Holy Listeners

 

I was reading this morning and the author, Joan Chittister, used a remarkable phrase: holy listener.

We live in a chatty, speaking culture more than we do a listening culture. People on TALK radio, talk. That sounds obvious, doesn’t it? They talk. Being on the radio there is nothing to see so someone has to be doing something and other than singing or playing an instrument, one would expect them to talk.

Some of them take some phone calls but most of the phone calls they take are from fans who largely agree with them. This gives the talker the opportunity to expand on their own point of view and they do it over and over again. Rarely do they take time to listen.

On television it’s much the same way. Even interviewers now seem to think that a good interview comes as the result of the interviewer talking more than the interviewee. The hope, I would imagine, is if you, as the interviewer talk long enough in trying to pose a question to really stump the interviewee, you’ll get a great interview. Of course, one of the best interviews of late was Anderson Cooper interviewing Donald Sterling. Cooper BRILLIANTLY sat quietly and let Sterling talk and talk and talk and before you knew it, Sterling had dug himself into a far, far deeper hole than he began with. Anderson Cooper did something unusual. He listened.

Then there is holy listening. Often people define prayer as talking to God. We place ourselves in a spot of attempting to acknowledge God’s presence around us and we talk and talk and talk. Whether we actually felt God’s presence is often not part of the equation. We talked. We often talk about what we need to God.

We sometimes use the Bible to ‘listen’ with a sense that we will read something and that will enable us to listen to God. This is a great opportunity but all too often instead of reading the Bible to listen, we talk right through it. We find passages we like and we preach to ourselves on how we were right about something the entire time. We read the Bible to affirm our position; which means we probably didn’t bother to listen.

Holy listening is taking the time to be quiet and listen to other people. They may have something to say we had not thought of. Holy listening is reading Scripture and discovering what is there and allowing the Word to speak to us and, Heaven forbid, challenge us. It invites us to learn and discover more about God, not just we thought we knew.

Holy listening is taking the time to listen to other people. To REALLY listen to other people. To listen to their words instead of composing our response. To take the time to digest what someone else is saying instead of assuring our point is made.

I’d like to say I’m good at this. I wish I was. To me, this holy listening is something I need to work on. The phrase provoked my own thinking because it challenged me.

Take the time to quiet down and listen and allow that listening to become holy. Let’s try to become holy listeners.