Listening to God’s Silence

A certain Parish Priest was about to give up when, week after week, his sermons fell on deaf ears. Nobody paid attention to his homilies.

Then one night he had a dream. In the dream he saw himself addressing a large crowd.  He was dressed in a yellow raincoat and wearing a hat of a fire chief.

The people hanged on to his every word as though their lives depended on it.

When he awoke, the priest recalled that his dream had taken place in a forest. A raging fire was heading that way and only he could direct the people to safety. “Ah,” he thought, “If only one of my homilies got that kind of attention, I would die a happy man!” Preaching can be hazardous to one’s ego and self-esteem.

A boy came to the Parish Priest after the Mass and gave him 20 pesos. “What is this for?” asked the priest. “It’s just a help Father,” the boy said. “My dad said you are the poorest preacher in the world.” Although St. Chrysostome was a captivating preacher, he rebuked the people saying, “Forget the applause. All I want is for you to listen with attention. Then do what is said.”

Listen with attention. Then do what is said. Even the world’s greatest homilist can accomplish nothing by going it alone.  When Jesus gave his first homily at Nazareth, he was initially applauded and then thrown out.

In the time of Jesus, there were two places of worship in Israel: the Temple and the synagogue.  There was only one Temple.  It was located in Jerusalem. But there were hundreds of synagogues, one in every village.

The Temple was a place of sacrifice. There the Jews offered to God such things as lambs and doves. The synagogue was a place of instruction. The Jews listened to God’s Word and tried to apply it to their lives.

As you’d expect, the synagogue service and the temple service have their counterparts in our Mass. The first half of the Mass is like the synagogue service. It is called the Liturgy of the Word and deals with reading Scripture and applying it to our lives – just as Jesus did for the people of Nazareth in today’s Gospel.

The second half of the Mass is like the Temple service.  It’s called the Liturgy of the Eucharist and it deals with offering sacrifice just as Jesus did at the Last Supper.  There, we read: “Likewise [Jesus] took the cup after [the disciples] had eaten, saying, ‘This cup is the New Covenant in my blood, which will be shed [sacrificed] for you.’”  (Matt. 26:26-30)

Let us first look more closely at the first half of the Mass – the Liturgy of the Word.  Our main activity during this part of the Mass is to listen to the Scripture. The key word is listening. How do we listen to God’s Word? In three ways: We listen with our mind. We listen with our heart. We listen with our soul.

First, we listen with our mind. We do this by trying to understand God’s Word. We try to make God’s Word come alive for us. For example, St. Ignatius of Loyola did this by closing his eyes and imagining that he was present in the synagogue of Nazareth listening to Jesus.

For instance, he’d imagine the emotion that certainly choked the voice of Jesus, when he said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.” And he’d imagine the excitement that certainly electrified the congregation when Jesus said, ‘Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.’” And so listening with the mind means not only understanding God’s Word but also making it come alive.

The second way we should listen to God’s Word is with the ear of the heart. This means we take God’s Word to heart.  We try to see how it applies to our own situation. Years ago Charlie Pitts owned the construction company that built the Toronto Subway in Canada. The more Charlie’s business grew, the more his personal life and family life suffered.

One day things got so bad that Charlie turned to the Bible for help. As he read it one sentence suddenly leapt from the page: “What profit is there for one to gain the whole world, yet lose or forfeit himself?”  (Matt. 16: 26) The words spoke right to Charlie.  They said to him, “Charlie, this is what’s happening to you!” And so listening with the heart means taking God’s Word to hear and seeing how it applies to our own situation.

The final way we should listen to God’s Word is with the ear of the soul. This means besides taking God’s Word to heart, we also talk to God about it. We do more; we do what Charlie Pitts did.  We ask God to help us take the necessary steps to make our lives conform to his Word.

For example, after Charlie Pitts prayed over his situation and discussed it with his wife, he sold his company before it destroyed him.  Charlie went on to buy and manage a hotel and a golf resort.  And the income from this enterprise was donated to the spread of the Gospel.

The third step, then, in listening to God’s Word is talking it over with God to see what he may want to say to us about it. Of course, we don’t expect God to answer us in words.  He usually speaks to us in a spiritual way, in the depths of our soul.

One thing more is true about God.  He doesn’t always speak to us immediately, during the time of prayer.  Often God does this outside the time of prayer, in the course of our daily life. For example, we may begin to experience a growing desire to do something about our situation. We may begin to get ideas on how to deal with our situation. We may begin to feel a subtle pull toward one of the ideas. All of these spiritual movements may be God speaking for us in a wordless way in the depths of our soul.

In conclusion, we should listen to God’s Word by making God’s Word come alive in our mind, by taking it to heart, and by talking to God about it – and then listen to what He might want to say to us.