Poor Listening

"We are poor listeners because we are afraid that there is something other than love in God."

-Nouwen, 121

At my last job, I have a very clear memory of sitting in a meeting where someone said something that annoyed me.  It more than annoyed me.  It made me mad.  It actually made me pretty furious.  And I sat in my chair silently fuming for I don't know how long before I realized that I hadn't been paying any attention to what was actually happening in the meeting.  Perhaps someone else in the room had disagreed with the speaker.  Perhaps the speaker later apologized or edited their previous remarks.   I imagine that would have been very satisfying to watch, but I have no idea if it happened because I was far too busy focusing on my own emotions and my own sense that a boundary had been violated to bother paying attention to anything else.  Furthermore, I have no recollection of what decisions were made in the meeting during that time...I lost out on my chance to offer feedback.  And it was all because I had this anger that was blocking my ability to listen.

Maybe you've had an experience like that.  Perhaps it was another kind of emotion that overwhelmed you.  I think anger is a common way to get to that point, and I think fear is another common way to get there as well...something Nouwen touched on in today's passage.

 I love the sentence quoted above for two reasons.  I'm interested in the question of what keeps us from listening to God, but I'm also curious about the idea that there might be something other than love in God.  The sentence rings true to me, but what other things do we think are in God?

Perhaps we believe that God may be judgmental or wrathful or disappointed or indifferent.  And there's certainly been enough bad theology combined with personal experience to lead us to that point.  But if we can't listen to God because of our fear or anger that God might be those things, then it's kinda like me having no idea what actually happened in that meeting.  If negative emotions block us from listening, then we can't hear the reality of what's actually happening - the truth that God is love.  Nothing more.  Nothing less.

Where Is Our Glory?

Nouen does not make life easy for us, does he?  Every meditation is so full of food for thought, and so full of counterintuitive observations!  We human beings, especially in America, thrive on competition - it's the American way, right?  Our "glory" so often comes from making it to the top, being the best, the coolest, the smartest, the richest.  We always have our eye fixed on the top of the ladder.

It is just the opposite with Jesus.  Instead of scrabbling for glory by being the best rabbi in town, the best prophet, the cleverest orator, he kept his eye fixed on the poor and the outcasts, on the ones who didn't count worth beans in his society.  God's glory is revealed to us by moving downward.  How bizarre this seems to us at first glance, and how difficult a concept for us; I think it is something we all struggle with all the time. We want to pattern our lives after Jesus, but it is so hard to break old patterns, to turn ourselves away from what most of us have known since we were little kids - the vying for our parents' attention, trying to beat out the other kids with better grades, more accolades at school - you know the drill.  Our eye keeps moving up that ladder!

In reading Nouen's meditations this Lent I have been most intrigued by this "downward call" of Jesus - not an easy concept, but one that we can hold before us and aspire to.  I don't expect in a million years that I can come close to answering that call for myself; I can but try my best, and maybe that is enough.

Audrey

Filling Ourselves With God

One of the main themes of Nouen's book is prayer, and learning to open ourselves to God, to fill our very beings with God. It has been agreed that this book is harder going than his Advent book, and I think that is perhaps because learning to fill ourselves with God is so very difficult for us. There are so many other things that "fill" us, that eat up our time, that cause us to sometimes, alas, put God at the bottom of our list of things to think about. Turning ourselves around is hard work - good Lenten work!

I love his image of prayer as a way to "clean [one's] heart and to create a new space" - a space that can then be filled with prayer for others, so many others, without becoming weighed down.  That, Nouen says, is the spirit of God praying in us.  What a lovely thought that is - God's spirit praying in us!

Of course, prayer involves not only an open heart, but also open eyes and open ears; when we see the little green buds on a tree - thank you, God!  When we hear a siren or see an ambulance speeding down the street - a quick prayer for the person on his or her way to the hospital. When we see a plane flying close to the airport, a little prayer for its safe landing. A thank you to God when we wake up in the morning and before we fall asleep at night.

An open heart can be at prayer all day - kind of like breathing!

Audrey

God and Lady Grantham

Last night I was hanging out and channel surfing and ended up falling into an episode of Downton Abbey that I had (of course!) already seen.  That show is impossible to resist!

I tuned in toward the end of the episode, just after one of the characters had suffered a particularly cruel and wrenching kind of heartbreak.  The character runs upstairs to her room and throws herself on her bed in the most acute emotional pain.  Her mother and her sisters run up the stairs after her to try and find a way to comfort her, but when they arrive in her room, they realize there's not a thing to be done.

"Is there anything I can say to make it better?" her mother asks with the kind of desperation only present when someone we love is in pain.

I replied to the fictional character from my couch, "Of course there's not."

And so the mother simply crawls onto the bed with her daughter and holds her.

I wish the scene had stopped there, but after a moment or two, the mother begins to tell her daughter that God is testing her in order to make stronger.  Oh how I detest this kind of theology!

I wish the scene had stopped with the mother simply holding her daughter because I think it's a wonderful example of the way in which God loves us.  It's like Nouwen says - "The mystery of God's love is not that he takes our pains away, but that he first wants to share them with us."  I think God is like a mother desperate to soothe a child's pain, but knowing that the child requires independence.  It doesn't mean we're left alone with our struggles...far from it...but it means that we are given the space to work through our challenges knowing that there is a loving presence close by.

Here's to hoping Lady Edith figures that out!