Listen With The Ear of Your Heart
Some years ago, I represented the Diocese of Connecticut at
a Stewardship conference held at the camp and conference center in North
Carolina, Kanuga. I vividly recall being in a workshop, about what and led by
whom I cannot remember. I do remember he held up a little book he had found in
the Kanuga bookstore, Always We Begin Again: The Benedictine Way of Living, by
John McQuiston II, an attorney from Memphis, TN. He read from the book The
First Rule:
“Attend to these instructions. Listen with the heart and the mind, they are provided in a spirit of good will. These words are addressed to anyone who is willing to renounce the delusion that the meaning of life can be learned, whoever is ready to take up the greater weapon of fidelity to a way of life that transcends understanding. The first rule is simply this: live this life, and do whatever is done in a spirit of thanksgiving. Abandon attempts to security, they are futile, give up the search for wealth, it is demeaning, quit the search for salvation, it is selfish, and come to comfortable rest in the certainty that those who participate in this life with an attitude of thanksgiving will receive its full promise.” [i]
I sat there stunned. It was as if the world stood still; as if I was the only person in the room; as if God had just spoken to my heart and my head at the same time. Thanksgiving. Eucharist in the Koine Greek of the New Testament. I went and purchased the book right away, and read it cover to cover. McQuiston had boiled down The Rule of St. Benedict making it accessible for just about anyone. I learned that a group of monastics had begged Benedict to be their leader, the head of their community. He put together a rule of life for the community. Which is what the author of the epistle called Ephesians does – lay out four essential core dimensions of life lived as the body of Christ: truthful speech “for we are neighbors of one another” who are made one body; do not let anger open you to sin and to those who try to mislead, deceive, and undermine the strength of the body of Christ; do not grieve the Holy Spirit with misbehavior for we are those marked and sealed as Christ’s own forever; forgiveness must be our fundamental practice “for God in Christ has forgiven you.” [ii]
Those who had once begged Benedict to lead their community found it too hard to follow his Rule and attempted to poison him with the communion wine. He became aware of the plot, made the sign of the cross over the jug, broke it, forgave everyone, and sent them back to work – which work was to create a community of hospitality for any and all visitors who came to visit the monks. For you were once strangers in Egypt. We are all strangers in a strange land.
Eventually, I set out to find a copy of The Rule itself, and learned about an annotated edition with commentary by Sister Joan Chittister, OSB. While vacationing in New Hampshire one summer, I ran about five miles first thing in the morning. Soon after, we all went to the local independent Morgan Hill Bookstore. It is small, but has a truly broad and well curated selection of books. They also have easy chairs around the store so one can sit and read a book before deciding to purchase it. Suddenly I became light-headed from my morning run, and sat down in one of those chairs, head between my knees for a few minutes. I was next to a set of bookshelves. When I sat up, I turned and looked at the books on the shelf, and there it was right in front of me: The Rule of Benedict: Insights For The Ages, annotated by Joan Chittister, OSB. I wasn’t looking for it, and yet it was right there! I turned to the Prologue to the Rule and read, “Listen carefully, my child, to my instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart.” Listen with the ear of your heart! “This is advice from one who loves you; welcome it and faithfully put it into practice…First of all, every time you begin a good work, you must pray to God most earnestly to bring it to perfection. In God’s goodness, we are already counted as God’s own, and therefore we should never grieve the Holy One by our evil actions.” [iii] To which Sister Joan adds, “The person who prays for the presence of God is, ironically, already in the presence of God. The person who seeks God has already found God to some extent.” We are already counted as God’s own! We are already forgiven by God in Christ. We can become those who speak truth for we are neighbors of one another, and all who God brings to us. Marked and sealed as Christ’s own forever, we remain in the presence of God not allowing those outside the community of God’s love to deceive us and mislead us.
Still talking to the 5,000 who had feasted on five barley
loaves and two fish, Jesus says. “No one can come to me unless drawn by the
Father who sent me; … It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be
taught by God.’” [iv]
I had not looked for Always We Begin Again. It found me that day at Kanuga.
Although I wanted to experience the sixth century Benedict’s Rule directly, it
was the furthest thing from my mind that morning in the Morgan Hill Bookstore.
And I surely had not counted on almost passing out, and then turn to see that
the chair I sat in to recover was right next to Sister Joan Chittister’s
annotated Rule of Saint Benedict. It truly was as if God had drawn me to that
place, and that God was teaching me through Benedict and Sister Joan.
Listen with the ear of your heart. Just breathe that in. Let it come to us. Simply in seeking God’s presence in prayer is to be in the presence of God. There are no spiritual gymnastics to perform. No triple twists in tuck position needed to score forgiveness from God through Christ. We are already loved. We are already forgiven. We have already heard the truth with the ears of our hearts. Now here is the kicker: It’s our turn to do the same. Can we wrap our heads around what the unknown author of Ephesians is really saying?
“Therefore, be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” Don’t imitate me, says the author of the epistle. Do not even imitate Christ. Be imitators of God. Or, as Jesus would say elsewhere, love God, love our neighbors, love our enemies, and in our spare time we are to be perfect as God is perfect! [v] That’s all. That’s it. We are made in the image of God. Live it!
Make no mistake about it, we humans fall into terrible peril when we wrongly imitate God’s power, God’s knowledge, or God’s judgment. Benedict and Ephesians, like Christ himself, urges us to imitate a particular dimension of God, which is God’s love and forgiveness for all humankind, seen most astonishingly and most clearly in the fragrant offering of Christ’s sacrifice for the life of the world. The world. The whole world. As in “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything therein.” [vi] How different this world would be if we would only let that first verse that follows the 23rd Psalm to penetrate the ears of our hearts so we might truly be imitators of God in Christ. Christ who is the bread of eternal life. Life lived with God here and now and forever.
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