Listening ...

During these days of Lent and reflecting on the Suffering of Our Lord one of the critical disciplines that will deepen our understanding of Christ’s Journey to our cross is “listening.”

Several years ago I read the following insights into this often neglected Spiritual Discipline.

The first is from Experiencing Prayer: Three Settings, by Mark Lind. Lind writes, “During the Depression a young man saw an ad in the newspaper for a telegraph operator. He hurried to the building and room listed in the ad. When he got there the room was jammed with applicants. They young man was crestfallen. As he stood there wondering what to do he heard a steady flow of dots and dashes over the heavy drone of conversation. Suddenly, the young man’s eyes lit up. He dashed over to a door marked ‘Private,’ turned the door knob, and went inside. In a few minutes he came out smiling. He had the job. The employer told the rest of the applicants that they could leave.

As you might imagine there was an angry outcry from the group. ‘We demand an explanation,’ someone shouted. ‘This young man comes in late, bucks the line, and you hire him.’ The employer paused a moment, and then said: 'You have your explanation. All you have to do is listen to the dots and dashes.' Everyone stopped and listened. They couldn’t believe what they heard. Over and over the dots and dashes repeated the same message they’d been repeating for an hour: ‘If you hear this, come in. The job is yours. If you hear this come in. The job is yours.’”

The second insight is from As for Me and My House, by Walter Wangerin, Jr. “At the beginning of his reign, King Solomon prayed for one superior gift from God. Not wealth, not long life, but something far more valuable – he asked for ‘an understanding heart,’ which may be translated, a hearing heart. He asked, we say, for wisdom. But the genius of wisdom … is the ability to open a room in one’s heart for the talk – and so for the presence – of another. Wisdom is none other than the ability to listen.”