Lend Me Your Ears
Sermon Given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
February 16, 2014
Rev. Craig M. Nowak
“You are God’s representative!” That was the assertion made by a supervisor in training at the hospital where I did my clinical pastoral education or chaplaincy internship as a seminarian. God’s representative? “How arrogant”, I thought to myself, “I can’t believe this guy said that.”
Eight months later, after visiting hundreds of patients, their families, and hospital staff as they experienced everything from a mildly stressful peer relationship to the sudden death of a loved one I had a greater appreciation for the supervisor’s assertion.
Time after time I had appeared, a stranger, at people’s bedside, sat next to them in the ICU, family longue or nurse’s station and often, with little prompting on my part, fears, hopes, dreams, regrets, sadness and anger people had been holding came out...in stories, confessions, questions, opinions, body language, affect, and tears. And within the span of single visit, I, this stranger, had recieved entry into the depths of another’s profound humanity, a place few, if anyone was ever invited.
On more than one occassion I left a visit trembling inside in humble recognition of the power and responsibility given to me...and while I didn’t quite see myself as God’s representative by the end of that internship, I was pretty sure of one thing...most people have rarely or even never really been listened to.
Of course I had this insight in the context of a rather specific and unique role as a hospital chaplain, but listening and the need to be listened to is not confined to such a narrow context.
Indeed, The Jewish philiopher Martin Buber observed, “Man wishes to be confirmed in his being by man, and wishes to have a presence in the being of the other….Secretly and bashfully he watches for a YES which allows him to be and which can come to him only from one human person to another. This the potential gift and power of true listening...to offer the “yes” which allows another to be.
The reading from Exodus this morning tells of Moses‘ call to deliver the Israelites from bondage. To be listened to is to be delivered from the bondage or burden of maintaining our usual facade, the self we present to the world, a self created for our own survival which both protects and imprisons our deep dwelling true self. Each of us is called to listen, to deliver one another from the burden of carrying that protective, yet confining self and each of us has the power to answer the call to listen.
In order for us to both answer and exercise our call and power to listen, we need to examine our understanding of power. So often we equate power with doing, deciding, directing, and speaking forcefully. These are perhaps the most recognizable and widely used tools employed to get and maintain power, which is often over others. Here whether, where and how one is allowed to be is conditioned by approval or disapproval of the power holder.
In terms of listening, this is the kind of power we exercise when another person is speaking and rather than listening to them, we’re busy making assumptions about what they’re going to say or planning our response. It is the kind of power we exercise when we view another and whatever they share as a problem to be fixed. And it is the kind of power we exercise when we only listen to words and ignore or minimize the emotion, body language and word choice of the person speaking.
The power associated with true listening is very different. Contrary to how it may appear listening is not a passive endeavor, but a creative one. The exercise of power here involves a self emptying so that we may receive from another their words, emotion, body language, and so forth with as little self created and self serving distraction, prejudice or preconceptions as possible.
The power of true listening is the power to create space, sacred space or...holy ground where, according to Martin Buber, people relate to each other authentically and humanly...and...God is the electricity that surges between them.” Thus true listening is horizontal, concerned not with power over but power with another. It seeks not to deny and control, but to recognize and call or draw out the divine, the I AM, that mystery of being shared by all people.
This kind of listening is hard because it asks that we suspend our usual way of relating to the world where we automatically make judgements about everything we encounter...I like this; I don’t like this; this is good, this is bad. Think for a moment about the music the choir sang today. What was your internal response to it; how did you evaluate or judge it? This is not to say judging or evaluating is good or bad; it just happens to be a default setting we humans have that gets in the way of listening. A setting we can learn to adjust with the cultivation and exercise of attentiveness.
Attentiveness involves as one might expect, paying attention, but it is not about data collection, but rather learning to see into the nature of things to see beyond what is present at the surface of life. This is something more easily experienced than explained and so I’m going to invite you now to participate in a meditation with me that will provide you with an example and experience of attentiveness and all it requires from you right now is...your attention...and so let’s begin:
Look at your hand…Take a close look.
The skin…soft and hard and wrinkled and smooth…clear and blotchy, lined and grooved and creviced.
The nails, bitten or polished, brittle or firm…the fine hairs, the breathing pores, the warts, the scars…the whorls atop each slender or stubby finger…Those fingerprints, a cliché of a thousand Hollywood movies, but still unique to you.
The tendons, the muscles, the blood vessels, the myriad fine bones beneath the surface.
Your hand, so simple, so taken-for-granted… Yet no hand like this has ever existed since creation began. Your own hand, unique – that no one has possessed before you, nor ever will again. The mystery of your own hand, its being here now, its being here at all. Is it a cause for wonder? Do you shrug-and what does that shrug mean?
Let the hand stand for you, your existence, inimitable, unprecedented. The mystery of your being here, and not just your body with all its awesome complexity but your mind and feelings in all their majesty and individuality.
You who have a particular history, a biography as well as a biology.
You who have countless stories and memories and intuitions and desires within you.
You are the autobiography of a miracle.
This meditation, which comes from Rabbi Howard Cooper’s book, “An Alphabet of Paradise” is a simple exercise in the cultivation and practice of attentiveness that teaches us to look beyond the data available on the surface. While appreciating the facts of our existence, is takes us deeper toward the truth of our existence. When we practice attentiveness we slowly peel away layers of distractions and preconceptions born of our busyness and grasping for identity or position and uncover our true nature, distinct in form but connected to all that is, all that has come before and is yet to come. At its core, this attentiveness, this paying attention is the work of love. Indeed, in his book, The Light Inside the Dark, Buddhist teacher John Tarrant calls attention the most basic form of love.
To listen then someone then is engage and respond with love that is not dependent upon any worldly measure of good or bad, worthiness or unworthiness, but is instead rooted simply in an awareness of and appreciation of their “isness”, their being. It is as close to the practice of unconditional love one human being can offer another.
It has been many years now since that supervisor told an anxious bunch of newbie chaplain interns that we were God’s representatives. I won’t go so far as to say he had it wrong. He was rooted in a different theology than I, which I respect, even if I don’t share it.
I suspect few Unitarian Universalists, lay and clergy alike, consider themselves or the act of listening to somehow represent God. So who or what are we when we listen?
In our reading from Exodus, after God tells Moses to go and deliver his people, Moses, concerned no one will take him seriously without knowing who he represents asks God who he should say sent him? God replies simply, “I am who I am...tell them I am has sent me to you.”
Moses is not to serve as God’s representative, but as God’s witness.
Listening with intentionality, with attentiveness, is to bear witness to the mystery, miracle, and existence of another. And while it is true, minsters and other helping professionals receive some training in how to listen in the context of counseling, listening as an act of witness and of love, is something all of us are called to do as people of faith.
Through faithful listening Unitarian Universalism, a religion rooted in covenant, the establishment of right relations born of listening to one another, rather than ascent to a creed, is not only able to exist but inspire and change lives.
And so as you’ve come this day to lend me your ears for a while; I encourage you to continue to do the same for one another and the world outside these walls, where in the midst or all the noise and chatter, there are many eager for someone to listen...to bear witness to I Am within them. May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be
Sermon Given at Brookfield Unitarian Universalist Church
February 16, 2014
Rev. Craig M. Nowak
“You are God’s representative!” That was the assertion made by a supervisor in training at the hospital where I did my clinical pastoral education or chaplaincy internship as a seminarian. God’s representative? “How arrogant”, I thought to myself, “I can’t believe this guy said that.”
Eight months later, after visiting hundreds of patients, their families, and hospital staff as they experienced everything from a mildly stressful peer relationship to the sudden death of a loved one I had a greater appreciation for the supervisor’s assertion.
Time after time I had appeared, a stranger, at people’s bedside, sat next to them in the ICU, family longue or nurse’s station and often, with little prompting on my part, fears, hopes, dreams, regrets, sadness and anger people had been holding came out...in stories, confessions, questions, opinions, body language, affect, and tears. And within the span of single visit, I, this stranger, had recieved entry into the depths of another’s profound humanity, a place few, if anyone was ever invited.
On more than one occassion I left a visit trembling inside in humble recognition of the power and responsibility given to me...and while I didn’t quite see myself as God’s representative by the end of that internship, I was pretty sure of one thing...most people have rarely or even never really been listened to.
Of course I had this insight in the context of a rather specific and unique role as a hospital chaplain, but listening and the need to be listened to is not confined to such a narrow context.
Indeed, The Jewish philiopher Martin Buber observed, “Man wishes to be confirmed in his being by man, and wishes to have a presence in the being of the other….Secretly and bashfully he watches for a YES which allows him to be and which can come to him only from one human person to another. This the potential gift and power of true listening...to offer the “yes” which allows another to be.
The reading from Exodus this morning tells of Moses‘ call to deliver the Israelites from bondage. To be listened to is to be delivered from the bondage or burden of maintaining our usual facade, the self we present to the world, a self created for our own survival which both protects and imprisons our deep dwelling true self. Each of us is called to listen, to deliver one another from the burden of carrying that protective, yet confining self and each of us has the power to answer the call to listen.
In order for us to both answer and exercise our call and power to listen, we need to examine our understanding of power. So often we equate power with doing, deciding, directing, and speaking forcefully. These are perhaps the most recognizable and widely used tools employed to get and maintain power, which is often over others. Here whether, where and how one is allowed to be is conditioned by approval or disapproval of the power holder.
In terms of listening, this is the kind of power we exercise when another person is speaking and rather than listening to them, we’re busy making assumptions about what they’re going to say or planning our response. It is the kind of power we exercise when we view another and whatever they share as a problem to be fixed. And it is the kind of power we exercise when we only listen to words and ignore or minimize the emotion, body language and word choice of the person speaking.
The power associated with true listening is very different. Contrary to how it may appear listening is not a passive endeavor, but a creative one. The exercise of power here involves a self emptying so that we may receive from another their words, emotion, body language, and so forth with as little self created and self serving distraction, prejudice or preconceptions as possible.
The power of true listening is the power to create space, sacred space or...holy ground where, according to Martin Buber, people relate to each other authentically and humanly...and...God is the electricity that surges between them.” Thus true listening is horizontal, concerned not with power over but power with another. It seeks not to deny and control, but to recognize and call or draw out the divine, the I AM, that mystery of being shared by all people.
This kind of listening is hard because it asks that we suspend our usual way of relating to the world where we automatically make judgements about everything we encounter...I like this; I don’t like this; this is good, this is bad. Think for a moment about the music the choir sang today. What was your internal response to it; how did you evaluate or judge it? This is not to say judging or evaluating is good or bad; it just happens to be a default setting we humans have that gets in the way of listening. A setting we can learn to adjust with the cultivation and exercise of attentiveness.
Attentiveness involves as one might expect, paying attention, but it is not about data collection, but rather learning to see into the nature of things to see beyond what is present at the surface of life. This is something more easily experienced than explained and so I’m going to invite you now to participate in a meditation with me that will provide you with an example and experience of attentiveness and all it requires from you right now is...your attention...and so let’s begin:
Look at your hand…Take a close look.
The skin…soft and hard and wrinkled and smooth…clear and blotchy, lined and grooved and creviced.
The nails, bitten or polished, brittle or firm…the fine hairs, the breathing pores, the warts, the scars…the whorls atop each slender or stubby finger…Those fingerprints, a cliché of a thousand Hollywood movies, but still unique to you.
The tendons, the muscles, the blood vessels, the myriad fine bones beneath the surface.
Your hand, so simple, so taken-for-granted… Yet no hand like this has ever existed since creation began. Your own hand, unique – that no one has possessed before you, nor ever will again. The mystery of your own hand, its being here now, its being here at all. Is it a cause for wonder? Do you shrug-and what does that shrug mean?
Let the hand stand for you, your existence, inimitable, unprecedented. The mystery of your being here, and not just your body with all its awesome complexity but your mind and feelings in all their majesty and individuality.
You who have a particular history, a biography as well as a biology.
You who have countless stories and memories and intuitions and desires within you.
You are the autobiography of a miracle.
This meditation, which comes from Rabbi Howard Cooper’s book, “An Alphabet of Paradise” is a simple exercise in the cultivation and practice of attentiveness that teaches us to look beyond the data available on the surface. While appreciating the facts of our existence, is takes us deeper toward the truth of our existence. When we practice attentiveness we slowly peel away layers of distractions and preconceptions born of our busyness and grasping for identity or position and uncover our true nature, distinct in form but connected to all that is, all that has come before and is yet to come. At its core, this attentiveness, this paying attention is the work of love. Indeed, in his book, The Light Inside the Dark, Buddhist teacher John Tarrant calls attention the most basic form of love.
To listen then someone then is engage and respond with love that is not dependent upon any worldly measure of good or bad, worthiness or unworthiness, but is instead rooted simply in an awareness of and appreciation of their “isness”, their being. It is as close to the practice of unconditional love one human being can offer another.
It has been many years now since that supervisor told an anxious bunch of newbie chaplain interns that we were God’s representatives. I won’t go so far as to say he had it wrong. He was rooted in a different theology than I, which I respect, even if I don’t share it.
I suspect few Unitarian Universalists, lay and clergy alike, consider themselves or the act of listening to somehow represent God. So who or what are we when we listen?
In our reading from Exodus, after God tells Moses to go and deliver his people, Moses, concerned no one will take him seriously without knowing who he represents asks God who he should say sent him? God replies simply, “I am who I am...tell them I am has sent me to you.”
Moses is not to serve as God’s representative, but as God’s witness.
Listening with intentionality, with attentiveness, is to bear witness to the mystery, miracle, and existence of another. And while it is true, minsters and other helping professionals receive some training in how to listen in the context of counseling, listening as an act of witness and of love, is something all of us are called to do as people of faith.
Through faithful listening Unitarian Universalism, a religion rooted in covenant, the establishment of right relations born of listening to one another, rather than ascent to a creed, is not only able to exist but inspire and change lives.
And so as you’ve come this day to lend me your ears for a while; I encourage you to continue to do the same for one another and the world outside these walls, where in the midst or all the noise and chatter, there are many eager for someone to listen...to bear witness to I Am within them. May it be so.
Amen and Blessed Be
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