Fr. William Fennelly OSB
Today’s readings devote a lot of attention to the act of listening. In that first reading from Deuteronomy we heard Moses address the stern injunction to his people. “ Listen the, Israel, keep and observe what will make you prosper and give you increase. For Israel the source of their power and increase was the covenant and their whole history had been the story of their living faithfully and in rupture with this core element of their identity as a people. But before the covenant can begin to give life to God’s chosen people they must listen. And Moses goes on “Sh’ma Yis’ra’eil Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad.” Listen, Israel the Lord is our God and the Lord is one. The greatest dogmatic affirmation of the Jewish tradition is predicated on the necessity and by the necessity of listening. There is more at work here that the cry of an orator trying vainly to hold his audience’s attention. There is something more profound in question here. Jesus picks up on this in the gospel text from St Mark with his paraphrase when he says the most important commandment is “Listen Israel… you must love the Lord with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength”. Listening is the first thing that the Moses required of the people of Israel and Jesus as the fufilment of the Old Testament echoes this call. It is the same call that St Benedict uses to address his monks in the first words of his rule for monks “ausculta meii filii praecepti magistrii,” Listen my son to the precepts of the master. In other words be quiet, still your own torrent of words, turn your own inner cinema off, so that you can hear. Be attentive. This call has lost none of its relevance for us gathered here this evening. The challenge of removing distractions or trying to stop multitasking when something of consequence is being said or is taking place is no less difficult for us than it was for the people of Israel following Moses, or for those listening to Jesus and even for Benedict’s monks. Listening invites us into an act of imaginative empathy with the person who is speaking to us. We must be patient while we wait for them to speak and to stop speaking. And we must suspend our own personal judgment and prejudices so that we can actually be attentive to what’s being said. And indeed this rule applies not just to the act of listening but also to discernment or evaluating our lives. The text of our lives requires and the events that happen in them require a certain patient acesis in order to be understood or appreciated. It takes time to figure out what things mean and it takes patience to enable meaning to unfold, to manifest itself. When Jesus was transfigured on Mount Tabor he did not change but Peter, James and John when they gazed on him saw that he was filled with a radiance that they had not seen before.
Jesus says that once we have listened then the central act and truth in the life is love of God and love of neighbour. This is more important that any temple offering or material success or personal investment. But we do not dispense with liturgy just because the Temple is no longer the central element of Christian worship. The catholic imagination is deeply sacramental in that there is a very keen sense that all comes from God. And somehow everything bears an imprint of its divine origin. To speak of a sacramental vision means that we use words to speak of realities that are beyond words. Language cannot exhaust the depths of this reality. Food and drink will soon be used to express, to experience our unity with Christ and through him with each other. The whole of life is touched by this divine origin and so our Christian faith is not a merely spiritual or ethereal thing but it works itself out in our daily lives. And love is crucial here. The Latin anthem “Ubi caritas et amor deus ibi est” says it well where love is there is God.
Listening to the text of our lives and the word of God requires a patient and determined attention and the call is to live out this attention in a loving attention to the God we met in the neigbour, in the other, in our lives now.