In the silence, God invites and encourages us — because courage is what it takes — to be freely ourselves and to allow God to be freely God and not the prisoner of our inheritance, the product of our own private invention, or the possession of our presumption. Practicing silence as prayer leads to practicing silence as care. It not only means risking a living encounter with God, the Really Real, but also with what is most authentic in ourselves whether noble or imperfect, with what is most vulnerable and venerable in others, and with what is most precious or disturbing in creation. The invitation this year is to think of silence as a conscious practice intended to enhance our ability to hear what our true personhood, God, others, or the community of creation want us to hear most at a given time and to be moved enough to respond in ways that exalt not only ourselves but all of life.
Like the Russian Matryoshka dolls stacked inside each other from biggest to smallest, solitude nests the silence which nests the stillness where the listening heart resides. A listening heart nestles within the stillness that is held within and nurtured by the kind of silence and solitude from which ministers, spiritual guides, and persons of faith can compassionately receive and respond to others. The silence and the stillness that are given by God as grace and attended to by us enable us to learn receptivity and responsiveness, to live both the way of radical openness and the way of deep sympathy, to be hospitable and responsible, which together bring to fruition the intention and integrity of sacred silence and the still point where, as T.S. Eliot says, “the dance is.”
To live from the heart, that is, from the truest, inviolable core of the human person where God dwells unseen as intimate and extravagant love, one must first cultivate a listening heart. A listening heart is required both for persons of faith committed to living an authentic and integral spirituality and for persons blessed with the privilege and charged with the responsibility of guiding, accompanying, and supporting these same persons in their yearning to experience the fullness of life. A listening heart is vital and necessary in all relationships. Too often we are deaf to the sacredness of the universe, unable to hear the holiness of being itself, oblivious to the belovedness of each human person, and unaware of the doxology that flows secretly like sap through life if only we had the native intelligence, desire, and tools to tap it.
The truest, most transformative realization of a listening heart is not just that the silent journey toward our inmost center is in fact the journey toward the heart of God. It is also that it is the journey toward the grateful awareness of, felt love for, and sensed connection to everything and everyone as they are sustained by and contained within the all-encompassing, lavish love of God. . . .
In and through the “quotidian mysteries” of life God speaks. We listen. God summons, we respond. Or we don’t listen and we don’t respond and the antiphonal nature of being alive, of call and response is left unfinished, is left unsung. When in the Prologue of his Rule St. Benedict counsels the monks to listen with “the ear of your heart,” or later in Chapter 42 to “diligently cultivate silence at all times,” he is inviting them– and us as well– to a life of prayerful attentiveness and heart-filled responsiveness.
Become practiced in listening for the simple, hidden invitations that are woven into the daily fabric of our life. The opportunities to respond in simple yet profound ways that ennoble are everywhere if we but look intently and listen loudly.
~ Dan