Listening to God

Listening to God

There are probably as many methods of prayer as there are people who
practice them.  There are as well many languages people use to communicate,
to share this wealth of human experience.  No language is better than
another - and I would say that the same can be said for prayer.  Language
and prayers are gifts.  Both open us to wider worlds.

The need to communicate, to say who we are, to transcend our limits, is intrinsic to being human.  Oliver Saks has studied people who seem to make no sense, whose sentences go on and on but who are doing their best to render intelligible the world as they perceive it. 
Centering prayer has been around a long, long time.  Its existence has been
long known and practiced, though it is only fairly recently that it has
become the focus of renewed interest and this renewal has given rise to
books, videos, retreats and the like. Several monks in our own order – Basil Pennington, Thomas Keating and William Menninger have done a lot of work to put Centering Prayer on the map.  A priest from my own diocese, Carl Arico, has also been instrumental in spreading the word about centering prayer. 
  From the time we are very young, we learn that in order to better see or
understand something, we have to be still, be receptive.  We learned to stop
and listen when something of interest caught our attention.  We learned to
be as still as possible, so as not to burst those big bubbles we knew we
could blow.
The years passed and we all grew up.  The pace of life quickened.  And, in a
sense, the race was on.  Marriage, jobs, raising children, moving from one
place to another, all these and more forced a refocusing in our lives that
may have caused us to set our sights on some goals while losing sight of
others.
The practice of centering prayer is never really lost amidst all the
shuffles of life.  What seems to happen is that we narrow our field of
concentration, so much so that we assume we are doing one thing and looking
at one thing as we do it.  For example, a gaze at the beauty of a night sky
filled with stars can and should still us, center us, humble us before this
vast canopy of night.  We do not normally think of looking at the stars as
looking at or for God.  But to later recognize, in a quiet moment, God as
the source of all that we are and see - including the night - is to recover
our "original" seeing.  We are in the mystery of God every second of our
lives, with every breath we take and through every encounter we may have.
There is no getting away from God's involvement with us. Cantering prayer is
a conscious breath, a time consciously set aside to get in touch with who we
are and who God is, and to make a daily habit of it.
We all know that physical exercise is necessary for our health.
Centering prayer gets us back on just as important a track, the one that
leaves room for God. 

Strange things happen when you give yourself some quiet, focused time.  You will find that some things you thought were so important lose their claim.  Your life becomes simpler, more focused on things that are more appropriate to your faith instincts.  Meditation is a welcome path for artists, for poets, for those who need a break from the routine to see, to capture something that is always there but won’t settle down unless you settle down and nurture it. 

It is basically a method that enhances or promotes an experience that we all have, but tend to let slip by.  It can go by many words.  Careful attentiveness, a focus, a concentration.  A still observance.  It is the art of learning from something that is within us and that needs a stillness to awaken, to gift us.  A way of remembering.

When I was a kid, the garage behind our house burned to the ground.  By the time the firemen arrived, the best they could do was to control the flames, to keep the fire confined to that one structure.  I watched from my bedroom on the third floor of our house as the flames writhed and shot into the air, bringing with them ash and debris.  By the time the fire was over, not much was left of the garage.  Me and a few other kids went down there the next day.  I remember seeing what was once an aluminum ladder, or what was left of it.  Small remnants were still visible as ladder parts.  The rest was a melted blob on the floor.  Nothing escaped the heat, the destruction of the flames.  The fire consumed it all.  I am amazed by the details I can recall.  The ladder,m the smell, the ashes, the owners of the garage standing as far away from the flames as they could.  I think it was the enormous difference in the routine of my life that sharpened the lens of my memory. 

I suppose I witnessed that fire when I was in grammar school.  It was at the time  I would have been learning about the various religious verities as taught by the nuns in my grammar school.  One such warning was the eternal nature of hell and the wrathful judgment of God.  Hell was described as a place of unquenchable fire.  Eternal fire, no exit, no water coolers, no reprieve.  I guess the possibility of such a lasting place of misery may have had something to do with keeping us in line.  We were often threatened with the probability of ending up there unless we behaved like “decent” children. 

It was much later that the topic arose again.  What triggered it was not a goad to better behavior but an inquiry during one of the seminary courses.   As recently as a few years ago, I met a guy here who insisted on the reality of eternal damnation and flames galore.  He was quite insistent.  I am not too sure about many eternal verities.  He was very sure about God’s wrath and hotness.  I just don’t know.  I hope there are alternate routes, or bypasses, in the afterlife. 

The above, including the garage fire, came to mind this past week.   We were given several talks on the psalms by Father Charles Cummings, a Trappist from our monastery in Utah.  One day he was speaking about the infinite love and goodness of God, and how it is stronger than death.  I thought to myself how sin might be an unwillingness to let God’s love into our hearts.  We want to do things our way.  And so we hurt ourselves and our neighbor, when God’s way would have been kinder.  That made sense to me.  And for some reason, the flames and the garage came to mind.  The flames seemed to me to be like God’s love, transforming and consuming everything.   Try as we might to always live according to our narrow sights, the process by which we are transformed by God is as real as it is inevitable.  One day, God will break through our stubbornness.  We will lose everything we once thought was ours to keep forever, and be given everything we always really hoped for. 

So maybe the nuns meant well but they got it wrong.  And the man who came up to me anxious about the reality of hell need not worry.  God is good and generous.  Maybe he will provide a temporary place of misery, like a real fleabag motel, just off the road to paradise, for those who need a reassurance of a place of woe. 

But those places aren’t fire-proof.  The burning love of God is on its way to melt hearts that have grown hard, hearts that need to hide off the road. 

As I am writing this, there is a major storm warning for much of the eastern half of the United States.  It is raining heavily here in Conyers and as the rain moves northward it will change to snow.  Two feet of snow are expected to fall in many places far north of here.  There is a site on the internet that shows a map with all these colors and moving images, swirls of reds and blues, greens and yellows, blending all together to give a near accurate map of where the good weather is and where the bad weather is, and how it is all moving. There are sites, too, where audio is possible, as well as predictions that span the next week or so.

I remember a man whose name was Mr. Connolly and he was the grandfather of a good friend of mine from my grammar school days.  My friend’s name was John. Mr. Connolly lived in North Dakota and spent several months of each year with his daughter, who was my friend’s mom.  He was a farmer and was a quiet man.  He wore big shoes, had big hands and wore suspenders and red flannel shirts.  And he liked telling stories about North Dakota, knowing that we had never been there.  One day, we were at my friend’s house and John and I went outside to play.  Soon, tiny flakes of snow started coming down, being blown by a wind that seemed to be picking up.  Mr. Connolly came outside and eyed the flakes and smiled at us and said, “It is going to be a whopper.”  And he was right.  The ensuing blizzard lasted for two days and dumped several feet of snow in northern New Jersey.  Mr. Connolly had a trained eye for storms of all types, a kind of gift he had developed because he had to.  He had learned over the years to watch the North Dakota skies and read the wind and the snow, the rain and the clouds for storm warnings of many types – tornadoes, heavy rains, blizzards.

We learn to read and see, hear and translate different things when circumstances force us to do so.  I once read that in the time of Columbus, men who traveled the seas on ships were capable of seeing navigational stars in the light of day, simply because they had to and had trained their eyes to do so.  Nowadays, radar and computer screens get wayfarers where they need to go, most of the time. We live in a world brimming with experts who have inherited many technological wonders that can get us where we think we need to go with an increasing degree of speed, sophistication and ease.  Mr. Connolly would be amazed these days at what the press of a few buttons can do, seemingly magic things from illuminating weather patterns on a screen to capturing images of stars that died billions of years ago.

When I was a boy, it was known that there were a certain number of planets in our solar system.  Earth, Mercury, Venus, Uranus, Mars, Saturn, Pluto, Jupiter.  The farthest of these was the limit of the knowable.  Things have changed.  With the visible reach afforded by stunning advances in scanning the universe and seeing ever more deeply into it in terms of spatial and even temporal coordinates, it is now believed that there are more planets than there are grains of sand on the earth.  More planets are being added to the list each month.  It is also known that the history of the earth predates the arrival of humans by billions of years, so that we are a rather late arrival on the scene.  And our lives are a fleeting nano-second in the overall stretch of time.  It is so daunting that any human life seems to shrink to insignificance with each new discovery that adds to the immensity and mystery of this universe into which we were born, or, as some would say, thrown will-nilly.   

We believe that God spoke and Creation came into being.  And whatever the Big Bang was, the first “stuff” we call matter is believed to have been no larger than a tennis ball.  A Word was spoken and it grew, and is still growing, moving, expanding. 

Part of that expansion is one of understanding, of coming to know better who God is, how God is and how God may be speaking – and how we are to listen.  How we are, in the title of a memorable book by Karl Rahner, “Hearers of the Word.”

The God Who is: Creation is ongoing, and we are latecomers to the originating event.  But in our late arrival we have been able to look back and figure some things out.  The lens through which we gaze as Christians is the Incarnation, the presence of Jesus in human history as the presence of the divine, the divine who walked with us, dined with us, shared his life with us and in so doing shares divine life with us.  Jesus was able to look about and see the presence of God in many things, both small and great.  When asked about God, Jesus replied in terms of tiny seeds that grew into enormous trees with branches that would hold the birds of the air.  He spoke of a treasure hidden in a field.  He spoke of harvests and pearls of great price and the men and women of his day understood.  And they also understood when he presenced himself in bread and wine, and the gathering of people in his name, and the sharing of the word.  He became a presence that manifested itself as being throughout all of creation and it has taken a long time for the church to understand the fullness that is in its midst, a fullness that knows no boundaries other than human blindness and hardness of heart.

It is not as if Creation emerged from the mouth of God and tumbled into being, leaving the Creator behind to watch what came forth.  In speaking, God became a living part of all that is.  God’s speech is active and life giving in the very fabric of being.  Nothing exists apart from God.  As the late Edward Schillebeeckx was fond of saying, there is no salvation apart from the world.  The world itself, and the universe through which it spins, is the ongoing arena of salvific activity.  The role of the church is to hear, to listen to the currents of the winds and the hymns of the universe for the symphony of the Creator God. 

On my first visit to the monastery, I was fortunate to be in the presence of the Abbot General, Bernardo Olivera.  He spoke to a small gathering in the retreat house and one morning looked about and smiled and said that he delights in the presence of God as he finds that presence in all things.  He said that he awoke early and had gone for a walk down by the family guest house and heard the barking of a dog and that bark called to his mind the presence of God in a humble creature, a dog who may have been barking for food, for companionship, for a need to be noticed.  He then went on to share some thoughts about God in a more formal or classical sense but those first few words said as much as whatever followed.  If one wants to listen to God, it is necessary to take to heart and to the ear different people who have learned to hear him in different ways, ways similar to the one shared with us by the Abbot General.  His example was direct and simple.  And I think the ways that God speaks are no less so.

We are used to understanding listening in terms of language, of words that are spoken and that form sentences and patterns of thought that make sense, that we can hear and immediately translate.  And so it is we naturally focus in on learning to listen as an activity of attuning ourselves to a voice, to words that speak to the heart, to the ear.  And that is surely a part of the process.  But God speaks in different ways and through many different modalities.  There are the worlds of beauty – the forms of art and music.  The is the Word that is silence, and it is true that we can listen to silence and know that it is somehow saying something, speaking in much the same way that the silence of freshly fallen snow on a city conveys a message that is known by more than poets and artists.  A man or woman walks along the beach, listening to the ebb and flow of the surf and somehow hears the mysteries of time, of loss, of eternity, of longing for what the mind cannot grasp but what it knows exists.  Such is the gift of the language of the sea, a vast paragraph used by God to beckon men and women to the mysteries of depths that are as real in the heart as they are unfathomable. 

There is the story of Francis of Assisi, who when walking along a road was asked by a disciple to speak of the mystery of God and when asked he looked at a tree and asked that it speak, and the tree burst into blossoms. Much can be said of the man or woman who asks to hear something of or from God and encounters a person who can open the eyes of the heart by a bloom of kindness or compassion.  I believe that if you pray to hear, pray to listen, pray to see, then the seemingly ordinary events in human life will show themselves for what they really are and what they are capable of saying.  Can it be that we move through life looking for a tidy and lasting sentence or two from God and in doing so dismiss the unmistakable cadence of His voice as it speaks to each of us through the ordinary events of any given day?  God may speak all languages known to humanity – but I feel that he knows some that get through to us in as many ways as there are grains of sand on the earth.  God is a God of abundance – and there are the mystics among us who listen and hear God speak in tones and syllables that have colors, seasons, sonatas and even rock n’ roll. 

Our monastery is a place wherein lives are set apart to ponder and share the mysteries of God.  The first sentence in the Rule of Benedict is an invitation to come aside and listen with the ears of one’s heart.  It takes time to do that, and a special place, and a tradition of hearers who have gone before us and left the written scores of the symphonies they believe they heard, and that came from a place at once far from here but as near as the singing of the nearest bird.  Cistercian history is rich in finding God in the cultivating of the natural beauties of life.  In that sense, we are preservationists of the divine soil in this life, turning each shovel full of earth with each day that passes, letting God grow as he will in this cloistered garden in Conyers.  We listen as best we can with our lives and every sense that we are gifted with.  And there is no sense that is left out.  We touch and hear, see and feel and even speak of and from God every day.  We try and refine each of these gifts so as to use them and share them as to what they do best – sacramental means through which grace can be approached made a bit more visible.  The monk in each of us should be a crafts-person of the ordinary, taking what is seemingly common and making of it a channel of grace.  I think one has to listen with one’s entire being to become an expert craftsman.

Day before yesterday, Salena Troy held in her hands a metal work of art that Leo Francis had made.  It looked to be a candle holder and was rather unique looking – Leo had a way of fashioning metal in a style that bore his signature.  When she showed it to me I thought how much of a light Leo was to her and she to him, and now she has a way to allow his memory to burn once again, like the light that he was.  There is a kind of listening involved in something as beautiful as that, for many words can be gleaned from human lives that are centered on the gospel and that because of that centering share gifts, gifts born from the love of God that sustains us all as light.  Light can be seen.  It can also be heard. 

In closing, I hesitate to tell you how to better listen to God. I think you already know.  It might be better to encourage you to trust in all you have already heard from him.  Remember that bark of the dog, and the way an old man long ago saw a blizzard through a few flakes.  Grace abounds in life.  It is everywhere, and if you trust in the eternity that can be heard through the soft fall of a leaf to the earth, you too can scan the skies and trust in the winds of grace that are coming.  They are first felt as longing, a desire that buffets and pulls the human heart toward other hearts, towards God. The longings come, gently at the outset, carried by a strange but warm wind. It is the wind of God. His storm is on the way. And it is a whopper.