FR. SAVIO SICCUAN, OSB
I want to begin with some questions. What if, in life, we do not know how to listen anymore? How important is listening in everyday living? How important is listening in terms of Faith? What are the consequences of listening in the spiritual life? What difference does it make if we are a people who take the time to listen?
Listening is everything! No commitment is possible without listening. Our particular calling has no perseverance if we do not learn to listen. Without listening, all our relationships will soon collapse. There is no such thing as a genuine prayer life without listening. Everything falls apart when we do not want to hear!
Pope Francis urged Church leaders to listen to their flock in one of his recent Angelus discourses. What is troubling the faithful? What are their concerns? What are their hopes and expectations? The sign of a true shepherd is learning to listen to what the flock has to say!
The Church listens to the faithful in so many ways. The Church listens to the penitents in the Sacrament of Confession. The Church listens to the flock through spiritual direction. In raising holy men and women to beatification and canonization, the Church has to listen to the voice of the faithful. Even in selecting priests, bishops, cardinals, and the Pope, the Church must listen to the Spirit’s movement! When the Supreme Pontiff of the Church comes up with encyclicals or apostolic exhortations, it is but the fruit of listening to the signs of the times, whether it be about the pandemic, ecological concerns, and the crisis of overflowing migrants in Europe, the United States, and everywhere.
The one sin of the chosen people in the Old Testament is not listening. Their sin of murmuring after all the marvels the Lord has done to them is a sin of ingratitude, i.e., failing to listen to God’s voice telling them how much He loves them to free them from their bondage. And they kept on worshiping other gods even as the Lord commanded them through Moses with the words: Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is one Lord. You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. (Deut 6:4-9). Their disobedience is the sin of not listening to the Lord’s commands.
Love, in the end, is all about listening. If I genuinely love my vocation, I would do anything to protect it and grow in it. For the family, this means listening to my spouse and children’s needs, cries, and concerns. For those in the religious life, it means listening to the loving commands of the Superior and my brothers and sisters in the community. For us religious leaders, it means listening to the needs of the Church here and now. Listening, in the end, cannot be equated with just hearing.
In the end, listening means living out concretely the demands of my family, community, the Church, and God. It means putting into practice the demands of my particular calling.
For to love in the end is to die to myself. To love in the end is to die to egoism and individualism. The Apostle Paul put it so well: For me to live is Christ, and to die (to the self) is gain!
Listening is at the heart of prayer, which bonds us to God. Listening is a difficult task, not only because we listen, not just with our ears, but even more so with our hearts. There are so many factors that affect the disposition of our hearts. What makes listening even more a challenge in prayer, is that we do not see God! That is why Jesus made great effort to LISTEN in prayer, waking early at break of day, and even going out to a place where He could be alone with God. To LISTEN is to prostrate ourselves before and solely to the Divine!
Comments are closed.