This is the keynote essay from a new book, A Listening Heart: The Art of Contemplative Living, by Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk who is a writer and lecturer and was a close friend of Thomas Merton.
We’ve published Brother David’s writings before (Issue 76, “Learning to Die”). I admire his work, which is deceptively simple, full of the passionate intensity that arises from a life of silence, deeply joyful because, as he recognizes, “it is not happiness that makes gratefulness but gratefulness that makes happiness.”
We’re thankful to The Crossroad Publishing Company for permission to reprint this essay.
— Ed.
The key word of the spiritual discipline I follow is “listening.” This means a special kind of listening, a listening with one’s heart. To listen in that way is central to the monastic tradition in which I stand. The very first word of the Rule of St. Benedict is “listen!” — “Ausculta!” — and all the rest of Benedictine discipline grows out of this one initial gesture of wholehearted listening, as a sunflower grows from its seed.
Benedictine spirituality in turn is rooted in the broader and more ancient tradition of the Bible. But here, too, the concept of listening is central. In the biblical vision all things are brought into existence by God’s creative Word; all of history is a dialogue with God, who speaks to the human heart. The Bible has been admired for proclaiming with great clarity that God is One and Transcendent. Yet, the still more admirable insight of the religious genius reflected in biblical literature is the insight that God speaks. The transcendent God communicates Self through nature and through history. The human heart is called to listen and to respond.
Responsive listening is the form the Bible gives to our basic religious quest as human beings. This is the quest for a full human life, for happiness. It is the quest for meaning, for our happiness hinges not on good luck; it hinges on peace of heart. Even in the midst of what we call bad luck, in the midst of pain and suffering, we can find peace of heart, if we find meaning in it all. Biblical tradition points the way by proclaiming that God speaks to us in and through even the most troublesome predicaments. By listening deeply to the message of any given moment I shall be able to tap the very Source of Meaning and to realize the unfolding meaning of my life.
To listen in this way means to listen with one’s heart, with one’s whole being. The heart stands for that center of our being at which we are truly “together.” Together with ourselves, not split up into intellect, will, emotions, into mind and body. Together with all other creatures, for the heart is that realm where I am paradoxically not only most intimately myself, but most intimately united with all. Together with God, the source of life, the life of my life, welling up in the heart. In order to listen with my heart, I must return again and again to my heart through a process of centering, through taking things to heart. Listening with my heart I will find meaning. For just as the eye perceives light and the ear sound, the heart is the organ for meaning.
The daily discipline of listening and responding to meaning is called obedience. This concept of obedience is far more comprehensive than the narrow notion of obedience as doing-what-you-are-told-to-do. Obedience in the full sense is the process of attuning the heart to the simple call contained in the complexity of a given situation. The only alternative is absurdity. Ab-surdus literally means absolutely deaf. If I call a situation absurd I admit that I am deaf to its meaning. I admit implicitly that I must become ob-audiens — thoroughly listening, obedient. I must give my ear, give myself, so fully to the word that reaches me that it will send me. Being sent by the word, I will be obedient to my mission. Thus, by doing the truth lovingly, not by analyzing it, I will begin to understand.
The ethical implications of all this are obvious. Therefore it is all the more important to remember that we are not primarily concerned with an ethical but with a religious matter; not primarily with purpose, even the most exalted purpose of good works, but with that religious dimension from which every purpose must derive its meaning. The Bible calls the responsive listening of obedience “living by the Word of God,” and that means far more than merely doing God’s will. It means being nourished by God’s word as food and drink, God’s word in every person, every thing, every event.
This is a daily task, a moment by moment discipline. I eat a tangerine and the resistance of the rind, as I peel it, speaks to me, if I am alert enough. Its texture, its fragrance speak an intranslatable language, which I have to learn. Beyond the awareness that each little segment has its own degree of sweetness (the ones on the side that was exposed to the sun are the sweetest) lies the awareness that all this is pure gift. Or could one ever deserve such food?
I hold a friend’s hand in mine, and this gesture becomes a word, the meaning of which goes far beyond words. It makes demands on me. It is an implicit pledge. It calls for faithfulness and for sacrifice. But it is above all a celebration of friendship, a meaningful gesture that need not be justified by any practical purpose. It is as superfluous as a sonnet or a string quartet, as superfluous as all the ultimately important things in life. It is a word of God by which I live.
But a calamity is also word of God when it hits me. While working for me, a young man, as dear to me as my own little brother, has an accident. Glass is shattered in his eyes, and I find him lying blindfolded in a hospital bed. What is God saying now? Together we grope, grapple, listen, strain to hear. Is this, too, a lifegiving word? When we can no longer make sense of a given situation, we have reached the crucial point. Now arises the challenge that calls for faith.
The clue lies in the fact that any given moment confronts us with a given reality. But if it is given, it is gift. If it is gift, the appropriate response is thanksgiving. Yet, thanksgiving, where it is genuine, does not primarily look at the gift and express appreciation; it looks at the giver and expresses trust. The courageous confidence that trusts in the Giver of all gifts is faith. To give thanks even when we cannot see the goodness of the Giver, to learn this is to find the path to peace of heart. For happiness is not what makes us grateful. It is gratefulness that makes us happy.
In a lifelong process the discipline of listening teaches us to live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God without discrimination. We learn this by “giving thanks in all things.” The monastery is an environment set up to facilitate just that. The method is detachment. When we fail to distinguish between wants and needs we lose sight of our goal. Our needs (many of them imaginary) keep increasing; our gratefulness (and so our happiness) dwindles. Monastic discipline reverses this course. The monk strives for needing less and less while becoming more and more grateful.
Detachment decreases our needs. The less we have, the easier it is gratefully to appreciate what we do have. Silence creates the atmosphere for detachment. Silence pervades monastic life in the same way in which noise pervades life elsewhere. Silence creates space around things, persons and events. Silence singles them out and allows us gratefully to consider them one by one in their uniqueness. Leisure is the discipline of finding time to do so. Leisure is the expression of detachment with regard to time. For the leisure of monks is not the privilege of those who can afford to take time; it is the virtue of those who give to everything they do the time it deserves to take.
Within the monastery the listening which is the essence of this spiritual discipline expresses itself in bringing life into harmony with the cosmic rhythm of seasons and hours, with “time, not our time” as T.S. Eliot calls it. But in my personal life, obedience often demands that I serve outside the monastery. What counts is the listening to the soundless bell of “time, not our time,” wherever it be and the doing of whatever needs to be done when it is time — “now, and in the hour of our death.” “And the time of death is every moment,” says T.S. Eliot, because the moment in which we truly listen is “a moment in and out of time.”
One method for entering moment by moment into that mystery is the discipline of the Jesus Prayer, the Prayer of the Heart, as it is also called. It consists basically in the mantric repetition of the name of Jesus, synchronized with one’s breath and heartbeat. When I repeat the name of Jesus at a given moment in time, I make that moment transparent to the Now that does not pass away. The whole biblical notion of living by the Word is summed up in the name of Jesus in whom I as a Christian adore the Word incarnate. By giving that name to every thing and to every person I encounter, by invoking it in every situation in which I find myself, I remind myself that everything is just another way of spelling out the inexhaustible fullness of the one eternal word of God, the Logos; I remind my heart to listen! This image might seem to suggest a dualistic rift between God who speaks and the obedient heart. Yet, the dualistic tension is caught up and transcended in the mystery of the Trinity. In the light of that mystery I understand myself as a word spoken out of the Creator’s heart and at the same time addressed by the Creator. But the communion goes deeper. In order to understand the word addressed to me, the word I am, I must speak the language of the One who calls. If I can understand God at all this can come about only by my sharing in God’s own Spirit of Self-understanding. Thus the responsive listening in which my spiritual discipline consists is not dualistic communication. It is the celebration of triune communion: the Word, coming forth from Silence, leads by Understanding home into Silence. My heart, like a vessel thrown into the ocean, is filled with God’s life and totally immersed in it. All this is pure gift. It remains for me to rise to the occasion by all-embracing thanksgiving.
From A Listening Heart: The Art of Contemplative Living by David Steindl-Rast. Copyright ©1983 by the author. Reprinted by permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company.
