Copyright: This article is reprinted on the Lift Up Your Hearts web site http://www.worship.ca/ with the permission of The Christian Ministry (January, 1990) where it first appeared.

Pneuma is a journal on spiritual direction and formation in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada.

"Christianity no longer listens," a young mother said to me."All the church wants to do is talk -- lecture, reprimand, and command -- never really listen." The woman identified a crisis in Christianity: the loss of listening as a basic orientation of the church.

Even those Christian pastors and counselors who try to recover this art find that their time is consumed by an ever-increasing population of clients who live on the edge of crisis and hysteria. For many counselors there has been a subtle detour away from attending to the small problems of normal people to dealing with an endless procession of the severely disturbed. Few now have time to listen to the average person's slight skirmishes of soul. Ironically, neglect often causes those overlooked folk to become themselves people in crisis. Untended little problems easily become big. If people can get their share of attention only by being in crisis, they will learn to have major disturbances rather than small ones.

The church's structures, orientations, and agendas no longer lend themselves well to the healing power of listening. The church has veered from the ancient model of nurturing mother to such modern models as entertainer and guardian. Both of these place a high value on wordiness. It seems that every minute of the worship service must be packed with talking, preaching, or teaching. The frantic pressure to get everything in -- offerings, announcements, music, sermon, readings, prayers - almost would make one think that silence is a sin and the need for solitude a sickness.

Isaiah prophesied that the Messiah would possess skills central to listening -- wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge, and fear of the Lord. Jesus both spoke with authority and listened with great compassion.

Taylor Caldwell's novel "The Listeners" tells of John Godfrey, an architect who retires to a small town. He decides to leave a memorial to the town and erects a unique building. Over the door, etched in gold, are the words,"The Man Who Listens." When Godfrey dies, the building is finally opened. One by one, people who need help sit in a chair facing a curtained area. Late in the novel we discover what is behind this veil -- a figure of Christ, the Man who listens. Caldwell argues that our basic needs are few. We don't need to go to the moon or the stars. We don't need all the things advertisers try to sell us. We certainly don't need more missiles or better bombs. We do need bread, shelter, and lots of listening. Our most desperate need is to be heard, not as a patient in a clinical setting, but as a human soul requiring attention. As Caldwell states in her foreward:

"Our pastors would listen -- if we gave them the time to listen to us. But we have burdened them with tasks that should be our own. We have demanded not only that they be our shepherds, but that they take our trivialities, our social aspirations, the "fun" of our children, on their weary backs. We have demanded that they be expert businessmen, politicians, accountants, playmates, community directors, "good fellows," judges, lawyers, and settlers of local quarrels. We have given them little time for listening, and we do not listen to them, either."

What the Apostle John wrote about love - that unless you love your neighbour, you can't love God -- is equally true of listening: if you're not really listening to others, you're not really attending to God either. There is a direct link between prayer and listening. Epictetus's adage is still true: "Nature has given us two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak."

Because our sensitivities are no longer finely tuned, no longer sophisticated, we fail to recognize the various kinds of listening needed to uphold and encourage people. We need to be heard in order to release tension and frustration; to build relationships; to feel loved; to receive advice; to gain perspective or an alternative way of looking at things; to share one of life's greatest pleasures -- dialogue; to discover who we are; to let others test our ideas and opinions; and to help heal our hurts.

The great Reformation concept of the priesthood of all believers certainly asserts the right of every Christian to be his or her own priest in approaching God. But this priesthood also means the obligation, the mandate, to minister to one's neighbour. Listening is the best way to do this.

The practice of listening is not instinctive, though the need for it is. We have to learn to listen to others and then constantly to remind ourselves to do so, allowing attentiveness to become a habit of the heart. As a result of sin, we are not inclined to attend to the cure of souls through listening, but God's forgiveness can inspire us to do so.

The early, the medieval, and the Reformation church were much more in tune to empathic listening than we are. Several medieval mosaics and stained-glass windows depict the conception as taking place when the Holy Spirit enters Mary's body through her ear. This echoes the Hebrew belief that the ear is the gateway to the soul. Mary herself was a model listener. After Jesus was born and many unusual things were said of him, she "kept all these things, pondering them in her heart."

In the past, the structures and rituals of Christianity have provided a variety of listening opportunities:

• The great symbol of the confessional was the priest with his ear turned toward the screen and the person confessing.

• The concept of spiritual direction -- of having "soul friends," as the Welsh called it -- rested not so much on giving advice as on being a dedicated listener.

• Great emphasis was placed on hearing the word of God, listening to the vocal nuances that echoed through the cathedrals. Today, some direct their congregants to read along in their Bibles and take notes. This diversion drains life from the spoken Word, so that we no longer fully hear it.

• The rhythm of the church year encouraged people to listen to the seasons, to respond to the year-long story of redemption.

• The class spiritual retreat was designed to open people to solitude, meditation, and reflection. In contrast, some modern-day retreats are intensely packed orgies of rich foods, endless games and athletics, preaching, and Bible study. They provide no quiet time when words can be left behind as spirit touches Spirit, when daily chatter can lose itself in listening to the voice of God.

• One supreme value of fasting is that by diminishing one of our senses, the others -- particularly listening -- becomes keener. Fasting gives one the time and the desire to listen.

• The crowning glory of devotion was the prayer of contemplation -- turning one's full attention to the experience of God. Experiencing the gaze of God meant spending much time alone in prayer and in listening to God speak through his Word.

• Christianity has encouraged believers to keep spiritual journals and diaries. The church has been enriched by such little bibles of spiritual power as Augustine's "Confessions," John Wesley's "Journal, Brother Lawrence's Practice of the Presence of Christ," Thomas Merton's "Seven Story Mountain," Dag Hammarskjold's "Markings," and Henri Nouwen's "Genesee Diary." These "portable sanctuaries," as George Simons has called them, allow us to listen to God and to our own minds and souls.

• Medieval churches, monasteries, and retreat houses provided garden settings in which to stroll and reflect. The "counseling walks" between a spiritual director and a penitent allowed for the blue sky, soft wisps of wind, chattering birds, and trees and flowers to minister to the soul, along with the listening ear of the spiritual director. In contrast, much present pastoral counseling takes place in an office far from nature.

• In the past, worship centres were so partitioned that various kids of mansions and porticoes created private pockets of silence and solitude for those whose souls longed for the ear of God. The old Christianity was interested in the treasures of prayer -- along with the importance of the sermon. The new Christianity builds churches that focus all attention on the preacher.

What happens to a Christianity that loses the spiritual discipline of listening? For one thing, though knowledge may grow, wisdom decreases. A more subtle consequence is that souls go uncured. Without a zealous company of empathic listeners, who will work with those who are scarred by rape, drug abuse, injustice, divorce, alcoholism, poverty, and scandal?

Kenneth Leech begins his book on "True Prayer" by quoting the words of Evagrius of Pontus from the fourth century: "A theologian is one whose prayer is true." Similarly, a theologian, a "studier of God," is one whose listening is true. Such a person listens to God, to the echoes of God's voice in the universe, to the authority of the Scriptures, to the whispers of hope in the church, to the weariness of the world, and to the anger of the oppressed and downtrodden. Only then does she dare speak for God.