Listening to God

Loving as Listening

It seems to me that if we love someone, we want to understand their story, the objective and subjective facts of their story, where they were born, their upbringing , their aims and desires, their sorrows and their joys. This is done not by the hiring of a detective, but by listening. The more we listen, the more and the more deeply we understand. The love of God is no different. The more we listen to God, the more we understand God.

Listening is a skill. It requires self-emptying, getting self out of the way. We cannot listen as long as we have our own thoughts going on. When full of ourselves, we have no room for an other. There is no room in the In.

To listen to God, I must empty myself of me. I must go to the templum, the clear and open space where I sit silently and open. 

Listening is a form of death, a death which opens to a wider life. No longer living in our personal echo chamber, we resonate with the sounds of those about us. 

What are the sounds of God?