Listening as responsibility.
"In the silence of listening, you can know yourself in everyone. Eventually you may be able to hear, in everyone and beyond everyone, the Unseen singing softly to itself and you,” writes Rachel Naomi Remen.
The unseen: In loved ones, strangers, evening light, but also the wounded and betrayed, the decaying, death.
This is obedience. Which literally means thorough listening, from the Latin, ob audire. To obey, to listen thoroughly. Habitually, our rapid judgments and assumptions create a constant static. Obedience asks me to get out of my way. To surrender to what is unfolding, the unexpected, the undesirable, the beautiful, a truth that contradicts my ideas. To find new meaning without an agenda, present to sensations. Trusting common sens(es)? A paradox, to be this focused in listening, grounded, and yet not exclude anything, open. How different from what we think obedience means.
"What comes alive then is more than eyes or ears. Our heart listens and rises to respond," writes Brother David Steindl-Rast. "To the measure that my heart wakes up, I hear the challenge to rise to my responsibility. We tend to overlook the close connection between responsiveness and responsibility, between sensuousness and social challenge."
The bolded text above is my doing. What I know I cannot un-know. Dare I rise to this level of listening Steindl-Rast speaks to? Yes. I am built for this reality. The option to turn away ceases to exist. "If the only thing people learned, was not to be afraid of their experience, that alone would change the world," the teacher Sydney Banks used to say.
We can do this. Really. Meeting what greets us with skill. Even when it’s difficult. Or inconvenient. Seemingly insignificant, my small choices or actions coupled to yours, this responsiveness adds up. I have to. We get to. A practice. We will be okay.
Pablo Neruda: "If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death. Perhaps the earth can teach us as when everything seems dead and later proves to be alive."
Which unseen song will you sense today? And what happened to you when you heard it? What response did you choose?
For the background: Brother David Steindl-Rast woke me up to the word obedience. He brought in another word: Absurd. It is the opposite of the Latin ob audire, turns out. It literally means you are turning away, absolutely deaf. The absurd occurs when wholeness greets me, and I choose to turn away, closing off, saying,'no thank you.' Nothing out there absurd. It is us closing off.
the unseen… light billions of years old reaching.
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