The Courage to Hear

When listening to God may cost us the life by which we have known ourselves

“Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.”

— 1 Samuel 3:9

There are moments when I look back upon the last several years and wonder whether I should simply have stopped.

Not searched.

Not planned.

Not tried so quickly to find another place to stand.

Perhaps I should have waited longer.

Waited upon the Lord.

Waited until the noise within me had quieted enough that I could distinguish His voice from my fear, my longing, the expectations of others, and my own need to know what my life was going to become.

I do not say this with bitterness.

Nor do I believe that God was absent from any of it.

But there are forms of movement that arise because stillness frightens us.

There are decisions we make not because they are necessarily wrong, but because uncertainty has become unbearable.

We want a place.

A name.

A future.

Something beneath our feet.

And sometimes God gives us none of these because He is trying to teach us where the ground really is.

Christ.

Nothing else.

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It has taken me many years to understand how difficult it can be simply to listen.

We speak easily about discernment.

We tell one another to seek God’s will.

We pray for guidance.

But we rarely speak about what happens when God’s guidance begins to threaten the very structures through which we have learned to recognize ourselves.

It is one thing to ask God what He wants when we suspect the answer will leave our life largely intact.

It is another thing to ask when the answer may change everything.

Then listening becomes frightening.

Not because we do not love God.

Because we have accumulated so much around that love.

History.

Relationships.

Vocation.

Reputation.

Expectations.

Responsibilities.

The understanding others have of us.

The understanding we have of ourselves.

These things are not necessarily false.

Some are holy.

That is precisely why surrendering them is so difficult.

The idols made of wicked things are sometimes easier to recognize.

The more dangerous ones can be fashioned from things God Himself once gave us.

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For nearly forty years I lived within a particular spiritual and ecclesial world.

It formed me.

I remain grateful for it.

Through it I received Scripture, sacrament, priesthood, prayer, friendship, discipline, and countless encounters with grace.

Nothing truthful requires me to deny this.

But every world also gives us a way of seeing.

It gives us a language.

Certain questions become natural.

Others become difficult to ask.

Still others become almost unimaginable.

Not because someone has forbidden them.

Simply because they lie beyond the horizon within which we have learned to see.

And so it is possible to encounter something for years without understanding what it is doing within us.

The desert.

Saint Isaac.

The Jesus Prayer.

Watchfulness.

Repentance as the continual breaking open of the heart.

Silence.

The long remembrance of God.

I thought I was discovering treasures within Christianity.

I was.

But I did not yet understand that they were also teaching me how to see Christianity itself.

Something was changing beneath the level of argument.

A grammar was forming in the heart.

I had learned words.

I had not yet understood that I was learning to breathe.

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Perhaps this is why guidance matters so much.

There are things we cannot understand merely by reading about them.

We need someone who breathes the same air.

Not someone who will make our decisions for us.

Not someone who will flatter our desires.

Not someone eager to recruit us into another world.

Someone whose life quietly reveals that another way of seeing is possible.

The Fathers understood this.

The disciple went to the elder not merely for information.

He went because truth had become flesh in another human being.

The elder had inhabited what the disciple had only begun to glimpse.

Sometimes we need to stand near such a person before we recognize the country toward which our own heart has been traveling.

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Looking back, I can see how much fear was present.

Fear of disappointing others.

Fear of betraying what had formed me.

Fear of instability.

Fear of losing priesthood.

Fear of having no recognizable place.

Fear of discovering that after relinquishing one world there might not immediately be another waiting to receive me.

And beneath these was another fear, more difficult to admit.

The fear of becoming no one.

We speak often about dying to self.

Usually we imagine sins, passions, vanity, selfishness.

But there is another death.

The death of the self we constructed from good things.

The faithful one.

The useful one.

The priest.

The teacher.

The monk.

The person others seek out.

The person who knows where he belongs.

God may not ask us to cease being any of these.

But He may ask us to stop using them to answer the question:

Who are you?

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Perhaps this is what the wilderness is for.

It does not always tell us where to go.

First it removes the places where we have been hiding.

Israel entered the desert without possessing the land promised to them.

The monks entered the desert without knowing what would become of them.

Abraham departed without knowing where he was going.

This seems terribly inefficient.

We would prefer revelation accompanied by an itinerary.

God often gives only enough light for obedience.

And sometimes obedience consists in remaining where we are until the need to escape uncertainty has died.

This may be one of the hardest forms of waiting.

To refrain from forcing the next chapter.

To refuse to manufacture stability.

To allow unanswered questions to remain unanswered before God.

To pray.

To care for the person before us.

To do the small work of the day.

To say the Name.

To remain.

And to discover slowly that a life which appears to be suspended may in fact be the place where God is doing His deepest work.

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I sometimes wish I had understood this earlier.

I wish I had waited more.

Listened more.

Allowed myself to know less.

But even regret can become another attempt to control the life we have been given.

We imagine a straighter road.

If only I had known.

If only I had waited.

If only I had understood.

Perhaps.

But the road actually traveled has also taught me.

The wandering taught me.

Closed doors taught me.

Disappointments taught me.

The failure of carefully imagined futures taught me.

The inability to secure a permanent place taught me.

The person entrusted to my care taught me.

Silence taught me.

And God, who wastes nothing offered to Him, has been present even in the roads I might not choose again.

So repentance cannot mean despising the road behind me.

It means becoming teachable upon the road beneath my feet.

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I understand now something I could not have understood years ago.

Sometimes we are not waiting for God to reveal His will.

God is waiting for us to become free enough to hear it.

Not fearless.

Free.

There is a difference.

Fear may remain.

The unknown may remain unknown.

The future may still have no recognizable shape.

But fear no longer gets to decide what questions may be asked.

That is freedom.

To stand before Christ without secretly handing Him the acceptable answers.

To say:

You may preserve this.

You may take it.

You may return it to me differently.

You may lead me somewhere I never expected to go.

Only do not let me prefer security to truth.

Do not let me call fear prudence.

Do not let me mistake familiarity for fidelity.

Do not let me demand that tomorrow justify yesterday.

Give me only enough light to remain with You today.

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Perhaps that is what has taken so long.

Not discovering another answer.

Becoming capable of asking the question without protecting myself from the answer.

There is mercy even in seeing this late.

Perhaps especially then.

Because God does not stand at the end of the road asking why it took us so long.

He meets us where we finally stop.

Where explanations fail.

Where identities loosen.

Where the future can no longer be secured.

Where we discover that beneath priesthood, monastery, ministry, belonging, reputation, success, failure, and every name by which we have known ourselves, there remains something terribly small and terribly free:

a human being standing before God.

And perhaps the beginning of discernment is not knowing where that person will go.

Perhaps it is finally becoming quiet enough to say:

Speak, Lord.

Even if what You say changes everything.

I am listening.