Advent 2: What Are You Listening For?

Isaiah 40:1-11
Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13
2 Peter 3:8-15a
Mark 1:1-8

A man and his grandson are walking through the busy city with all its sounds and distractions. He stops, turns his ear slightly and says to the young boy: “Can you hear that?” The boy says, “No, what? I can’t hear anything.” The grandfather says it is the sound of a cricket, and the boy is perplexed. He doesn’t hear anything at all, and by the look of the bystanders and passersby, neither can anyone one else. He says, “How can you hear that?” The old man quietly takes some coins and drops them on the pavement, and immediately all heads turn towards their subtle, clinking sound. “You see,” said the old man to the young boy, “it all depends what you are listening for?” It all depends on what you are listening for.

Today’s readings are replete with voices, cries and proclamations as God calls out to his people through the prophet Isaiah “to prepare the way of the LORD, [to] make straight in the desert a highway for…God” (Isaiah 40:3, and those voices and that call echoes in the witness and ministry of John the Baptist. The Scriptures call us to listen, listen to words of comfort tenderly spoken: “Comfort, comfort my people” (Isaiah 40:1); but listen also to the words of radical transformation: “Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain…for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.” (Isaiah 40:4, 5) Yes, they call us to listen, they call us to pay attention, to hone are senses; and as we do we may begin to ask ourselves, “What am I listening for?”

It was during my training as a counsellor that I really began to appreciate what a complicated and subtle process listening can be; and that more often that not we need to listen to what is unsaid than to what is said. Listening is a focused exercise, which takes more than just our ears, but rather our entire faculties of discernment; because in real listening we try to hear what the person may be saying which even they themselves do not yet know as true. Listening must go beyond hearing the words – the sounds the other is making, but rather trusting that the entire person is speaking and conveying their knowledge and feeling in their demeanor, in what they leave unsaid, in what they take for granted. Listening is about entering into the mystery being presented to us. It is at the heart of our relationship with God, and at the heart of our relationship with ourselves. It is at the heart of any relationship we want to call loving and real, because it demands we go beyond the surface of things presented, and listen to the underlying and sometimes seemingly hidden truth.

As we approach Christmas, its attendant social noises draw our attention, but they do not encourage us to listen. Rather, they hope – knowingly or not – that by bombarding our ears with incessant advertisements, “holiday” music, the comercially-driven “Merry Christmas” we will be sufficiently distracted and confused by those surface sounds, forget what we might be really listening for. Indeed, it has come to the point that we have no cultural period of expectation – of listening – at all when it comes to Christmas, only a rushed, hurried and noisy sort of impatient waiting as the days are counted down to the “big one”. What passes for the sounds of Christmas rob us of the opportunity for deeper relationship, and for those who are more nuanced, bring them face to face again with the question: “What are you listening for?”

Through the voices and sounds of the crowds, through the cacophony of tinned and tinny holiday music, through even the cry of the prophet and of the Baptist, what are you listening for? The prophecy of Isaiah speaks of comfort, but are we listening to the all the echoes and resonances of comfort? Are we listening for all the places where there is no comfort, or are we listening only for our own? The prophet too declares the levelling of mountains, the raising up the plains; indeed, a total re-shaping of the landscape – social, political, religious. Are we listening for the suggestions of what this will mean for all people, or only for ourselves? In the prophet’s cry and in the invitation of the Baptist, are we just listening for what we want to hear, avoiding the relationship with the reality below the surface noises? Are we attempting to attune ourselvses to all that may be contained in what is being presented to us, beyond simply the immediately discernible and the familiar? Are we listening for what is not always spoken, but which is being presented nonetheless? Are you attending to the mystery beneath the surface and patient enough to allow it to manifest itself to you?

What are you listening for? What are you expecting to hear? At the end of the day, what is that catches and holds your attention? The enterprise of listeneing begins in openness and silence – openness to the person, event or words before us – and silence enough to encounter them in their fulness. The author and teacher Marilyn McEntyre writes: “Only in silence can the ‘listening into’ take place – the pausing over words, meanings, implications, associations – and the waiting – for the Spirit to speak, for the right response to surface.” As we learn to listen well, we learn to wait patiently for all the possible resonances to arise; as we learn to listen well we learn to listen for the sound of the cricket in the bustle of the city, the cry of a new-born baby amisdt the chaos and confusion of a town busy with a government census, the unspoken cry of pain in the ecnounter with a friend or colleague. As we learn to listen well, we learn to engage the mystery beyond the surface noises, and really to pay attention to what is important, what is at the core of any encounter.

The prophet calls, the Baptist cries, and crickets chirp everywhere. Are you listening? As we move through Advent, what are you listening for. Beyond the distractions, beyond the surface noises, and are you engaged enough, listening subtly enough to attend to it?