Paying Attention With the Ear of Your Heart

 

A Reflection for the Feast Of Pentecost                     The Church if the Holy Trinity, Hertford, NC

May 19, 2024                                                             Thomas E Wilson, Guest Celebrant

Paying Attention with the Ear of Your Heart.

Ezekiel 37:1-14 Psalm 104:25-35, 37 Acts 2:1-21 John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

Today is the Day of Pentecost; one of my favorite days. Right now, you can offer a silent prayer that I am not your Rector, here every week, because if I had been I would have been enlisting people to read the Pentecost Gospel lesson together in different languages. The call would have gone out, and I would have put on the full court press to corral “volunteers” or more correctly “volun-tolds”, to stand up in front of God and everyone in the congregation to read the lesson in different languages. Then after the Sermon , Creed, and the prayers of the people, each of the readers of the languages would stand up and say in different languages, “ Peace be with you” would be in Hebrew: “Shalom aleichem!”, in French “La paix soit avec vous” , Spanish :”Paz á vosotros”, Koine Greek: “Εἰρήνη ὑμῖν

Over the last forty plus years in different churches in which I have served or attended, I have heard the Acts lesson in English, Modern Greek, Koine Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Arabic, Tamil from Sri Lanka, Ibo from Nigeria, and I am sure there have been others. For some it was an academic exercise, but what I most enjoyed were people who spoke in the language that they had learned as a child and the language in which they were held in the arms of those who loved them.

The readers who read in different languages were doing two different things; one after reading the lesson over and over again in preparation is memory and the other is is to enter into imagination and live into the dream of being of being a faithful disciple of the Risen Lord in a different time and place .

There are six parts of the Human brain which do different things. There are parts for Memory, Manipulation, Cognition, Reward, Language and Vision. There is a part of the brain which we use for the processing of information, facts and figures that will be used to help with every day problems; like using math to balance a checkbook. Or we can use a part of the brain to solve gaps in our historical knowledge; like an awareness of the complex history of Jewish relationship with their neighbors. The lessons for today themselves are a combination of memory and dreams, both processed in the same non- rational part of the brain, but the biochemical process is a little bit different.

There is a song from Lerner and Lowe's musical Gigi; “Ah Yes, I Remember It Well” as two characters remember shared events; but the facts do not always agree. The facts are different but the shared memories resonate with each other. Meaning in life is not made up of facts but of memories and dreams. As we try to make sense of the world we live in, our brain is active all the time, but not all that energy is about facts. When I try to make sense of my life; facts are much less important than dreams and memories. In the same way, the Bible is not a textbook, crammed with facts, but a book of meaning. At Church and Meditation we hear the words, but also hear the reading within the context of worship; worship is there when each breath is not a matter of bringing oxygen to the lungs but in bringing the sacred spirit to our souls. St. Benedict of Nursia had a prayer for listening to the Holy in everyday life.:

Gracious and Holy Father,
give us the wisdom to discover You,
the intelligence to understand You,
the diligence to seek after You,
the patience to wait for You,
eyes to behold You,
a heart to meditate upon You,
and a life to proclaim You,
through the power of the Spirit of Jesus, our Lord.

Earlier this week I was reading a prayer by Phillip Newell:

Celtic Spirituality and Nature.

"There is no creature on the earth

There is no life in the sea

But proclaims your goodness.

There is no bird on the wing

There is no star in the sky

There is nothing beneath the sun

But is full of your blessing.

Lighten my understanding

Of your presence all around, O Christ

Kindle my will to be caring for Creation."

"Wednesday Morning" in Celtic Prayers from Iona: The Heart of Celtic Spirituality (Paulist Press, 1997).

The prophet Ezekiel, is living in a time when he begins to hear good news that the people who have been in exile for decades, are being allowed to come home. In his imagination, the exiles were like dry bones, cut off from each other. Then he has a vision, a dream, where God takes him into that Valley of Dry Bones and in this dream he sees the bones come together. He sees them become a mighty army full of strength. He is filled with hope of being reunited as a people again and his vision, his dream, his active imagination gives him the strength to face a new future. In his dream, I think he can see the faces of those people who had been carried into exile years before when he had been a child. These were not strangers but people he loved. When we read scripture in the context of worship, we are invited into the imagination of the writer's worship; we are using that same part of the brain. The Bible was not written as a textbook but as a combination of memory and dream imagination within the context of worship.

When I was young I thought it was really important that people listen to me. As I grew up and started to work with people, I found that it was more important that I paid attention and really listened to what people were saying and how they were saying it. My first marriage ended in Divorce, because while I was being paid to listen to people to earn a living; I did not use that same skill when I was at home. We were so concerned with being “right”, we never really got around to deeper listening.

I thought about those years while I was preparing to write this reflection. When I think about things a lot, I write a poem to help make sense. This is the poem I wrote this week. It is an apology to my first wife, which I should have written more than a half of a century ago. She died a couple of years ago.

Apologies To My First Wife

The ear of my heart is paying attention

To that living unseen space between us,

Trying to withhold judgment as a plus,

To fully hear that, so deeper, dimension.

Which was not there when we only dialog,

With our scripts of memory in our hand,

Hitting all the notes of a long ago band,

When being “right” was “dog-eat-dog”.

With no real winners but only survivors,

Holding on to the ribbons won competing

Against one another; then self defeating,

Our relationship like drunk drivers.

It was so easy to blame you,

But it was also my blame too.

In my second marriage, I found out that it was a lot better to listen as well as share. Nadia Bolz Weber, Lutheran Pastor of the Home for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, wrote ; “Real love is when you let yourself be truly known . . otherwise it is just a pitching of personas which is only partially true.” The first five years we knew each other, we only saw the bad things in each other. The next couple years we saw a lot of grace in each other and then we got married. Pat and I even took some courses to lead groups of people into a deeper understanding of their dreams. The first thing we would do when someone would share their dream was to be still and to be ready to enter into imagination where we might be able to claim their dream along with the members of the group, not for therapeutic problem solving, but to experience the spiritual meaning of the dream as an unopened letter from God. The Dream was treated not as a problem to be solved, but as a message shared in a community, to be shared so that each person might respond in the ways they heard it.

In the Lesson from the Acts of the Apostles, we are not sure we are dealing with a pure memory of a factual historical event, or as an event of a dream of imagination. The writers of the Books of Luke and Acts are not all that interested in facts but in meaning. The story from Acts for today is about how a community is born out of people who are different from each other, but there is a connection of love in the space between them. It is paying attention, as St. Benedict of Nursia reminded us to,“Listen, attend with the ear of your heart.”

I use a special word when I call a community of people who are different from each other but bound by a strong connection of love in the space between them and listen with the ear of their heart. I call that community a church, a body of Christ. That is why I show up at church! I have an adequate retirement and don't desperately need a check or an attendance certificate. I come to, “Listen and attend with the ear of my heart.”