Sights and Insights
Devotion for Jan. 26, 2021
13 [Jesus said to the disciples:] The reason I speak to them in parables is that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.’ …16 But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. – Matthew 13:3, 16 (NRSV)
I read an interview the other day about the new book The Listening Path by Julia Cameron. Having not read the book, I don’t actually know much about it nor am I in a position to recommend or not recommend it. I was, however, intrigued by its basic premise that listening is the key to creativity. It has had me wondering about what effect social distancing has had on our ability to listen.
Listening is not an ability so much as a skill that must be honed and trained. Even in normal times, those who live alone must work harder to maintain their ability to listen closely to other people because they are not forced into household discussions that are a necessary part of living with other people. This time of separation further limits opportunities to interact and listen to one another, making it all the more important to keep those listening skills sharp. For those living with families, meanwhile, the blurred lines between home life and school/work can make it harder to remember to take a moment to stop and truly listen to one another. With fewer interactions, I worry that our ability to listen to one another is even more threatened than it had already been. We already contend with a non-stop flow of distracting background noise, whether it is radio, television, device apps, or any number of other forms of entertainment that are fine in themselves but can overwhelm our ability to truly pay attention to one another.
The skill of real listening is integral to our spiritual lives, too. As we become busy and hurried and fill our time and lives with background noise and distractions, we can lose touch with the world around us. Yet it is not haphazard that the metaphor of listening is so often employed in speaking of our awareness of God. God is there for us, but we must unlearn our tendency to fill our moments with distractions and noise. We need to learn again what it means to truly listen and to hear the details. We must build up the skill of listening in a way that seeks to understand others and not merely to hear them. This applies to other humans, but it is broader than that. We can listen to the world around us, to recognize the rhythms of the different sounds of nature. The skill of listening is centering, and opens to us the still small voice of God speaking into our lives. God reaches out to us in grace, but we can easily become too distracted by everything else and fail to hear it. Learning to slow down and listen really is a key to a meaningful and creative life filled with the Holy Spirit.