Deep Listening
“Give me the listening ear. I seek this day the ear that will not shrink from […] the word that challenges me to deeper consecration and higher resolve — the word that lays bare needs that make my own days uneasy, that seizes upon every good decent impulse of my nature, channeling it into paths of healing in the lives of others.” ~ Howard Thurman
Deep listening. It is an evocative term, conjuring a sense of profound and reverent attentiveness to what lies beneath the surface. A simultaneous reaching out and receptivity from the belly of being; alert for the scent of what is behind, below, above, between the words spoken. Listening as a spiritual discipline. Listening to gesture, breath and tone. Listening to rhythm and to mountain, to wind and to weeping. Listening to stars and grass and street protests and campaign speechifying. Listening to hunger and to grace. To passion and to grieving and to laughter. Listening for the “sound familiar” within a stranger’s voice.
When I was training in medicine we learned to attune our diagnostic ear to the inner chambers of the heart, to perceive the subtlest rumble or rub, to describe and even imitate the whisper-soft murmurs and movements of the body’s coded language. At first it was an exercise in frustration, but then somehow, with patience and persistence, a new ear was opened, one that was able to decipher the code. When my acupuncturist places her fingers on my wrist to read my pulses, it always seems more like a listening than a touch… as if there are special ears in each of her fingertips that hear the quality of chi the way I used to listen to the character of my patients’ heartbeat.
Now I strive to listen with the same acuity to the hearts of those who come to me for prayer and counsel; attend to the diagnostic murmurs and rumbles of an often broken-hearted world. And at the same time, I seek to hone my listening to discern the thread of divine connectivity — “that of God” — within all of Life. I must learn to place my careful fingers so tenderly on the pulsebeat of Being that I may sense even the rustling portents of its dreaming.
This is listening with the mystic’s ear, the ear that knows the hearer and that which is heard are one and the same, are one with that infinite creative Is-ness which imagined them both into expression. To listen from this place requires the cultivation of Silence. As Dorothee Soelle describes it, “the silence of the mouth, the silence of the mind, the silence of the will.” It is through this practice, and through the intention of spiritual availability, that the “third ear” begins to open.
Here is the spaciousness to listen deeply. In Radical Presence, Mary Rose O’Reilley identifies “deep listening” as a form of contemplation, where we offer the fullness of our attentive presence in service to the revelation of another’s wholeness. We can, she says, “listen someone into existence.” I believe this is true not only in our personal encounters, but through our reverent listening to the world — to the earth itself, and to the voices of her many children. Perhaps together we can listen new creative possibilities into being. Perhaps we can hear the pulsebeat of justice and healing and help to bring them forth.
