longer do. Christ calls me to love and this from the heart. Good behaviour on the outside, however well meant, is not in the end, enough.

A little while ago I came across this lovely quotation by the 13th Century Persian poet, theologian and philosopher, Rumi.

“Your talk is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built built against it.”

It came as an answer and as a bit of a relief. I was no longer charged with loving someone out of my own inadequate faith, ability and energy. Instead I was invited to seek and find, as honestly as I could, all the barriers inside me that stop me either giving or receiving love.

When I started to think about this at more depth I realised how manifold and slippery many of these barriers are. For example, I might just avoid someone or some situation that makes me uncomfortable: easy to do and no one is ostensibly offended or hurt. But if I do this I fall short of Jesus’ pro-active command to love and I remain blind to and in the thrall of the barrier, whatever it is. The challenge goes the other way, too. What barriers do I put in the way of allowing God and others to love me? It is strange how similar the barriers are that stop us loving others and being loved: fear, distrust, pride, anxiety about coming out of one’s comfort zone; all of these are alive and well whether we are trying to love or receive love.

The invitation, as always, is to self knowledge; to recognise the moment when the barrier is raised, to stop, to observe, to question and to challenge oneself. It is to resist what seems the easiest line of defence, blame of others. It is, as Jesus said, to stop looking for the mote of dust in the other person’s eye and to face up to the plank in one’s own eye!

I would not, however, want to suggest that this is a recipe for self-help. Everything we know about love teaches us that we learn to love by first receiving, experiencing and learning to trust love. The first letter of John puts this succinctly,

In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins (1 John 4:10)

Christ first loved us. Our job is to try to seek and find those barriers which we all have that stop us from believing this and acting on it. As we understand what stops us from loving and receiving love we are healed and freed to love as Christ commanded.