To Whom Do You Listen? (Mothers’ Day Reflection)

To Whom Do You Listen:  Mothers’ Day reflection, St. Anthony Catholic Church, May 11, 2014

Good morning, and Happy Mothers’ Day—to all of us, who in one way or another are mothers to others.

Today’s Gospel is all about listening.  For those of us who like to talk, there is perhaps the perception from others that we don’t listen often enough or well.  Sometimes we don’t.

Listening requires hearing, and hearing, while we sometimes think of it metaphorically—and correctly so—is a miracle of biology, and of a universe of sound waves, a marvelous gift of our Creator God. 

As humans we share many experiences, but the most common, even more so than our births, is hearing for the first time, the sound of our mother’s heartbeat.  At 16 weeks gestation, the unborn child can hear—a full five months before birth.  Science has demonstrated this by recording fetal movement in response to a broad range of sounds transmitted through the mother’s abdomen.  But as mothers have always known, our unborn babies often dance when we sing to them.  They recognize music heard in utero when they hear it outside the womb.  In addition to our mother’s heart, we hear too the noise of her body and the whoosh of the placenta.  (A bit of trivia here, the “shhhh” we use to soothe our young children mimics the placenta’s song—it is ancient and universal.)  Even outside sounds, voices, music, patterns of pitch, stress and rhythm prime us for life in this world.  Indeed the patterns of speech, and the neural connections that make it possible, are laid down months before we enter the world.  We begin to learn our “mother tongue” long before we can speak it.

From the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health comes this wonderful statement: “A mother’s voice is particularly powerful because it is transmitted to the womb though her own body, reaching the fetus in a stronger form than outside sounds.”

How like a good mother is our Good Shepherd.  Listen to His words:  “I know my sheep, and mine know me.  Whoever enters through the gate is the shepherd of the sheep.  The gatekeeper opens it for him, and the sheep hear his voice, as the shepherd calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.  The sheep follow him, because they recognize his voice.”

My question for all of us is—to whom do you listen?  How do we discern the voice of Jesus, our shepherd, especially amidst the background noise of our own lives, our needs, and our desires?  How does God’s voice reach us in a stronger form than outside sounds, outside voices?

Like any skill, listening for the Shepherd’s voice takes practice.  I have a plaque in my kitchen that reads, “the longer we follow the right path, the easier it becomes.”  The longer we listen to the Word of God, the more quickly and more correctly we discern it. 

One of the most wonderful gifts of parenting is listening to both the wisdom and the delightful folly of our young children.  Often the wisdom is in the folly and revealed in the most unlikely ways.  Years ago when my youngest son Aron was a little boy, his older brother got a lego set for Christmas.  Jacques was probably too old for such a gift and it sat, unopened, at least until he returned to school after winter break.  Bored one day at home, Aron asked me if he could build the lego set.  I reminded him it belonged to his brother. He was so adamant—and insistent—that Jacques didn’t care if he did so.   After listening to him plead with me, and not knowing exactly what to say, I suggested he have a little talk with Jesus about it.  He agreed, and went off to his room.  About a half hour passed, it was mysteriously quiet and Aron hadn’t returned, so I went to his room. I found him quietly and happily engaged in constructing the set.  So I asked him, “Did you talk to Jesus?”  “Yes,” he replied.  “And what did He tell you,” I asked.  “He told me to build it.”

What could I say?  I had told him to talk to Jesus, and now who was I to say, “No, he didn’t, I talked to Him too. Jesus wouldn’t tell you to build your brother’s lego set!” I kept my mouth shut.  I don’t remember what Jacques’ reaction was.

Another lesson occurred when my daughter Jasmine and I used the restroom here at St. Anthony when she was about three years of age.  When we were just about to leave, a woman in a stall, who had entered the bathroom unseen by my daughter, cleared her throat.  This was not just a little “ahem” or even a cough.  No, this was more like the kind of choking, gagging, sound one makes before—as my children would say—one “hocks a loogie”—only louder and longer. As my hand reached to open the door to the outside, Jasmine turns, looks up at me with her big blue eyes wide, and says, “Is that God?”  Perhaps it was.

We all know the stories of those who have claimed to hear the voice of God, from the embarrassing comical exhortations of a TV preacher several years ago who heard a 12 foot Jesus tell him when the world would end, to the tragic and unspeakable crimes committed because of voices in the head of a mentally disturbed person that were decidedly not divine.  

The sheep hear the Shepherd’s voice because they recognize it, much as a newborn recognizes the voice of his or her mother.  We are hardwired early on to turn and respond to the One who will feed us, who will care for us, who will ultimately lay down His life for us so that we “may have life and have it more abundantly.”   Sometimes we forget this, sometimes the things we hear become so familiar we stop listening, we think we know the words.  That thought came to me while reading Psalm 23.  Every Christian seems to know this psalm, we most often hear it at funerals.  Many of us could recite it, verbatim.  Do we truly hear the voice of the Good Shepherd, or is it just so many words?  Does it resonate over the background noise?

As many of you know, my husband is an auctioneer.  For more auctions than I can count I have worked as the auction clerk.  It isn’t a highly skilled job, I record the item sold, the amount and a buyer’s number on a sheet of paper.  My primary task is to listen.  Through a rapid-fire progression of numbers I must keep my ears tuned to the sound of his voice, and listen for the word “sold”.  If the bidding goes long, I sometimes daydream, but at the sound of that word I respond.  If a customer or even one of my children distract me when that critical data is relayed, I will have to ask for it to be repeated, which slows the pace and rhythm of the auction. That’s why I ask Ron at the beginning of the auction to remind the customers not to talk to me.

I have trained my ear to listen to my husband’s voice—well at least at auction time.

To whom do you listen? This is an especially appropriate question for our graduates who are celebrating their baccalaureate with us this morning. You have spent countless hours listening to your teachers, listening to your parents, and listening to your culture and the world.  As a mother to three of today’s graduates, Jordan, Jesse, and Aron, and for all of our graduates, I pray that the voice of God will be transmitted not just by your voices, but through your bodies, and through your lives, so it may reach the world in a stronger form than outside sounds.

A couple of weeks ago I joined the youth in the parish to listen to short tracks of contemporary popular songs deemed the “Dirty Dozen” or “Clean Fifteen” based on whether or not they reflected Christian values.  Before we played the music the kids listed popular songs they thought might make either list.  They filled up the “Dirty Dozen” category rather quickly—and I admit, I really like a few of those songs.   Our youth demonstrated how well they are able to discern what is good and what is not so good in popular culture.  It gave me hope and revealed the great value of community in helping us to discern the good things of this world—in teaching us to listen for the voice of the Good Shepherd.

By ourselves we sometimes can become quite confused, we can struggle to choose among seemingly good options.  We are often misled by competing voices in our hearts and in our heads.  Discerning God’s voice in the world, in Scripture, in the lives of our children and those in our communities, and in the lessons of living is what life in the sheepfold is all about.  It is not about mindlessly following anything or anyone.  It is about being so attuned to the voice of the Shepherd that we can hear it in others as well, we can hear it reflected in everything around us.  This must be so, for Jesus Himself tells us that he will leave the flock in search of those struggling souls, those lost sheep who have forgotten the sound of the heart of Christ Jesus in their ears.

We must listen and care for one another in our Christian communities as Jesus engages in the task of seeking the lost, of saving them from thieves and robbers.  We must join Him in this task as well.

I think we best do this by listening well, by tuning our inner ear to the sounds of each other’s hearts, as well as our words.   Despite the distractions all around us, despite our tendency to daydream, we each have the ability to discern the voice of the Shepherd, even in the sound of one clearing her voice, and in the desire of a child to engage his passion.  Indeed that voice is not unlike that of our own hearts, when God truly dwells within them.  For if our hearts are deeply rooted in Christ we know that with the help and guidance of others and our faith communities and our Church we can truly follow them.

To whom do you listen?

No Regrets

I often say, if asked, that I have few regrets in life, but I do have them.  I regret not taking art classes in high school, not learning to play a musical instrument.  I regret not finishing college when I had both a scholarship and a grant.  I chose instead, to marry the love of my life and move to Alaska.  No real regrets there.

But there are others, subtle ones.  The biggest among them is that I didn’t take much time to write about the mundane and momentous events of my life.  When I learned I was pregnant with my oldest son, I began to write to him in a journal.  My initial thought was to keep this up and give him a completed book at a milestone birthday, maybe 18 or 21.  The book still sits on a shelf among many others, most unread, only half filled with thoughts of his very earliest years.  He turned 30 last month.

I began similar books for each of my other four children--each filled with progressively less words.  My youngest child has one entry, a reflection on her birth, months after it occurred.  She completed her last day of high school today.  Yes, there are the photos, yes there are the mementos and the odd clay figures and faded art.  Certificates and trophies and their own precious collections.

Where are my words, I wonder.  Why, at the end of what sometimes seemed like endless days could I not find the energy to find them, to write them down.  Was sleeping or eating more compelling than reflecting on my life so, so quickly passing?  Certainly I spent considerable mental energy reflecting, analyzing, agonizing of the major and minor details of raising five children, navigating a marriage, maintaining friendships and community, and struggling to keep faith as well.

Maybe there just wasn’t that much to write, I wonder, as I ponder the monumental accomplishment of guiding my kids to adulthood--at least “legal” adulthood.  What words would adequately convey an almost overwhelming sense of sadness for the loss of our childhoods, the concession of our mortality.  Perhaps it is this, this confrontation with the pain that accompanies growth and change that keeps expression at bay.

Still there is an immense joy in sharing the lives of these children which were entrusted to me years ago and remain with me still, and always.  There is tremendous satisfaction in admiring the fruits of my labor, mental, physical, spiritual.  To say they are in some profound way, the physical reflection of a cooperation with and reliance upon the One who created us all, leaves me in awe, leaves me humbled and grateful before and within that One.

So, as a new chapter opens in the saga of my life, I believe it is time to set both memory and present moment dancing in the elusive lilt of language, the wrested wrangle of words, no matter how poignantly or poorly wrought.  It is time to set aside the fear of the power of those words as they come through my consciousness, to yield to whatever agony or delight is reflected as I read them back to myself.

It is time, from this day forward, to live and to write, with no regrets.