Now that Saint Thomas Day as come and gone and our preparations for Christmas are completed, we have three days to focus on the spiritual life and preparing our hearts and minds for the coming of the Lord. Brother Kevin Hackett of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist in Cambridge, Massachusetts recently preached a sermon on patience and active listening. I am going to reproduce for you, over the course of the next three days, portions of this thought provoking sermon to assist you in your practice of listening. I hope you enjoy Brother Hackett’s words as much as I have.
“The word patience, you may know derives from a Latin root which means “to bear or to endure or to suffer (especially pain), without complaint.” As with any spiritual discipline, our ability to be patient does not come without practice, which simply means “something done routinely, habitually, or normatively; or something done repetitively in an effort to improve facility, skill, and familiarity.” Both senses pertain here in the practice of patience. To listen, then, for our purposes this evening, is a spiritual exercise that can equip us to persevere and endure and bear the “changes and chances of this life” that always seem to be accompanied by their first cousins, “confusion and loss.”
“The biggest challenge for most of us is that we do not really know how to listen. Carl Jung has said that an essential aspect of being human is to be able to tell our story to someone else and to know that we have been heard, that we have been deeply understood, that we have been known in a profound way. It used to be the case—and what I am about to say is not an exercise in nostalgia—that such listening happened in the course of daily human life, in ordinary conversation at the level of the domestic, the village, the church, the county. With advances in industrialization and communication, came the loss of natural venues in which one learned to listen and to tell and to interrupt the stories that were told and heard.
“Now, the world has never been so connected, at least by technology—and there is certainly much good that can come from its prudent use. It is a gift whose capacity to shed much brightness and light casts a shadow that is as black as pitch. There is still much we do not know about the long-term effects of virtual social networks replacing face to face relationships with friends and peers and mentors and confidants who listen to our stories and reflect back to us the truth of them, truth about ourselves that we often do not and cannot otherwise know.
“As creatures made in the image and likeness of God, we are created for relationship, with a built-in desire and longing to be known and loved and encouraged. Surely one of the darkest aspects of our growing love affair with technology is how it enables a kind of unbridled isolation. It is no accident that we do not have wePods, wePads, and wePhones. No, it is I, I, I. With more to come.”
The second portion of Kevin’s sermon will be offered tomorrow.
Love One Another - Brian
Listening to Whispered Promptings
Thomas Kelly
When we say Yes or No to calls, on the basis of inner guidance and whispered promptings of encouragement from the Center of our life, or on the basis of a lack of any inward 'rising' of that Life to encourage us in the call...then we have begun to live in guidance.... The Cosmic Patience becomes, in part, our patience, for after all God is at work in the world. It is not we alone who are at work in the world, frantically finishing a work to be offered to God.
Source: A Testament of Devotion
Luke 1:57-66
Now the time came for Elizabeth to give birth, and she bore a son. Her neighbors and relatives heard that the Lord had shown his great mercy to her, and they rejoiced with her. On the eighth day they came to circumcise the child, and they were going to name him Zechariah after his father. But his mother said, ‘No; he is to be called John.’ They said to her, ‘None of your relatives has this name.’ Then they began motioning to his father to find out what name he wanted to give him. He asked for a writing-tablet and wrote, ‘His name is John.’ And all of them were amazed. Immediately his mouth was opened and his tongue freed, and he began to speak, praising God. Fear came over all their neighbors, and all these things were talked about throughout the entire hill country of Judea. All who heard them pondered them and said, ‘What then will this child become?’ For, indeed, the hand of the Lord was with him.
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