Learning to Listen

Ceasing the Absurdity of all the Chatter We both Speak and Hear Today

This colorful image is actually the Chinese word for “listening.” Just noticed what is involved in their word for listening and how this might inform us to become better listeners. This is what I’m going to preach about this Sunday.

I am going to preach at my mountain parish this weekend. There was a time in my life when preaching and speaking were my go to ways of using my voice. I loved being able to articulate spiritual insights and offer them through the spoken word.

All of that changed when I stopped speaking on a regular basis. The neuron pathways that collaborated with my mind and heart, found a new way to channel themselves out of me. I began to write. My voice comes out through my fingers now and flows forward into poetry.

In this new season of my life, I now call “greening,” my voice—that part of my soul that needs to say something, has found it’s way of coming to life in poetry. My vocal cords have been re-routed, it seems to extend now to my fingers and to come out in shorter, perhaps more profound ways which are poems. But I love the challenge of focusing on a good text and the text for this Sunday captivated me, the moment I read the text assigned for me to expound upon.

With that said, let me share a bit of what I’ll be preaching.

My text for this Sunday is based on the story in the New Testament called, “the transfiguration.” It’s when Jesus went up on a mountain to get a way from it all, but strangely found himself in a mystical experience, we now call, the transfiguration. It involved a cloud (always a sign of mystery in the Scriptures), a Voice (always a sign that the Creator has something needing to be said and the story focuses on Jesus (the model, Light, Way and One who has best led me to God). Jesus was the One transfigured—meaning he stood out and still does stand out today.

What Jesus was told by the Voice is all important! It was all important for Jesus and those three followers who witnessed this significant event. It is just as all important of us today. Let me explain. Stay with me—please…

The Voice which came from the cloud of mystery, spoke these words: “This is my beloved son. Listen to him.” It wasn’t just Jesus who heard this but his climbing companions who were with him. There were witnesses to validate this all important event.

My sermon will be about why listening is the key to the spiritual life.

As we all know, we live in an age of constant chatter: political chatter, news chatter, family chatter, internal and private chatter in our heads, food chatter; anxiety chatter; despair chatter; church chatter and the chatter goes on and on and seems to never stop.

But when God said, “Listen to my son, Jesus!”—it is as if each of us were extended an invitation to cease the obnoxious chatter in our lives and learn to focus on the one Voice that would actually help the world situation and help us in a very deep, significant and personal way.

We need to learn how to listen. Learning how to listen deeply is the mark that distinguishes deep people from shallow people; angry people from people of peace and people marked by contentment and purpose rather than following fads, social influencers and the latest and greatest chatter boxes of our day. People who listen—people who experience their own transfiguration stand out.

Ten years ago, Gwen and I went back to marriage school to learn how to listen more deeply to each other. We thought we had it down. But come to find out, we were better listeners professionally, than we were maritally. For two years, and in weekly sessions, we worked on learning how to really listen to each other. How to speak from our hearts; how to tell each other the last 10% of a conversation that somehow seemed to never get said or heard; how to create space with one another where this space would be marked by acceptance, safety and awareness.

This kind of learning is needed when it comes to our spiritual lives. We need to learn to listen better to avoid so much misunderstanding, hurt and abuse of power.

Henri Nouwen reminds us that when it comes to “listening” it is important to understand the meaning of the word—listening. He explains that the opposite of listening is deafness. He goes on to tell us that in Latin, the root meaning of ‘deafness’ is absurdity.

When we don’t listen—everything seems absurd—everything gets absurd. I believe this one word, “absurdity” is the single, best descriptor terms of our time. This is an age of absurdity. There is political, social, religious, relational and economic absurdity going on in the world. I’m suggesting the reason is this: We’re not listening to each other anymore. When I watch the news—I see absurdity. Don’t you?

When nothing seems to make sense—you know you are living in an age of absurdity and deafness. Absolutely nothing makes sense when we do not listen.

When you fight a hard fight in marriage or relationship and realize the absurdity to be fighting over something so insignificant that it is absurd that all this energy in the fight is being expended and swallowing the spouses up where they feel eaten alive. It is absurd to fight about all the issues of our lives like money, sex, parenting, in-laws, jealousy and and on and on, when there are deeper, more significant issues at stake (control, acceptance, integrity, belonging and recognition). We need to learn how to really listen to the hidden issues that we’re struggling with and talk on that level. We will never resolve the tension in our relationships until we finally learn to listen to each other more deeply. We will never get to the hidden issues that we really need to be talking about until we learn to listen.

The same is true in our spiritual lives. Until we learn to listen deeply to God, we will spin the wheels of our lives but rarely make any progress at all.

To listen is to love. It is a remarkable experience to be truly listened to—to have someone see us and hear us; to have someone focus on our story and not interrupting us to give input, advice, perspective or to teach us something.

To listen is to love. To listen to is to offer undivided attention. To listen is to lay aside agenda for sake of truly experiencing the other person’s “essence.” The essence of someone is their whole soul—their whole self being seen and heard; accepted and loved. To listen is to experience the essence of someone—the whole person. It is an intimacy that the soul most craves; most wants and most needs in our lives.

When God said, “Listen to Jesus”—we are being offered the key that unlocks and opens all other doors long shut in our lives. When we learn to “listen” we hear truths about ourselves just like Jesus did. When we listen, we hear perspective. When we listen, we gain clarity. Without this, we remain in absurdity.

Jesus was told about his essence—his true self on that mountain and from that cloud. He was told by God that he was the “beloved”—that love is not based on doing something to earn love but true love expresses Itself—when the other’s essence is noticed, honored and seen. This is the message we most need in our lives. We are loved in our essence—not by our performance. This is the core on which we stand and live our lives without absurdity.

We listen to Jesus when we grow still and quiet and lean our ear to the heart of God to hear the Sacred Beat of Love that is actually beating for us—not against us.

We listen when we go into nature and watch the way of trees, listen to the chant of birds and observe life in flowers and breathe in the Beauty which is oxygen. There we exhale the chatter. There, we inhale a peace and often it is the “peace that passes understanding” that we need most these days.

When we listen, like this, then we are grounded, more able to respond to each other than react in anger with one another…we are more anchored in love and holding each person in our sight with dignity, honor and respect.

Those who do not listen are marked by discord, violence and anger. There is no peace around them because there is no peace in them. There is nothing to offer but themselves.

We listen to Jesus when we learn to tune out the chatter and turn the knob up on our spiritual ears to deeply listen to what the Scriptures describe as the “still, small, gentle voice”. This Voice can be drowned out by the incessant chatter of our lives.

But isn’t it interesting that we’re told in the New Testament, “Be quick to hear and slow to speak.” Is there any doubt as to why this is such a spiritual statement of declaration? We are at a time right now, where what is needed first is not ACTION but listening. If we act before we listen well, we may be going in a very wrong direction which might have dire consequences. We trust that in listening, we will find our way.

The spiritual life is a life of listening—a life of always wanting to hear someting from “Beyond” ourselves; to hear from Someone who really has something significant to say.

I have a friend who begins almost every conversation this way, “Steve, what can I hear today from you?” It gives me pause to be asked such a question as this. I have to somehow filter out the absurdities and find the inner flow of the river of my soul to say what is important…what is vital… what is needed. I like to begin my day with those same words: “Jesus, what can I hear today?” Let me keep my mouth shut in order to really listen well.

Now, with all of that said, let me share my new poem titled, “Listen.” It feels like a bold poem. It feels like a naked poem. I feels like a very expensive poem—why? Because learning to listen has not come cheap. Perhaps it never does and there are no blue light specials on listening. It takes hard work to learn to listen.

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If you’re interested in listening to me preach, then, THIS is the LINK to use.

I’ll be speaking at St. Philips Espicopal Church in Brevard, NC at 8am and 10:30am EST on Sunday, March 2, 2025.. The 10:30 service is streamed live and recorded for later “listening.”