On Listening

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My favorite spiritual reading is usually poetry—I think Mary Oliver taught me more about prayer than any church, though, to be fair, I have not given churches much opportunity. It’s been a year of loss and transition which may explain why this year I’ve been attracted to books with a more direct approach. These are grounded in a variety of traditions: Buddhist, Celtic, Christian, but with a bent towards exploration and practice rather than dogma. 

If there has been a thread, it is humility. For much of my adult life, I considered humility the kale of spiritual attributes. Something I was supposed to seek because it was good for me, though it didn’t sound particularly delicious.

My perspective on humility has changed into something having more to do with an acceptance that I am human. (I know, how obvious! ) Somehow this shift has made it easier for me to stay present for situations I cannot control. To show up—as helper, witness, listener, griever—instead of assuming the only two options are fixing or failure.

These books, then, are a kind of antithesis to the self-help “How to fix your life in 7 days” genre. Their authors dive right into the mess and somehow arrive at language that is eloquent and helpful and wise.

Last year, one of my colleagues who remains anonymous even to me left a book on my desk: Comfortable with Uncertainty, by Pema Chodron. Chodron’s meditations remind me I learn from failure in ways that go beyond mere intellectual lessons:

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It is a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognized our shared humanity. 

I also related to this reminder that humility has something to do with the ability to laugh at myself:

…sometimes when you just get flying and it all feels so good and you think, ‘This is it, this is that path that has heart,’ you suddenly fall flat on your face. Everybody is looking at you and you say, ‘What happened to that path that had heart? This feels like the path full of mud in my face.’ Since you are wholeheartedly committed to the warrior’s journey, it pricks you, it pokes you. It’s like someone laughing in your ear, challenging you to figure out what to do when you don’t know what to do. It humbles you. It opens your heart.

Lately, as a writer I’ve struggled to know sometimes when my words might be helpful or relevant and when they are just adding to the cacophony of public discourse. When is speaking ego? When is it courage? What changes words from being noise to an invitation for connection? 

Two books in particular explored the relationship between words and silence. In Silence: The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise, Thich Nhat Hanh begins with a description of the sickness of “too much” in our culture:

Our need to be filled up with one thing or another all the time is the collective disease of human beings in our era. And the marketplace is always ready to sell us every kind of product to fill ourselves up.

And then, his definition of silence,

Silence is ultimately something that comes from the heart, not from any set of conditions outside us. Living from a place of silence doesn’t mean never talking, never engaging or doing things; it simply means that we are not disturbed inside; there isn’t a constant internal chatter. If we’re truly silent, then no matter what situation we find ourselves in, we can enjoy the sweet spaciousness of silence.

Henri Nouwen, who I first heard about from interviews about the L’ Arche communities, also also grapples with questions of seeking and silence in The Way of the Heart: Connecting with God through Prayer, Wisdom, and Silence. 

Silence is the home of the word. Silence gives strength and fruitfulness to the word. We can even say that words are meant to disclose the mystery of the silence from where they come.

It’s probably no wonder one of my favorite books about spirituality is by a poet. In My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, Christian Wiman reflects on belief, unbelief, anxiety, inspiration, creativity, terminal illness, and probably most of all, how faith changes over time.

Life is not an error, even when it is. That is to say, whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependent upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life—which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change. It follows that if you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen then you have not lived—or have denied the reality of your life.

Here too is a poem by Christian Wiman, that bowled me over for its description of beauty in the face of hard things, The Reservoir.

This year I returned to a book I found a few years ago, John O’Donohue’s Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom. This time I found I was much more interested in the last couple chapters which discuss aging and death than I was the first time I read the book. From the section titled, The Faces of Death in Everyday Life:  

It is a wise person who knows where their negativity lies and yet does not become addicted to it. There is a greater and more generous presence behind your negativity. In its transfiguration, you move into the light that is hidden in this larger presence. To continually transfigure the faces of your own death ensures that, at the end of your life, your physical death will be no stranger, robbing you against your will of the life the you have had; you will know its face intimately. Since you have overcome your fear, your death will be a meeting with a lifelong friend from the deepest side of your own nature.

And, in a return to poetry, I learned of a translation of Rilke’s Book of Hours from an interview with Kristin Tippett and Joanna Macy who translated the book with Anita Barrows. Macy writes in the forward:

The work I found myself doing helped people overcome denial about the condition of our world. It taught me that understanding our despair, and not shrinking from it, transforms it into strong, connective energy.

That connective energy is the surprise gift of humility. I experience it, when working with others towards a common meaningful goal or when I am deep in a canyon on a wild river beneath the ribbon of blue sky. And sometimes it comes while I am reading and am caught off guard by particular passage or poem, one that lets me know I am known. It is a sense, not of smallness, but rather of belonging to something big.

Laura Stavoe