Listening Skills

Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator

We continue to read from the Farewell Discourse of St. John's Gospel, passages which are both reassuring and unsettling at the same time. They are reassuring because Jesus promises us that we will always have the Holy Spirit to guide and instruct us. However, Jesus also asserts that despite the gift of the Spirit, we will be scattered, that we will betray him and leave him alone. It helps us a little bit to remember that John was actually reporting what had already happened. However, there can be no denying that this betrayal continues in our own time.

While the gift of the Holy Spirit is freely bestowed upon all of us through the Sacrament of Baptism and through the many encounters we have all had with the sacramental graces that are available to us, it remains for us to actually listen to the promptings of the Holy Spirit. Unfortunately, that is not as easy a task as we might wish. There are many factors that make listening very difficult.

First of all, we have to drown out the noise of the world. The voice of the Holy Spirit can only be heard when we move away from them. A smile always crosses my face when I see a commercial or an advertisement for "noise cancelling" headphones. This appliance is reportedly effective in shutting out the noises that invade our world so that it will not disturb the music to which we are listening or the audio of a movie or television show which we are watching. Would that there were such an appliance that would make it easier to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit. Spiritual directors have long known the importance of retreats, days of recollection, and the time of personal daily prayer, periods of time when we shut out the noise of the world. However, as a former retreat master, I can attest to the fact that it is not easy to get a group of people to remain quiet.

Secondly, we must admit that listening is not easy. Our human nature makes it difficult to pay attention to what is being said. Most of the time, we are formulating our response before we have really heard what is being said by the other. Counselors often find it necessary to teaching listening skills to their clients, especially when they are counseling couples. It only gets more difficult when the voice is disembodied, such as the voice of the Holy Spirit.

Listening is an important part of prayer. Yet even here we find it much easier to doing the talking, to recite various prayers, or to list our various needs and concerns. Any good liturgist will tell you that the most difficult part of planning liturgy is building in periods of quiet for reflection and understanding.

Without spiritual listening skills, we are doomed to repeat the failure of the apostles in Jesus' time of need. So the statements in today's Gospel accentuate the need for us to develop those skills by a regular time of quiet prayer in our daily life.