3-12-26: Thurs of 3rd Week of Lent Homily
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3-12-26: Thurs of 3rd Week of Lent Homily
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概要
Helen Keller said that blindness cuts you off from things but deafness cut you off from people. How true it is that hearing loss, especially severe hearing loss, leads to withdrawal, isolation, depression, and reduced independence.
A world without sound is a much more flat, one-dimensional world. Although sound is invisible, we all live in a sound world as much as a visual world. In the same way that our eyes take in the landscapes all around us, our ears take in the soundscapes that surround us as well.
To be cut off from this engrossing sound scape, from the voices and bird song and music that populates our world is to be reduced. We have a sound mind that yearns for the dense reality offered through all the gifts of the senses, especially hearing.
It is a relatively short step to go from “I can't hear” to “I'm all alone.”
A close cousin to not being able to hear is choosing not to listen. What is the point of the faculty of hearing, after all, if it’s used only to listen to your own voice and none other?
In the first reading at Mass today the prophet Jeremiah speaks for his boss, God, and says “Thus says the Lord, listen to my voice then I will be your God and you shall be my people.”
Jeremiah then complains to the Lord about his fellow Jews: “When you speak these words to them, they will not listen to you either. When you call to them they will not answer you.”
Finally, he gives the Lord some advice: “Say to them, This is the nation that does not listen to the voice of the Lord its God or take correction.”
And in the Psalms we hear this: “And if today, you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.”
How important it is to listen to God, to the church, to others in order to give meaning to our lives. Otherwise, we become a personal echo chamber, isolated and never growing or improving.
How do we listen to God? Is He the call of the loon on the morning lake? The huge waves crashing on the rocky shore? The crackling fire? The wind threading through the trees? Nature has its soundtrack. But God is more than his creation in the same way that we are more than our bodies.
We listen to God by listening to his church. The church and God are not strictly synonymous but to restrict God’s voice to nature’s symphony is to disembody him and to leave His will open to any and all interpretations.
There's a wonderful scene in the 1980s movie The Mission. An indigenous chief from a rain forest tribe is arguing with a church cardinal. He asks the Cardinal: “Do you speak for God?” The Cardinal responds, pensively, “I personally do not speak for God, but I do speak for the church, which is his instrument on earth.”
The church indeed is the instrument of God on earth. And this instrument, both beautiful and flawed, has a mind and has a voice, and has plenty to say.
She speaks at mass. She speaks in the readings and in her liturgical prayers. The church speaks in her sacred music and in her homilies. We listen to the voice of God when we listen to the church. Even her liturgical body language is meaningful for those who can’t hear or who don’t speak the local language of the Mass.
Most people who suffer from hearing loss wait about 10 years to do anything about it. It’s often too late - relationships have dried up, work ends, family members become distant. If we isolate ourselves from the voice of God in the church, we too will be cut off from the beneficial spiritual and moral formation the Church offers to all of her faithful.
Solitary confinement is a punishment in prison partly because of the silence which reigns over the prisoners in their cells. Not everyone is good company for themselves.
Many people are in a form of modern solitary confinement. Cut off, dwelling in a cell where the ancient voice of God does not reach.
Jeremiah commands his fellow Jews to listen, not just to hear, the voice of God. Listening to the multi-track voice of the Church enriches our sound scape, contextualizes our existence, and gives more meaning to our life.
Heaven will be beautiful for many reasons, and partly because of the hum and whistle of a great cloud of witnesses offering God sound worship and sound praise of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Hell may be very quiet, or perhaps a mere echo chamber of narcissists glorying in the voice they love the best – their own.
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