Dear Friends,
Listening, really listening, takes, I find, a lot of concentration, and a lot of practice. Its about the hard work of paying careful attention, and it’s not easy, even though I am blessed with good hearing. As I’ve mentioned before, every morning I go out on my prayer walk, in the middle of which I stop, stand in silence, and listen and watch for around 10-15 minutes. First I ask myself the question ‘what can I hear?’, and then, ‘what have I not heard?’. This second question isn’t in the Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ sense of ‘what should I hear but no longer do?’, although that may be a good question to ask, but in the sense of ‘what have I not noticed?’
First are the obvious sounds close at hand; the gentle cascading cadence of the willow warbler, the brash pace-bowler-run-up of the chaffinch, the quivering bursting of the wren, the jaunty swinging of the chiff-chaff, the alarmed staccato of the blackbird, the mournful plaint of the robin, all against a constant background of worried ewes and crying lambs. Then listening through these, to make out the silver rain of a skylark, the strident declaration of the distant song-thrush, the twittering chattery of a charm of goldfinches, perhaps a single rising reedy bubble from a peewit that makes me turn suddenly, the occasional frantic meowing of a buzzard as it searches for a thermal on which to soar. Beyond these again, in the woods over there, the enchanting fluting of a blackcap, or in that far-off thicket, the mellifluous conversation of a garden warbler, the occasional soft incitement of a wood pigeon, ‘steal TWO cows, Taffy!’. Then I become aware that I’ve been oblivious to the noisy arguments emanating from the rookery half a mile away, the sporadic sharp yak of a jackdaw, the harsh rasping of a few crows, the sweet purring of a passing rook, and a disturbed dog barking way over yonder. Now I’m straining to hear what I haven’t noticed. Was that the faint call of a cuckoo towards the Bewcastle Fells? I can just make out the monotonous hum of a distant car engine. The near silent drone of a tiny glint carrying a few hundred trusting souls 30,000 ft above. And now, close beside me, the quiet breath waving the water avens, a red-tailed queen bumble crawling among the stalks of creeping buttercup, an orange-tip alighting on an upright cuckoo flower. Am I hearing now, or just seeing? Have the two senses become one? And what was that? Can I hear the grass growing?
All these sounds are happening at the same time, yet somehow we are able to distinguish them. But what I find almost unfathomable is that there is, in fact, no such thing as ‘sound’. There is only the ‘simple’ vibrating molecules of air. We ‘hear’ them as they flutter on our eardrums. If we didn’t have these tiny films of skin, the world would be quiet to us – deafness. We actually live in a silent world. But because we have a thin, tympanic membrane that vibrates in response to collisions from these particles in the air, and three miniscule bones (wonderfully called the hammer, the anvil and the stirrup) that convert those vibrations in the air to vibrations in our brain, we can interpret them as ‘sound’. And that becomes birdsong, wind, engines, talking, music, thunder – one of the five ways through which we sense the world around us.
But listening isn’t just about discerning different sounds in our environment. My mother used to sometimes say ‘God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason’. She wasn’t referring to any evolutionary principles of natural selection here! But she was identifying one of the most important elements of human relating – the ability to listen carefully to the other person before commenting or passing judgement, and an interest in them before ourselves. And I wasn’t very good at it.
This aspect of listening is perhaps even harder work than distinguishing the sounds we can hear. It certainly takes as much practice and patience. Almost all arguments and misunderstandings arise from an unwillingness to do the hard work of listening first. We can see it in our own relationships, in our families, and increasingly in our noisy and strident politics. The ability to listen carefully and sympathetically to others, especially those with whom we think we disagree, or those of a different gender, or from a different culture or country, before passing any comment, or coming to any decision or judgement, is a fundamental component of our being human. But its not one that seems to be valued by many political leaders, or social media ‘influencers’. Understandably, we all want our point of view to be heard, our circumstances understood, which means being listened to by others – asking them to treat us as worthy of being listened to, of being human. The irony is the less we listen, the less human we become because we aren’t treating others as ourselves. So listening carefully has something to do with becoming fully human, and isn’t that something we want for everyone? As Jesus never tired of saying, ‘he who has ears to hear, let him hear.’
Your friend and priest,
Robert
1 comment
I now ‘hear’ your important June words….