The stories of these two Benedictine women remind me that I have to listen not only to my inner voice, but to outside—and sometimes unwelcome—voices as well, like that of my colleague who warned that my strong opinions can sometimes be grating. Disappointment is often a useful teacher. Can I have the courage to listen to it, to discern where it might be leading me?
Let us open our eyes to the light that comes from God and our ears to the voice from the heavens that everyday calls out this charge: If you hear God’s voice today, harden not your hearts (Ps 95:8). And again, You that have ears to hear, listen to what the Spirit says. (Rv 2:7).
—FROM THE PROLOGUE
In listening with the ear of the heart, I’ve often discovered wisdom comes from what at first might seem an unlikely source. My father finished high school by attending night classes while working during the day. He earned his living as a truck driver. I, with my advanced degrees, often dismissed what he had to say. I know now that while my book learning might have given me knowledge, it didn’t necessarily make me wise. My father had a staple of sayings he was fond of repeating. One of them was, “When you’re hungry you eat, when you’re tired, you sleep.” That one used to draw some of the loudest guffaws. I guess I thought it was a stupidly self-evident statement. But there have been periods in my writing career when I have been so self-driven, I literally forgot to eat. I neglected to get enough sleep. At one point, when I was making an ample salary at one of the largest newspapers in the country, I landed in the hospital suffering from exhaustion and malnutrition—both self-inflicted wounds—and had to spend four months recuperating.
Suddenly my father’s little saying didn’t seem so stupid. It contained wisdom worthy of the Book of Proverbs. It’s something I still need to remind myself of, daily.
I experienced a similar lesson in listening when my husband and I led a retreat one Lent in rural Semmes, Alabama. Semmes is such a small community that when I asked for directions from the pastor of the church we would be visiting, he said, “Just roll into town on the main road, pass a cotton field and the Dollar General, and you can’t miss the church.”
On the first night of the retreat, I arrived early at the parish hall to collate the handouts, set up the CD player, and test the projector for the opening PowerPoint presentation. I became vaguely aware of an older woman flittering around the hall, sometimes talking to herself. I remember thinking, “I’d like to talk to this woman, just not now. I’m busy.”
I glanced over at the table I had been planning to use as a kind of altar. Someone had covered the table with a white linen cloth and placed an elaborate bronze crucifix in the center, along with a vase of fresh flowers.
“How do you like the way I fixed up the altar?” the woman said. “That crucifix there, that’s been in my family for generations.”
The woman I had been trying to avoid had brought the altar cloth, the flowers, and the crucifix. She not only decorated the altar, she had also brewed the coffee and baked a cake—the only cake anyone had brought to share.
I learned her name was Eva. On the second night of the retreat, Eva brought some poems she had written. One was a loving chronicle of the characters she meets on her weekly pilgrimages to the Dollar General. My husband and I thought the poem was so moving, we asked Eva to read it to the retreat group. It was early spring, and Eva talked about being an avid gardener. She said she wakes at dawn to look for new shoots beginning to break through the soil. They remind her that every day nature is renewing itself, and so are we. I soon figured out that any wisdom anyone was going to take away from the retreat wasn’t going to come from my husband or me, but from Eva.
We returned home from Alabama a few days before Easter. Two cards were waiting in the mailbox. One was an Easter card from my sister. The other was from Eva.
“Hope you all have a blessed Easter,” Eva wrote. “I think of you two often. Writers are like gardeners. They both grow things. When I lose someone close to me now, I don’t send flowers anymore. I write a poem for the family and frame it. Poems last longer.”
Who are the wise ones in our lives—like my father, like Eva? Whose words to us have been difficult to hear? Are we missing a message within the message? Are we listening with the ear of the heart?
For reflection:
Let us get up then, at long last, for the Scriptures rouse us when they say: “It is high time to arise from sleep.” (Rom 13:11)
—FROM THE PROLOGUE
There is a wonderful scene in the novel Zorba the Greek in which Zorba tells the young foreman he’s befriended about meeting a ninety-year-old man who planted an almond tree.
“What, Grandfather, planting an almond tree!” Zorba exclaims, guessing the old man won’t live long enough to see the tree bear fruit.
“My son, I carry on as if I should never die,” the old man says.
Zorba replies, “And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute.”
“Which of us was right, boss?” Zorba asks the young foreman.
I tend to agree with Zorba. I like to think I try to live my life fully, as if I might die any minute. In college, I had a writing professor named James C. G. Conniff who routinely railed about students he felt were sleepwalking through life. The Jesuit writer Anthony de Mello writes, “Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep, without every waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing we call human existence.” Even a long life is no guarantee that any of us will ever awaken from our emotional stupor.
That same sense of urgency to “wake up!” permeates the Benedictine Rule. It is especially pronounced in the early chapters. We need to get serious, St. Benedict seems to be saying, about living what the poet Mary Oliver calls our “one wild and precious life.”