Listening

Wisdom 7.26-8.1, Mark 8.27-38

A bunch of serious medical professionals gathered on Q & A to address the concerns of the children of the nation. “Are we going to die?” asked seven year old Amaya. Of this, Virginia Trioli remarked, “You only ever try to bullshit a kid once.”[1] After that, “you experience their directness, blunt questioning and reasoning as a tonic,” a relief from the evasive spin and jargon of the post modern world.

This interaction highlights a major issue in all our lives to do with listening. As Trioli pointed out, we have seriously underestimated the capacity of youngsters to understand and engage with challenges that discombobulate many adults. Their voices simply have not been heard.

But the buck does not stop there. The business of listening is complex. I am convinced that human beings are almost incapable of real communication, because we all view the world through a multifaceted lens of linguistic, social, cultural, religious and ethnic conventions,[2] alongside the ideologies of power structures associated with gender, race, and class.

When I say something, the hearer immediately translates what I have said into her/his own conceptual framework. I do the same. You do the same. There seems no escape from the cultural myths of our own childhoods.

And how often do disagreements escalate into unmanageable situations, disagreements that usually arise from a misunderstanding of what another has said or done. Peter cannot cope with the notion of a Messiah crucified by elders, lay leaders and tall-steeple preachers.[3] So he takes Jesus aside and “rebukes” him. The Greek word is epitēmao (ἐπιτιμάω), which has a range of meanings, the most extreme of which is “to censure severely.”[4] Jesus responds equally strongly with an insult, “Get behind me Satan!” Their ideals and presuppositions are trading blows, while the real substance of their conversation is lost, and their relationship is bruised.

Oh for a modicum of restraint — and wisdom! Where is the Wisdom grace of our OT lesson?

There is in her a spirit that is intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, clear, unpolluted, distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, keen, irresistible, beneficent, humane, steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful, overseeing all, and penetrating through all spirits that are intelligent, pure, and altogether subtle. (Wisdom 7.22-23)

For she is a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; therefore nothing defiled gains entrance into her. For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of her goodness. (Wisdom 7.25-26)

Where is Wisdom to be found? You cannot buy it; and even the tantalising passage from the Wisdom of Solomon gives little clue about the whereabouts of Wisdom, except that it is something to do with God.

She reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other,
and she orders all things well. (Wisdom 8.1)

The Book of Job “presents the most ironic conclusion of all — the Wisdom of God is only seeing the full range of the world’s variety, including its arbitrariness, its senselessness.”[5] We have grown up to expect order in our world and universe, witness the striving of science to determine that very order and make sense of it. However, even science is at the mercy of human frailty. Furthermore, although we may see orderliness, the “rationality in the material universe,” the more we become aware that that rationality is “lacking in the moral world.”

 We celebrate today the Second Sunday of our Season of Creation; although I am tempted to rename it the Season of Destruction, because that is exactly the course upon which the world is set, guided by human beings who do not listen, and who lack the moral intelligence to understand either themselves or the world around us.

We may devote ourselves to explanation, rational skill, and control, but at the same time we must bear in mind that such skills and control throw into stark relief, the uncontrollable world of human disorder and its suffering. Wisdom is more than explanatory skill on the one hand and intuitive penetration on the other.[6]

The “wisdom” to which the Book of Job directs us, actually avoids interpreting Job’s suffering. He refuses the rationalisations his friends offer. His “answer,” if you will, lies in the troubling passage where he accepts that the sight of God is itself the resolution. This is not simply a passive acceptance of “mystery,” which can be a cop out; Job perceives in the world, a boundless resource of creative gift behind its chaos.[7] In this light, Wisdom is the celebration of order and the cry of protest at what is without order.

Amaya’s question to the medical experts is but one of the many cries of protest, uttered by people who are silenced by those who do not listen, those who belittle and sideline other human beings. Food for thought — even the environment utters cries of protest; witness the extremes of weather and the consequences thereof — firestorms, floods, hurricanes.

Which gives rise to another question posed by Moira Donegan — “What, if it’s too late to save our planet without geoengineering?”[8] Geoengineering means ways that human beings can change the climate through interventions of one sort or another. The answer is clear; the pace of climate change, and the paucity of the human response, have already made that choice. Unbelievably, the dominant power structures of the planet still do not listen, entrenched as they are in their ivory castles built of cash. Houses of cards, actually.

Their deafness is deafening.

 At the National Women’s Safety Summit last week, Thelma Schwartz acknowledged the women who came before her, who laid the foundations for her to be there as an Indigenous woman, as an Indigenous lawyer, and she went on declare that “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children have not been seen — they have been silenced … I refuse to be used as a tick and flick measure”.[9]

Her shirt-fronting points to a deeper inquiry about intention.[10] Are political leaders and the mega-wealthy capable of change?

Do they want to change? Those kinds of human conversions, from being deficient to being present, from avoidance to leadership, are substantive, soulful, searching. They are not tick and flick. They require deep reflection, humility and listening.[11]

“To listen without humility is to presume a right to evaluate, to judge, and to control the conversation. Each of these acts is an act of dominance”, and dominance is “ultimately incompatible with one’s ability to listen with humility—to listen for listening’s own sake, without presuming you have a right to control. Listening is humility when it relinquishes dominance.”[12]

As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote:

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me

so that what no one has dared to wish for
may for once spring clear
without my contriving.

 If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.

May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.

 Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,

streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.[13]

[1] Virginia Trioli, Weekend Reads: A little girl's simple question, 28 August 2021

[2] See Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s masterful analysis “G*d - The Many-Named” in John D Caputo & Michael J Scanlon Eds. Transcendence and Beyond: A Postmodern Enquiry (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2007) p117

[3] See C Clifton Black, Commentary on Mark 8.27-38, Working Preacher 10/09/21

[4] See Strong’s NT 2008

[5] Rowan Williams A Ray of Darkness (Plymouth UK : Cowley Publications 1995) p 201)

[6] ibid p202

[7] ibid

[8] What if it’s too late to save our planet without geoengineering? Moira Donegan, The Guardian 26 August 2021

[9] … not when Aboriginal women were 32 times more likely to be hospitalised due to family violence, 10 times more likely to die due to assault, and 45 times more likely to be victims of violence. Not when she was aware of cases in remote communities where young children, victims of sexual assault, had to “wait, untouched, unshowered, because there was no paediatric specialist to undertake the forensic intimate service”.

[10] Katherine Murphy, “Trying to do our best” is just not good enough from our leaders, The Guardian, Saturday 11 September 20201

[11] op cit Katherine Murphy

[12] Amy Lawton, “Listening as Practice of Humility” in The Immanent Frame,13 February 2018 https://tif.ssrc.org/2018/02/13/listening-as-a-practice-of-humility/ download 2021/09/11

[13] from Rainer Maria Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, by Rainer Maria Rilke / Translated by Joanna Macy