MY LIFE AS A LISTENING

“My life is a listening. His is a speaking. My salvation is to hear and respond.”
Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude

The other morning, I told myself it was about time for Merton inspiration. Though I don’t understand everything Merton wrote about, I resonate with Merton’s writing more than any saints and mystics. A few years ago, when I was clearing all my books from my office, I saved all my Merton collections when most of my other books were donated. Now, in two medium-sized bookshelves at home, my wife organized our valued books in such ways that Merton collections occupy the most visible section of the bookshelves. Good for her and good for me.

I grabbed Thoughts in Solitude and while standing, I quickly flipped through my underlined or noted sentences of the book. My eyes glanced at the sentence above, “My life is a listening. His is a speaking. My salvation is to hear and respond.” I don’t recall when I first read the book. I also don’t know why I underlined this sentence at the time when I first read it. After a needed timely inspiration, I closed the book and placed it in my everyday bag for I knew this was the book I would go through again.

Ever since that morning, I have been lingering over the sentences. My life, my entire unrepeatably unique life, is a listening. According to Merton, we go through life’s experiences—the life we choose to live, a life that happens to us, and life with all the questions and answers—to do one thing, listening. Life as listening is no different from life as a prayer. More and more, I view prayer foundationally as listening, not merely speaking, or asking. I listen to discern what God wills in my life knowing that God’s will can never violate my desires to discover God in me. In the end, what I hope is that what God wills and what I will become one. That to me is a vision of a life well lived.

For me to listen, not only do I need to live my life, but I also need to be aware of what my life has been and is about. We cannot sleepwalk through our life or treat our life as only a means to the end of giving God the glory as if our life does not matter. Our life is both the means and the end. We steward what we are given to steward, ourselves. The invitation is to live our life and own our life with all of what we perceive to be good, bad, and weird.

God’s is a speaking. God speaks to and through my life. God speaks to me through Scriptures too which is to say that God speaks to me through men and women in the Bible and how they did life in relation to what they understood God to be at the time of their existence. God does not superimpose Scriptures over my life, valuing the men and women in the Bible more than my life or putting my life aside as if my life does not matter. Rather, God expects me to converse with the Scripture through the experiential lens of my life as a long and continued trajectory of humans gaining God-consciousness, elevating both the Scriptures and my life.

God also speaks through God’s creation of both nature and other humans. We are part of God’s mysteriously designed interconnectedness through everything that is living and breathing. The grand purpose is so that we listen, learn, and be part of the ancient and wise web of growing God-consciousness. When we view our life as a listening, we honor God to be God and honor others and otherness around us to a degree that our life feels less entitled and more generous and kinder to otherness.

After listening (or as we listen more precisely), we are in a better desirable position to discover our true vocation. Through our vocation, we then are able to “speak” with our life. The discovery of our true vocation is our timely act to speak. Here, I do not necessarily think that the process of listening and speaking is a linear process but an upward spiral movement with repeated listening and speaking—ever finetuning of our ability and capacity to listen and speak and getting closer to the union with God and ourselves. When we are in the presence of those who have found their place in the world, their presence is infectious for they speak with power, love, and purpose. They speak and we listen. The more we have people who speak out of such a union, the world will be a better place. And we can speak with our life too. In a sense, we are joining God who speaks, giving God and other fellow humans, human examples, and joining the divine and human chorus of listening and speaking.