Difficult question to answer. Reminds me of a discusion in a 12-step group. "Okay. We need to surrender to Higher Power. But what is surrender? How do you do it?" No one could quite answer the question. It is interior, mysterious, spiritual, inexplicable.
It is like riding a bike or swimming: no one can really teach you how to do it, they can teach you how to try. So you try and fall; you try and sink; maybe 10 or 20 times or more. And then, magically...incredibly...you do it! You can ride! You can float! And it becomes natural.
Even a natural action like swimming or riding a bike requires effort, but strangely the effort itself does not suffice. At some point, something beyond our deliberation, intention, decision happens serendipitously: suddenly our body/mind synchronize with the bike in movement or the water and something new and surprising happens. What Joy! Even more with listening to God: we try and we try and we try...maybe hundreds or thousands of times...and startlingly, ecstatically, it happens.
What is it to listen? You are alone, quiet and a strange sound disturbs you. Is it a mouse scurrying about? Is someone at the door? Is something wrong? What do you do? You listen! You clear your mind and your senses. You hold yourself quiet and still. You wait...and listen. You wait, expectantly, for any unusual sound. You hear a dog barking in the distance...normal. You hear a horn on the street...normal. You hear the purring of the air conditioner...normal. But you wait...and listen. And so, the prayer of listening: you still yourself, especially your manic-monkey-mind, as much as you can, and you wait. You ask: Lord, do you have a word for me? And then you wait...quietly, patiently, expectantly.
Imagine someone is talking to you and you are really listening. What are you doing? Well, you mind is quiet, empty, expectant and receptive. You are looking into the eyes, following the expressions as well as the movement of lips and mouth; you are feeling the emotion; you are fascinated by the narrative or the ideas or the experience being shared. You are out-of-yourself and entirely into the other. Well, normally, God does not come to us so concretly in this way. So how does He speak with us?
Mysteriously, quietly, in different ways, often not so clearly. If we are asking Him daily "What do You want to tell me" then He will answer. Mysteriously, quietly, surprisingly.
In the quiet of our hearts.
In conversation with others when we hear something that inspires, corrects, encourages, directs us.
In an event, an encounter, a dramatic experience...in which our heart/intellect/soul opens to an exquisite, unbounded horizon of Truth, Goodness, Beauty.
When reading scripture or daily meditation or spiritual reading or the life of a saint.
At mass or in Church.
Listening to God is like anything else...playing handball, speaking Spanish, singing a song...the more you do it, the better you become at it. Early into our marriage I had a problem: I was chronically indecisive. "Should we go to dinner or to a movie? I don't know, what do you want to do?" "I don't know, what do you want to do?" It was some strange disability. Most of the decisions were entirely inconseqential, without moral content. Terrible! Then I read: "Decision making is like anything else: the more you do it the better at it you become." Bingo: All I have to do is make decisions, many of them, and I will become decisive.Not to worry so much about good, bad or indifferent: just make decisions. And that is what happened: I became decisive over a time. So it is with listening to God: try it, over and over again.
Listening...really listening...to another person or to God...requires an interior receptivity, an eagerness, a joyous expectancy, an openess. Such receptivity itself requires an interior quiet and serenity: a freedom from anxiety, activism, work-addiction, resentment, sadness. It requires sobriety...mental, emotional spiritual. It requires inner healing.
Lord Jesus! Breathe into us Your Holy Spirit! Make us quiet and serene, that we may truly listen...that we may receive You and Your Word and welcome the Other in Joy and Love!
Such a great question1 More thoughts to come.
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